Rounds in NiGHTS and Burning Rangers
Claris in Splash Garden, Sonic in Frozen Bell, and Versus mode in Burning Rangers
Quick, what’s your favorite zone in Sonic CD? Trick question: Sonic CD doesn’t have “zones,” it has “rounds.” The other games that Naoto Ohshima directed - NiGHTS Into Dreams and Burning Rangers - also refer to their stages as rounds, at least internally. You can see this in various file names on the discs (e.g., RD1P.PRS), and it’s led to years of speculation from Sonic fans about the missing “round 2” in Sonic CD.
In this edition, we’ll look at the round handling in NiGHTS and Burning Rangers, and tweak it to let us play things we can’t normally play…
NiGHTS and Burning Rangers both handle rounds the same way:
Memory address 060FFC15 holds the target “next round”
Memory address 060FFC14 holds the current round
When you select a dream in NiGHTS, you can see 060FFC15 get set. After a moment, it will be copied to 060FFC14. The internal order for rounds in NiGHTS is as follows (note the boss ordering is different from what you get in the game):
00, 01: Spring Valley / Gillwing
02, 03: Frozen Bell / Puffy
04, 05: Mystic Forest / Clawz
06, 07: Splash Garden / Reala
08, 09: Soft Museum / Jackle
0A, 0B: Stick Canyon / Gulpo
0C, 0D: Twin Seeds / Wizeman (Claris)
0E, 0F: Twin Seeds / Wizeman (Elliot)
If you change it before loading stars, then a different round will play! So if you want to be Claris in Splash Garden, select one of her dreams and then change 060FFC15 to 06. You have a second or so to do it, but if you need more time you can set a write breakpoint.
You might think that Christmas NiGHTS would look just like NiGHTS, but it’s actually a bit different:
060FFB15 has the target next round
060FFB14 has the current round
The rounds for Spring Valley, Gillwing, Frozen Bell, and Puffy are present on the disc. You can play as Sonic in Frozen Bell like this:
Select the Christmas NiGHTS present to enable the winter theme
Set a write breakpoint for 060FFB15
Select the Sonic present
When the breakpoint is activated, change the value written to 02
If you play Sonic normally with that breakpoint, you can have him fight Gillwing instead of Eggman/Puffy by changing the round to 01 after completing Spring Valley.
Burning Rangers works just like NiGHTS. The rounds are organized as follows:
00, 01, 02: Mission 1, Fallen Memory.
03: Training space
04: Unused Versus arena
05, 06, 07, 08, 09: Mission 2, Silent Blue.
0A, 0B, 0C: Mission 3, Gravity Zero.
0D: Unused
0E: The cutscene that plays after Mission 2.
0F, 10, 11, 12, 13: Mission 4, Winged Cradle.
The same trick works here. If you want to check out the unused Versus arena, select one of the missions and change 060FFC15 to 04! We’ll examine the Versus arena more in another article.
Side note: Is 0D a missing round like Sonic CD’s R2? I don’t think so: it looks to me like five rounds were set aside for each mission. Mission 1 and Mission 3 only use three rounds, so there were some slots left over. Those got used for the Training Space, Versus arena, and Mission 2 ending cutscene.
One more nice application of the round manipulation hacks: it lets you unlock demo discs. For example, Burning Rangers Taikenban is a pre-release demo that lets you play the first round of Mission 1. But the disc has data for all four Missions on it. If you change 060FFC15 before Mission 1 loads, you can play other parts of the game! Lots of things are different in this build of the game - one notable thing is the presence of the Burning Ship in Mission 4.
The same trick works for Sega Flash Vol. 7’s demo of Burning Rangers. It’s got the whole game minus the voice clips. It’s much cheaper to acquire this demo disc than an EU copy of BR, so if you’d like to experience the game on a PAL Saturn, this is a good option!
