Still loading: Re-Loaded

Play some more of Gremlin's unreleased Saturn port of Re-Loaded, if you dare

Based on the requests for a Fighting Force article, you like unreleased Saturn games. I suppose you want some more? Are you sure?

The other canceled Saturn game that made its way onto a demo disc was Re-Loaded, from Gremlin Interactive. It appeared on the Gremlin Interactive Demo Disc¹ in 1997, which was distributed with a few European magazines.

You can see why the Saturn version Re-Loaded got canceled from this demo: performance issues. You get an approximately three minute preview, and one of those minutes is spent at the loading screen. When you are actually playing, you’ll see the frame rate drop down as low as 5 fps.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the disc only has data for one level. But we can still give you more of the Saturn Re-Loaded experience: the time limit is too short to let you see much of anything², so removing it will give you a chance to finish the level.

Up for that? Get the patch from SegaXtreme. As a bonus, I’ll show how to play as the other characters.

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As usual, a good place to start analyzing a game is by locating the input handling code. I used my memory snapshot diff script to find that the button you’re pressing is stored at 06013b6c.

From there I set a read breakpoint for that address, which led me to the function at 06032f68. It’s part of a big loop. The termination condition for that loop is shown here:

The value at 06084ae8 is a counter that’s steadily decrementing, a good candidate for our time limit. And indeed, if we patch out the instruction that writes the decremented value, the demo doesn’t end:

06033876 0009

That’s it! Run around a shoot stuff to your heart’s content. You don’t have unlimited continues, so beware: you can still get a game over screen if you lose too many lives.

The game doesn’t tell you what your goal is, but it’s this: destroy all the rotating blue satellite dish things. This will open the gate to the area in the northwest corner of the map. There you have to blow up a big spaceship thing, which will lead to the end of the level and demo.

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The preview image on the main title screen shows a different character being played, so I suppose we have to check into that. I started with these suggestively-named files on the file system: MAM8WLK.HED, CONWALK.HED, BUT8WALK.HED… There are characters named “Mama,” “The Consumer,” and “Butch,” so that’s why those caight my eye.

The function at 0602f070 has references to those files. It looks something like this (heavily simplified) code:

if var_0608248c == 0:
    load_file("MAGWALK.HED")
elif var_0608248c == 1:
    load_file("BR.HED")
elif var_0608248c == 2:
    load_file("CONWALK.HED")
elif var_0608248c == 3:
    load_file("MAM8WLK.HED")
elif var_0608248c == 4:
    load_file("BUT8WALK.HED")
elif var_0608248c == 5:
    load_file("CAPWALK.HED")

A value of 04 is written to address 0608248c when the game starts, so I guess we normally play as Butch. Changing the value indeed gives us the extra characters:

Modify LOAD/AAA.BIN to change the hardcoded character. The byte to change is at 0000F8A1.

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Without all the performance issue, this game would have been… still pretty terrible, I think. Maybe you like blood and guts, though? I hear the Playstation version has its defenders.

Send me suggestions for other things to look into! Thanks to Cerbero and Wesker for testing out the patch for this one. Thanks also to vbt and the other people who suggested I check out this particular game.

As usual, you are welcome and encouraged to use this information and these screenshots on your favorite wiki sites - Hidden Palace, TCRF, Sega Retro, etc.

1. Not be confused with the Gremlin Interactive Demo Disk.

2. Unless you’re very good! See this video for somebody who managed to finish the stage within the demo limit.