TwinBee Time Attack stands alone

The other shmup sub-game from *Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You*

If you missed the last edition, here’s a recap:

• Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You is a dating sim that came out for the Saturn in Japan in 1996.

• If you play that game in a particular way, you can access two sub-games. One is Psyth, an original arcade-style shoot-em-up.

• Going through Tokimeki Memorial has historically been the only way to play Psyth, but now there’s a patch that makes it playable on its own.

The other sub-game is TwinBee Time Attack. In this edition we’ll examine it. I’ve developed a patch to make it more easily accessible, too - get it from SegaXtreme.

Here’s a video of it in action:

Below are details about this mini-game and the details about how the patch works.

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Playing TwinBee Time Attack

TwinBee Time Attack is a vertical shooter. Although it has four “stages,” everything looks pretty much the same from start to finish (Psyth is much more varied). Each stage ends with a boss, and the goal is to finish as quickly as possible (hence the name).

The controls are:

• Forward shot: press B

• Repeated forward shot: hold Y

• Forward charge shot: hold B and release

• Downward shot: press C

• Repeated downward shot: hold Z

It’s reasonably fun! I’m not great at it, though, so I came up with a hack to give myself infinite lives. The memory change to make for that is:

06094766 0009

There’s a little bit more out there about this mini-game than Psyth. Check these out for more details:

• The TwinBee Wiki article

• Hardcore Gaming 101’s article

• Randomised Gaming’s YouTube video

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Technical details

Tokimeki Memorial has different “modes.” Three of them are relevant for this discussion:

• Mode 00: Load the main game

• Mode 88: Load TwinBee Time Attack

• Mode 8A: Load Psyth

To make Psyth boot independently, we changed the pointer to the handling code for mode 00 to point to the handling code for mode 8A instead. The game tries to load Tokimeki Memorial, but gets Psyth instead.

That trick doesn’t work for TwinBee Time Attack: its handling code is shared with other modes. So we’ll need to make the game try to load TwinBee in the first place. Here’s where that needs to happen:

If we change the instruction at 0600ca38, we can have it load mode 88 instead of mode 001. The patch is:

0600CA3A e488

Now TwinBee Time Attack launches after the Saturn boots. Mission accomplished!

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Outro

What other games have cool stuff inside of them? Send me suggestions for what I should be looking at. Thanks to Wesker for prompting me to look at this one.

As always, feel free to use the information and screenshots in this article on TCRF, Sega Retro, your favorite Wiki, etc.

1. I originally had this wrong; I had it in my head that I couldn’t use immediate values larger than 7F. Thanks to fafling for correcting me!