Under the Microscope: Burning Rangers (1997-12-20 build)

In this edition:

• A magazine demo disc has a non-playable demo of Burning Rangers
• …which is based on prerelease build of the entire game
• …that we can make playable

This article will explain the process of making it playable from beginning to end. If you want to try it out, grab a copy of Flash Sega Saturn Vol. 25 and this patch.

Here’s a video!

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Features of this build

This version of BR was built in between the 1997-12-01 “alpha” and the 1998-01-03 “beta,” and is notably different from both of them. Here are some highlights:

• Mission 1: The “Supply Room 03rd” room has a robot explosion that isn’t present in other builds (video).
• Mission 2: Swimming is broken in this build; you can walk on the bottom of submerged areas. The dolphin is very glitchy, and prevents you from progressing at one point (video). There are rolling fuel canisters in some hallways, a gimmick that is introduced in this build but removed before the final one.
• Mission 3: There fuel tanks floating around in low gravity that you can knock around. Neal’s cutscene isn’t implemented; he’s just standing there in Stick Canyon Path. The boss is quite a bit more difficult.
• Mission 4: The elevator after the swimming section is broken and blocks your progress (see below). The Burning Ship is docked next to the Platform in the climbing section. There’s no final boss.
• Rescues: If you have more than 10 crystals, they’ll all be banked, but you’ll only lose 10.

For a thorough comparison of all the prerelease builds of BR, see the page I wrote on the topic here.

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Taking control

This preview normally features:

• An auto demo of Shou in the first section of Mission 3
• An auto demo of Tillis playing the Mission 1 boss
• The opening animation

The auto demos are running in the game engine. We can tell the game to skip loading them and go straight into “normal gameplay mode” from the title screen. This will let us play the game from beginning to end!

Burning Rangers, like NiGHTS Into Dreams, uses the memory address 060FFC00 to store the “current mode.” The demo normally starts in mode 02, which eventually winds up at the (non-functional) title screen. We’ll change the first write to 08, which is “load mission.”

06004112 e008

That gets us pretty far! After a moment, we’ll be playing Mission 1 normally.

If we proceed to the end of the first round, we’ll encounter Doctor Bradley’s assistant banging on the elevator door. Then the demo will abruptly end with a COMING SOON screen. So there is more work to do…

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Fallen Memory

To get past the end of the first round, we’ll need to change the game mode again. The function at 0604385c executes after round 00 finishes. It sets the mode to 1A, which is the end-of-demo screen. We can change it load the next round instead by using mode 06 (“load a round”):

06043880 e706

That gets us past the elevator! We can play normally from here and proceed to the boss round.

After defeating the Mission 1 boss, we’ll encounter another problem: the game crashes. The issue is the “Mission Results” screen – evidently it’s not implemented yet. We know from the 1997-12-01 prototype that it looked completely different, so it must have been undergoing changes at this point in development:

To keep playing, we’ll need to skip the Mission Results screen. I changed its function to skip past it and jump to mode 06, which will take us to Mission 2.

0604b4c8 e006
0604b4ca c000
0604b4cc 000b
0604b4ce 0009

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Silent Blue

You’ll probably notice two things when Mission 2 starts:

• Shou is running underwater
• The limit did not reset after the last mission

The first problem is with the prototype – swimming is broken in this build. The second problem is a result of my interference: by skipping the Mission Results screen, I prevented the game from resetting its various counters.

We can at least put the limit back to 0% in the mode 06 handler:

0601b4d0 d2b8 
0601b4d2 1202 
0601b4d4 8123 
0601b4d6 0009
0601b4d8 0009

This writes zeroes to the two limit counters. I’m overwriting a bit of code used for replays here. Since replays don’t work in this build, we can steal their instruction slots.

With that done, we can play Mission 2 with a fresh set of stats. There are a few bugs to look out for in this Mission:

• When you fix the dolphin’s tank, the game often crashes.
• When you finish the underwater section with the dolphin, sometimes you fail to grab hold of it and swim in circles forever.

My goal is to give you the authentic prototype experience, so I didn’t try to fix these. Beware losing your progress!

There’s a dolphin-related bug I had to deal with, though. Normally, the dolphin flips you into an open door to the last section before the boss. But in this build, it flings you straight into the wall. This prevents you from continuing. I spent hours testing workarounds, but ultimately couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.

Eventually I decided to just make the game skip that section entirely. This patch takes you from the underwater section to the boss. It modifies the function at 06014da8, which runs just after the underwater section:

06014dae e009 
06014db0 c015 
06014db2 e006 
06014db4 c000 
06014db6 000b 
06014db8 0009

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Gravity Zero and Winged Cradle

After the Mission 2 boss, we’ll get to Mission 3 without incident. You can (usually) play through it and through most of Mission 4 before encountering a game-breaking bug.

The next one of those comes after the water section in Mission 4. Normally you run past a series of giant boulders and then hit a trampoline thing that takes you into round 11.

Unfortunately, the trampoline thing doesn’t quite work: the screen goes black and you eventually die. I fixed that by skipping the boulder section entirely. This patch modifies the function at 06015218, which runs just after the water round:

0601521e e011
06015220 c015
06015222 e006
06015224 c000 
06015226 000b 
06015228 0009

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Outro

That is the last of the changes! This build lets you play up to the last round before the final boss. You go to the title screen after it completes, which is convenient.

If you play the patched disc image, press start at the Flash Sega Saturn screen and select the fourth menu item for Burning Rangers (バーニングレンジャー).

Some possible future work:

• Skip the Flash Sega Saturn screens and launch directly into BR
• Hook up the character select screen such that Tillis can be played
• Hook up the mission select screen such that you can start from any mission

If you’re interested in any of that, let me know! In a future edition, I’ll give Burning Rangers Taikenban this same treatment.

This post is syndicated from Rings of Saturn, Bo’s reverse engineering blog.