Under the Microscope: Metropolis Street Racer (Dreamcast)

In this edition:

• The Dream On: Volume 7 demo disc has a “rolling demo” of Metropolis Street Racer that’s not normally playable.
• I made a patch that lets you take control of the demo and see an early version of this game — it’s from eight months before the final build.
• While I was at it, I made a patch for the E3 demo, too.
• …and one for the Opel Challenge demo.

Read on for details! Get the patches from SegaXtreme.

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Dream On: Volume 7

Dream On: Volume 7 was bundled with various magazines in Europe. It features movie previews of several games, playable demos of MDK 2 and Slave Zero, and a non-playable demo of Metropolis Street Racer.

Whenever I see a non-playable demo, I wonder: can it be made playable? The answer is often yes. My hopes were high for this demo of MSR because it’s from 2000-02-02, eight months before the final game was built (2000-10-10) and even earlier than the E3 prototype.

Normally when you start up this preview, it shows you a pre-recorded race with several cars on one of the London courses at night. It goes for a minute or two and then kicks you back to the demo screen — there’s no opportunity to interact with it.

When comparing the startup code from the final game to the demo in Ghidra, this bit from the final stood out:

Even without variable labels, the function here is clear: if the value at 8c1ac2d4 is not 0, the game checks for a -playable string and then an -autodemo string.

The Dream On demo doesn’t have these strings, but it does have a block of code with a similar shape. The value at 8c0da1f0 gets read in a similar looking block. It’s normally 1, so I set it to 0.

That’s all that was needed! Instead of the pre-recorded scene, you get a “Press Start” screen:

After pressing Start, you’re prompted to set your name and the time. Then you’re taken to a barebones main menu:

The selectable items are:

• Status: Lets you re-enter your name and set the time again.
• My Cars: Ostensibly allows you to change which car you’re using.
• Time Attack: Lets you choose a course to race on.
• Options: A semi-functional settings screen with a car viewer.
• Street Races: Lets you set up a challenge race.
• The Showroom: Lets you pick a car and test drive it.
• Demo: Lets you view pre-recorded demos.

The My Cars screen doesn’t really work — you can return the TVR Chimera you have by default but not select a new car.

The Options screen has a Car Colours option that does let you change how your car looks. It freezes up for certain cars, presumably due to lack of files:

The car list is (including some duplicates):

The Time Attack, Street Races, The Showroom, and Demo items do actually let you start racing, provided you pick one of the London / St. James Park courses — the disc only has files for that course.

If you pause when racing, you get a menu with some interesting options:

The Viewer is a free camera mode! A zooms out, B and X pan, Y zooms in, and the analog stick rotates. You can explore the whole city:

The TV Camera is what you see in the rolling demos and replays:

You can also switch between Camera Real, Camera Wide, and Camera Fisheye.

During a race you can adjust the camera angle as in the final game with D-pad up and down. If there are multiple cars on the course, you can switch to tracking them with the camera using D-pad Left and Right.

There is lots that’s unfinished. Some graphics are broken — if you run into something, you’ll see gibberish on the screen for a moment. Your times aren’t really recorded. You’re placed into courses facing the wrong way sometimes.

Overall, this is a really cool look into how MSR was shaping up during development — definitely check it out if you like this game.

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The E3 demo

This build, from 2000-05-09, was made available by sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com. It normally gives you a single timed run challenge. However, the same trick from above works to unlock the full menu system. The patch is:

8c01e082 0900  # Don't set the demo flag

The menus are different from the previous prototype, and different from the final game:

You can access the Extras > Cheats menu and unlock all cars. The list is:

The Car Colours option from above is on the Extras > Cheats screen in this build.

You can do many of the races, but not all of them (presumably this is because files are missing). The pause menu has the free camera option:

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The Opel Challenge demo

The above hacks also work for the Metropolis Street Racer Opel Challenge demo disc, dated 2000-07-25. The patch is:

8c0166e4 0900  # Don't write the demo value

The main menu looks pretty close to the final version’s:

You can go to Options > Cheats and enable the Open All Cheat to unlock all cars. The list is:

The Options > Bonus Items screen doesn’t have an equivalent in the other builds. It seems to be meant to display the unlockable cars:

You can navigate to the race setup menus — they’re noticeably unfinished. I couldn’t get any of them to actually launch a race— the game gets stuck at the Now Loading screen.

I’m not sure why the races don’t finish loading, but I was able to make each of the cities playable by changing how the demos work: go to Options > View Demos/Replay and pick a course:

The patches are:

8c037028 01e1  # Don't enable AI control
8c01154c 0900  # Don't dismiss the demo
8c0115f4 0900  # Don't enable "TV" camera

The special pause menu options are available here as well:

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Comparisons

Title screen:

Mode select screen:

Pause screen:

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Outro

The other demos of MSR are either the same as the ones here, or built after the final game, so I didn’t make patches for them.

I checked the final game to see if it has the free camera “Viewer,” but it looks like it was taken out. There do seem to be lots of tweak-able things in the final version of MSR, if the .pak compression format can be decoded. I may take a shot at that in the future.

For more demo discs with prototype content, see my Hidden Palace user page.

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