It’s common knowledge that there are four different releases of Daytona on the Saturn — the original 1995 port made by AM2 that released worldwide, AM3’s Championship Circuit Edition that released in the U.S. and Europe in 1996, AM3’s Circuit Edition that released in Japan in 1997, and AM3’s CCE NetLink Edition that released in the U.S. in 1998.
But what isn’t common knowledge are the differences — and similarities — among these releases.
Many people grouse about AM3’s Championship Circuit Edition having different (read: worse) car handling than AM2’s Daytona port, which hews so closely to the original arcade game’s handling that they’re practically identical.
A couple months later, Circuit Edition released in Japan with supposedly better handling than the West’s Championship Circuit Edition, even if it’s still not quite perfect. But is it really different than the earlier CCE? And what about the final Daytona port, the U.S.-exclusive CCE NetLink Edition?
Some say that the NetLink Edition is based on Japan’s Circuit Edition, including its improvements to car handling, but I wondered if that was true. So I did a little experiment to test the handling.
The handling test
I started up all three of AM3’s Circuit versions and, using the default Hornet car, performed the same steps: On the iconic Three-Seven Speedway track, once it gave me control during my rolling start, I hit the gas and held left on the D-pad, careening off the track and through the grass. Just as my car was about to hit the wall, I paused and took a screenshot to see if my position was identical in all three versions.
The thinking being: If the code that governs car handling is different in each version, my turning arc should be different, as should where I hit the wall. By the same token, if the handling is similar between any two versions of the game or all three versions, I should hit the wall in the same spot.
What did I find? The U.S.-exclusive CCE NetLink Edition does indeed appear to have the same handling as the Japan-exclusive Circuit Edition, as you can see below.
On the left is Japan’s Circuit Edition, as you can see from the kp/h speed, while the right is the U.S.’s NetLink Edition with the mph speed. In case you’re wondering, 217 km/h converts to 134.8 mph, close enough to be a rounding error from NetLink Edition’s 136 mph.
Meanwhile, the Western Championship Circuit Edition — the earliest of these three releases — seems to take harder turns. Check out the screenshot below.
The car hits the wall more to the left, as evidenced by where the car is relative to the white line on the pit lane. It also has different signage, which is an interesting footnote. Additionally, as you can see from the timer, CCE gets to the wall slightly faster (4″47 vs. NetLink’s 4″73), perhaps owing to a faster speed (149 mph vs. NetLink’s 136 mph).
For funsies, I also did this with the North American version of the original port of Daytona, although it means very little because it’s so different — the tracks in the various Circuit Editions have been rebuilt in the Sega Rally engine by a different dev team. It has the fastest speed of any version and seems to hit the wall much sooner.
The various Circuit Editions do give you the option of making the handling slower or faster, but I left it at normal each time. I also set each one’s difficulty to easy, which you can see by how much time is on the time remaining (you start with like eight fewer seconds on normal difficulty).
This also was done with the Bizhawk emulator, a fork of Mednafen — it’s easier for me to take screenshots with it than on real hardware, since I don’t own a capture card.
The speed test
The speed differences made me wonder if Championship Circuit Edition was faster than the other two in general, so I did one more quick test. I started up Three-Seven Speedway with the default Hornet in Time Trial mode and just held the gas as long as I could without braking, then took a screenshot right before the third turn at “Sonic mountain.”
On the left is Championship Circuit Edition, in the middle is Circuit Edition and on the right is NetLink Edition.
At 198 mph, Championship Circuit Edition’s top speed is about 3 mph faster than Circuit Edition (217 km/h converts to 194.4 mph) and NetLink Edition (195 mph). I seem to be at about the same spot in the track at the 12″57 mark, though, if not maybe a little behind in CCE than in CE and NetLink, oddly enough.
Other similarities
My handling test shows that Japan’s Circuit Edition does indeed differ from CCE and lends credence to the argument that NetLink Edition is based off of Circuit Edition. But that’s not the only thing we can check. There are various cheat codes that are known to work on Circuit Edition but not on the West’s Championship Circuit Edition — do they work in NetLink Edition?
In short, yes.
First I tried Circuit Edition’s hidden feature to set the time of day for a race by holding down a button or two on the “Gentlemen Start Your Engines” loading screen. As you can see in the screenshot below, when I held X during the screen, NetLink Edition had me racing on Three-Seven Speedway in the dead of night.
And when I tried the same thing in Championship Circuit Edition, it was broad daylight, as expected:
For the curious, on the “Gentlemen” loading screen, hold X to race in the afternoon; hold Y for nighttime; hold Z for an oversaturated summertime look; hold X and Y for nighttime with everything lit by unseen streetlights; and X and Z for the morning.
Next, I checked whether the hover car code in Japan’s Circuit Edition works in NetLink Edition — it does, while it does not in the first CCE.
On the left is my car hovering in NetLink Edition while on the right, my car’s tires remain firmly on the track in Championship Circuit Edition.
For those wondering how to use the hover car, on the “Gentlemen” loading screen, hold the D-pad up and left at the same time as well as the right trigger.
Lastly, I tried the Circuit Edition’s ghost car cheat during time trial mode. Sure enough, it works in NetLink Edition but not in the first CCE.
On the left, a ghost car races alongside me in NetLink Edition. On the right, I race alone in Championship Circuit Edition.
To race a developer-recorded ghost car, once you’ve selected Time Trial mode, choose your number of laps by holding the X, Y and Z buttons while selecting with the C button.
When I brought up some of these findings in the SHIRO! Discord server, my fellow SHIRO! Knight0fDragon pointed out another reason to believe NetLink Edition is based on Circuit Edition: “Been saying for a while now CCE NL is the same as CE because they can play together online,” he said.
The differences?
For completion’s sake, it’s only right to acknowledge the differences between NetLink Edition and Japan’s Circuit Edition. Besides unique title screens for each release’s name, they have divergent music lineups and a Japan-exclusive multiplayer mode.
The exclusive mode is Link Battle, in which two Saturns can be connected via the Taisen Cable. That cable only released in Japan, so it makes sense that it’s available in Circuit Edition but not NetLink Edition.
Knight0fDragon said in our Discord server that he wonder whether that mode still exists in the NetLink Edition but is simply hidden. If that’s the case, perhaps someone will uncover it one day.
On the left is Circuit Edition’s main menu, including Link Battle mode. On the right is NetLink Edition’s main menu, which lacks a Link Battle option.
But one thing that certainly isn’t hidden in NetLink Edition are the four music tracks that are exclusive to Circuit Edition among the three AM3 ports: a Daytona USA medley as well as the original renditions of The King of Speed, Let’s Go Away and Sky High from the arcade Daytona, complete with vocals. AM2’s Saturn port has them but they were excised from both Western Circuit releases, allegedly because audiences outside Japan didn’t like Takenobu Mitsuyoshi’s earnest, energetic vocal talents.
We can tell easily that the tracks aren’t there simply by listening to the Redbook audio tracks on each disc. There’s no hiding a Redbook audio track from any old media software, let alone CD player.
Twenty-five years later, many players now lament those three tracks’ lyrical versions being excluded from CCE and NetLink. But what few acknowledge is that CCE and NetLink have two exclusive tracks that Japan’s Circuit Edition lacks: Funk Fair and Race to the Bass. They don’t feature Mitsuyoshi’s singing, though, so they’re a bit of a poor tradeoff for us Westerners.
Conclusion
Despite these changes, there seems to be strong evidence that points to the U.S. NetLink Edition being based on the Japanese Circuit Edition. The music changes and the exclusion of the Link Cable mode are regional localization-related adjustments, after all. It’s more telling that the cars in NetLink turn in the same way that they do in Circuit — and differently than in the earliest version, CCE. Plus, the hidden codes added to Circuit that didn’t exist in CCE are indeed present in NetLink. Those things wouldn’t be there if Sega had simply taken CCE and added NetLink support to it.
If you check SegaRetro, a fan-made wiki that attempts to catalog all things Sega, you’ll find that the NetLink Edition of Daytona doesn’t have its own page, instead included as a small section in the larger article on 1996’s Championship Circuit Edition. What’s worse, the article calls the NetLink Edition “mostly indistinguishable from its non-NetLink counterpart” aside from NetLink-specific leaflets included with it.
Japan’s Circuit Edition does have its own page, and its associated page about its hidden content lists the cheats I tried for changing the time of day, driving the hover car and racing time trials against ghosts. But the hidden content page for Championship Circuit Edition doesn’t mention at all that the codes work in NetLink Edition. It certainly doesn’t mention the difference in car handling between CCE and NetLink — nor the similarity with Circuit Edition.
Meanwhile, long-running game secrets depository GameFAQs doesn’t have a page for the NetLink Edition either. Its Championship Circuit Edition page lists the time of day and hovercar cheats but specifies that they are “Exclusively for Daytona USA Championship Circuit.” Presumably, whoever wrote that was trying to reference Japan’s Circuit Edition.
Wikipedia doesn’t even have a separate page for Circuit Edition let alone NetLink Edition. Its entry on Championship Circuit Edition merely lists the Japanese and later NetLink release dates as if they’re the same game with no mention of the differences among them.
So it seems that it’s not well known — on the Western Internet, anyway — that Sega made substantive changes to Circuit Edition that aren’t present in Championship Circuit Edition, nor that Daytona’s NetLink Edition is closer in gameplay and feature set to the Circuit Edition than CCE. Hopefully this piece will begin to change that.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
The thing is at the time Daytona USA CCE Netlink was crazy rare because it was possible to get it only by writing to SEGA of America with a voucher or something. During some years, it was the most expensive US game on the US Saturn library. So very few people actually played it in its full extend and preferred to play the cheapest and just as complete Japanese Circuit Edition, which was the same with the extra tracks, the codes, and a far easiest way to play on two separate screens with the Link cable instead of two Saturn Netlink. With all the advantages of the Japanese version for that, it was the one to play with. Nevertheless, you taught me something. The CCE Netlink edition would have 2 bonus tracks exclusive to this version, with the four extra tracks already included in the Japanese version ? I’m going to try that on my version (I have a Mode ODE). Cheers for the article, but some forums had highlighted the differences and had already noticed that Netlink and Circuit Edition were quite the same indeed.