Under the Microscope: Sega Touring Car Championship

If you examine the game data for the Saturn version of Sega Touring Car Championship, the arcade racing game from AM Annex, you’ll find some interesting strings:

• 0603e598: SEGARALLY_0
• 0603e5a4: RALLYPLUS_0

SEGARALLY_0 refers to Sega Rally Championship, which was released for Saturn in 1995. And RALLYPLUS_0 refers to the enhanced edition of that game that came out the next year.

What does Rally have to do with Touring Car? I broke out my reverse engineering tools to see.

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The reverse engineering

The strings above match the names of the save files used by the Rally games. Here’s one of them shown in the Saturn memory manager:

The PC version of Touring Car has something similar going on. Its main executable file has these strings:

• 004b3898: Srally.ini
• 004b38a4: Rally.ini

These .ini files are what the PC version of Rally uses to save player progress.

Both versions of the game write a value of 1 to a particular memory address if a Rally save is detected. That address is only read once, in a section of code that looks like this in Ghidra’s decompiler:

        if (DAT_06004e39 == 7) {
          if (rally_save_present_06006950 == 1) {
            arg_1 = 0x7f;
          }
          else {
            arg_1 = 0x7c;
          }
          FUN_06022c56(arg_1);
        }

What does that mean? I had to trace each of the variables shown in the code snippet to figure it out:

• DAT_06004e39 is the race type. 7 is the unlockable Exhibition mode.
• FUN_06022c56 gets called every time the game plays a sound effect or a BGM track.
• arg_1 is the ID of the sound effect or track that’s about to be played.

That’s enough information to solve the mystery.

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The Easter egg

To activate the Sega Rally effect, you have to:

• Have save data from Sega Rally Championship or Sega Rally Championship Plus saved to your Saturn’s backup memory (or on your PC’s hard drive).
• Start playing Sega Touring Car Championship. Complete its Championship mode to unlock Exhibition mode.
• Start an Exhibition race and turn up the volume on your speakers.

The song Conditioned Reflex (STC mix) will play while you race! Here’s a video:

This is the secret track on the Touring Car soundtrack album. It can also be played from the Options menu:

What does this song have to do with Sega Rally? Conditioned Reflex is a track from that game’s soundtrack. You can play its version of the song in the Rally Options menu:

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Outro

Many thanks to Bobblen for helping me test out the PC version of Touring Car.

I first noticed the Rally save name in Touring Car a few years ago, but couldn’t figure out what was going on with it because I had my speakers turned off – whoops! I’m very happy to have finally cracked the code.

I’ll be back with another article next week. In the meantime, check out my blog for more on retro game reverse engineering.