Kiss Psycho Circus (Sega Dreamcast) Unused spiders, Custom map placements, VMU hidden PC level saves
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- The past month or two, I've been experimenting more with the Dreamcast version of Kiss Psycho Circus in ROM hacking (at a rather slow pace), and I discovered two unused headless spider types (ice & magma) unused for both PC and Dreamcast. I also discovered another hidden PC skybox at Earth Rift 1 (R2M1A).
The coolest thing that I feel I've discovered is how to create my own level placements, where I was able to command R2M1A via a hex edit to access an .OTG level file called "R6M1A" that I made (I made & renamed a duplicate of Morbid Manor 1, R2M2A). Besides very few enemies loaded from the .OTG file itself, making my own map placements breaks almost all of the enemy placements since they are loaded from particular hex mapdata in CLIENTDC.EXE, heavily dependent on file names & placements in the "WORLDS" directory.
At the same time, I noticed that for default "blank" maps, Tremor Entertainment used the first sky of the Air Realm (the sky of R3M1B and R3M2A) for their default sky, Paul Stanley as their default character, and a plain white loading bar for the load screens. For this R6M1A level, I used the hidden loading screen for the Nightmare Realm called "Womb", which is unused on both PC and Dreamcast.
Due to the "out of whack" R6M1A placement I made for R2M2A, the Dreamcast game attempted to load R2M2B, which is a completely non-existent level of the Dreamcast version, which on PC is R2M2B. Morbid Manor 2, the inside of the mansion & a texture/geometry-heavy level with tons of enemies that would've likely ran at 10 to 15 FPS on the Dreamcast.
Even on my gaming PC back in the day (from December 1996), the inside of Morbid Manor levels & Gloomvale (Gene Simmons's final circus level) lagged rather badly. My PC was a dual Pentium Pro with two 200MHz processors (400 MHz total), 64MB of RAM, and 16 MB of VRAM with a Voodoo Banshee. Despite my PC being a bit younger than the N64, it was like having two Dreamcast CPUs, four times the RAM, and twice the amount of VRAM, and yet the PC levels excluded from the Dreamcast version still kinda struggled. However, my late 1996 PC did not lag on the bosses, as they were small arenas.
Ironically, the VMU actually revealed a loading map save for Morbid Manor 2, showing that Tremor Entertainment had actually programmed real VMU spots for the canned PC levels. This I feel is proof that they very likely planned to include these ambitious PC levels, given that they had more time to work on the game. This was a very pleasant surprise that I discovered for myself. With that, I hex edited each of the official Dreamcast levels to end with a cancelled PC levels, and it allowed me to unveil all of the VMU spots for the PC levels.
All in all, Tremor intended to have the missing levels in the Dreamcast version, and all of the PC levels (except the bosses) have actual titles in the PAL version, despite some slight misnumberings. The bosses & Nightmare Realm 1 (R5M1A) only have a colon ":" for their map names. I think these colons were placeholders, where Tremor Entertainment intended to name them "Fortunado", "Tiberius", "Stargrave" and "Blackwell" had Tremor had finished the PC bosses. However, despite the PAL version releasing in January 2001, three months after the October 2000 release of the US version, the publisher seemed to want Tremor to have the same exact missing PC content as the US version, despite there being an effort to title VMU loading spots missing maps.
As I explored in a previous video, Stargrave is the only "circus boss" to have partially working Dreamcast exclusive code, which is proof that Tremor started to work on him. However, the final boss (the Nightmare Child) is fully working on Dreamcast, all with exclusive script code to get him working. His map ran quite well in terms of framerate.
• Kiss Psycho Circus (Se...
Music I added was from the Dreamcast version of "Railroad Tycoon 2", thought I'd be funny/different with that, and it's also another Tremor Entertainment port developed by the same exact people who ported Kiss Psycho Circus to Dreamcast. Plan to upload the OST for the Dreamcast version of this game sometime in the future :)
It's amazing the things that were removed from the game. A few months ago I discovered that in the PC version there was a feature to see the cinematics and some other things like the old hud or old game modes, also old images and in an old video, a different version of Pain Plaza although it no longer exists in the game files.
Something that sticks in my mind is that they have eliminated several levels that easily work on the console, such as act 1 of freak show, the bosses or the gloomvale act that would work better than the disgusting nether station (this is a little bugged and more in dreamcast) also the objects, secrets and the demon mask that removes the logic when used in womb, but oh well
That's a good point, and I noticed that vast majority of the missing levels are in the Fire Realm, which is Gene Simmons's chapter. Paul (Water) is only missing the first part of Freak Show, Peter (Earth) is missing Morbid Manor 2 & 3, while Ace (Air) has all of his levels. Gene (Fire) is the last chapter of the game, and it also makes me think that most of the missing content is due to time constraints and/or the Dreamcast taking too long to make a PC port like this to play.
I think what Tremor Entertainment did was work on each realm piece by piece, saving the Fire realm and the bosses to program for last. The code used for the Nightmare Child boss fight was exclusive to the Dreamcast, with different code from the PC version, while Stargrave's code was half worked on with exclusive Dreamcast code when I looked into the files.
Had the Dreamcast version of KPC been delayed for another 6 months or so, I think they could've got the whole PC game content in there. But with Tremor Entertainment missing the July 2000 deadline, getting delayed until October 2000 with rumors of the Dreamcast discontinuing, I think Take 2 Interactive (the publisher) made Tremor Entertainment publish the game incomplete. This was the same publisher that also cancelled the Dreamcast versions of "Rune", "Heavy Metal: FAKK 2" and most infamously "GTA 3". That's the only thing that makes sense to me, based on the clues I see in interviews and in the files of the game that I hacked.
As a huge fan of not only KISS but this game (I so long for a day some intrepid modder can port and rework some of these assets, weapons and characters for an easily expanded experiance in say the Doom and Quake engine) I love these deep dives into the what ifs on this atmopsheric and sadly forgotten FPS. Awesome stuff. Its crazy that Tremor got this running on the DC at all, its so rickety and unstable but - ultimately it works. Really classy work of them to do so well with the limits of the DC. Are you planning on doing anything related to the mulitplayer portion of the game? Im aware the DC version lacks it, but was it ever planned to he in? Or does anything here explain the PC Multiplayer being so rough?
Love watching these!
Hehe, same here, thanks for the kind words, Kiss Psycho Circus has long been my favorite FPS game of that era. Yes, multiplayer was planned to be in the Dreamcast version according to an interview from November 1999 (when the Dreamcast port just started development) and a more detailed interview from very early in the year 2000. However, it was canned around the time the "Sega Sports" Dreamcast was released (July/August 2000). Prototype "white label" covers of KPC have the "Sega online multiplayer" logo in the top-left corner, but the official "black label" cover is missing this logo. The black label Dreamcast games became standard after the "Sega Sports" Dreamcast debuted (I remember well).
So far, I can't find multiplayer-related files in the GD-ROM itself, but I'm still trying to explore what more I can find. But, I do have an interview circa February 2000, saying how there are indeed plans, but goes over the challenges of developing Dreamcast network games. To me, it does sound quite time-consuming:
Questions for Jivko Velev (Network Programmer):
Q: Have you added anything new to the multiplayer capabilities of the Dreamcast version?
A: By the time we get done with it, we will have reworked and rewritten a fair amount of the networking components to make it Dreamcast specific and compatible. The Dreamcast, as with every console, has it’s own quirks. The Network capabilities of Dreamcast are somewhat challenging, but the game industry has a lot of experience and workarounds that can help us. So we are sure that we’ll be able to give the player the chance to have a very enjoyable and exciting experience.
Q: Will multiplayer take advantage of the Dreamcast's Internet capabilities? If so, how?
A: Definitely. KPC DC have multiplayer capabilities and they will become much much stronger in near feature. Current plans are to support up to 4 players at minimum 30fps. Our team has overcome a lot of problems that may seem unsolvable to others, such as cutting memory requirements from more than 60-70M to less than 14M, while preserving game quality. So we feel confident in our skills and we feel equally confident that we will be able to achieve this final goal, too.
Q: Will users experience slowdown in the game when playing multiplayer over the net?
A: Hah. Good question. You know the Internet is something that is alive - it is unpredictable. Its properties and behavior can change significantly in very short interval. It all depends on the internet connection bandwidth and latency. The better the latency and bandwidth, the smoother the game flow will be. The frame rate and latency will not be coupled so the game will not run at the speed of the worst player's connection. There are also some potential to have the game hosted on SEGA’s private network. This will significantly reduce the latency and will provide the player with smoother game flow.
As far as the network layer is concerned, it is using the latest available technologies such as client-side prediction to process as much as possible to alleviate the network issues and to keep the player protected from the limitations that exist.
Multiplayer would be good, but the problem is that the game was already becoming difficult to port to the Dreamcast, although if the Sega console version could be modified more it would be good.