Years ago I discovered this secret for the first time and decoded the data, but forgot about it. Now I'll try again to uncover it.
The Xevious 3D/G+ game disc on PlayStation (One) contains the file DUMMY.DAT containing hexadecimal coded bytes in ASCII like this:
62 65 67 69 6e 20 36 34 34 20 64 75 6d 6d 79 2e
67 7a a 4d 27 58 4c 28 22 25 59 60 22 23 2c 22
60 56 31 55 3b 36 55 59 2b 47 41 45 3d 40 23 4c
After decoding you get a uuencoded file:
begin 644 dummy.gz
M'XL("%Y`"#,"`V1U;6UY+GAE=@#L_7>4%/7W_HM6]<R0<XZ2<Y(D`B)9LH!$
M":(H9E%11%`Q"X(@09(D!V;(.>><TY!SSCEGIKO.LU]5?KZ?WSWW=^\?=YVS
When uudecoded, the file dummy.gz is created and when decompressed with gzip the result is a tar file, which contains two files:
-rw-rw-rw- mokusei/namco 3215 1997-02-17 11:58 xevious.knh
-rw-rw-rw- mokusei/namco 9805824 1997-02-15 16:01 xevi3dgp.knh
xevious.knh is a text file in Japanese, while the other file is a raw sound sample in 22 kHz of a person (probably a programmer of the game) talking in Japanese.
Now who can translate the text file and make a transcript of the sound file?
Update! GlitterBerri of GlitterBerri.com provided a translation of the text. Thank you so much!
...Huh? ...You found it... Even though we went to all the trouble of hiding it! (lol)
Thank you very much for buying XEVIOUS 3D/G+. I'm Kosshi, one of the programmers in charge of the Normal/Super/Arrangement port.
Well, what did you think of the game? The non-3D/G Xeviouses are more or less based on the one compiled in Namco Classics Collection Vol. 1 (I was involved with the arcade version too, in any case (lol).
When I say that the game is based on the Classics Collection version, the people who've played the arcade game might be worried about the port. However, I'm confident that, out of all the officially ported versions, the normal/super one is the highest quality. Because the Classic Collection version had a high rank when it was shipped from the factory, there were a lot of people who found it different from before, but the original (?) Xevious also had dipswitches that allowed you to raise the rank, meaning you did the same attacks as the Classics version. Of course, lowering the rank in the Test Mode of the Classics Collection version allows you to do the good old attacks you so fondly remember.
Anyway, this Xevious fixes the bugs and parsing errors we noticed when it was being ported to the PS, making it closer to the original Xevious. It's very close to the original game, something we tried to reproduce as faithfully as possible, including the way the sound disappears. The 200000 point extension and the ending were added to the Classics Collection version, but they went to a lot of trouble (lol), so we left them in.
We did as much as we could, but even so, there were areas where, for example, we couldn't replicate things due to the differences in hardware (like, how do we put in dogs?), so I apologize sincerely for that.
As for Arrangement, we reproduced the arcade game as faithfully as possible. That being said, we ported the game to the same hardware as the Classics Collection, so it should be more or less the same. Plus, the arcade version is incredibly difficult, so we also created a new VERY EASY mode. This way, I think the attacks of the Xevious army are just a liiiiittle bit easier. If you still can't handle it, I recommend the two-player simultaneous play. It'll be way easier, I think. (Especially the Andoa battle.)
This time around, we tried to use interlacing in horizontal mode. The vertical display is raised, and the problem of the sprites getting destroyed is a thing of the past, but there might be a lot of monitor flickering. If the flickering is really bad... please enjoy the game as much as you can without tiring out your eyes.
There's more I'd like to say, but I'll leave it at this for now. I hope we meet again... Please enjoy the four types of Xevious!
P.S. No reprinting this text, or telling anyone about its existence. Promise me!
---
I'm Iwanaga, the guy involved with the main program and the CD-related stuff. I'll start by apologizing. I'm very sorry. (_o_) Since the release of Soul Edge (Soul Blade in English), and with the development of Soul Edge for the European market happening concurrently, I've only had a month available. I wanted to put in more bonuses and functionality, but I wasn't given the time. (;_;) It's not much, but I changed the memory card message. The conditions for displaying it are... well, it's got something to do with a hidden function, so I'll keep it a secret.
(^^) I'm just happy that people thought the load times in Soul Edge were short. Going to the trouble of using a frame buffer was worth it. I tried to make Xevious 3D/G+ as fast as possible, too. Man, and there's still the American and European versions... I can't wait to use SYSTEM12! (^^;; It would be a waste if the circuit boards got all dusty.
Anyway, see ya!
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