Bill Walsh College Football (Sega CD)

The first—and only—college football game on the Sega CD is chock full of development-related text, including no less than four build dates.

Development Text#

This game is full of development text for a variety of features.

Sega CD Battery Backup Utility#

At offset 537809 is an explanation for a battery backup analysis utility. Line breaks have been added:

This a very simple Utility to enable you to look at the state of Battery
Back Up Ram on board this Sega CD. The options for filling memory, just place a
file into Battery Back Up Memory with the name of EA-TESTFILE. Hence the term 
NV Memory File. The Display Hex utility will only display the first 960 bytes
of a file, this should be enough for most applications
Due to Sega's Addendum to the CD Docs when you ALMOST fill NV Memory, the space
you leave may have to be 1 block larger than the Application you are testing.
- Thanks Sega ! Use the START button to select menu items and exit, the C
button is used for selecting files and YES/NO options Thats all folks!!!!
- MaD GaZ

This utility also includes a bunch of its own text. Its help option is humorously titled "Help!!! I am lost!!!"

MaD GaZ is the pseudonym of Gary Roberts. Roberts is credited with the CD version of Bill Walsh College Football.

Other Development Text#

Many names for routines are buried in the program as well, as well as references to "Heap Start" and "MAINCPU".

Example Lines#

Located near the credits (both instances):

Example Line 0
Example Line 1
Example Line 2
Example Line 3
Example Line 4
Example Line 5
Example Line 6
Example Line 7
Wait Line!!

Build Dates#

The game has not one but two instances of its credits. Each has a different build date, and despite being a US release, they call it a "Mega CD" build!

Offset 351403:

Date of this Mega CD Build. 10/26/1993  Time = 17:4:46

Offset 593839:

Date of this Mega CD Build. 10/15/1993  Time = 14:5:52

A third build date is encoded twice in the beginning of the code: "1993110212204100" -> November 2, 1993, 12:20:41.

At both of the "Mega CD Build" offsets is yet another build date, this one for the original port:

Date of Original Port Code. 8 JUN ,  1993 1:51:25 PM