Dance Maniax

Dance Maniax was advertised as the next-generation successor to Dance Dance Revolution, but the project was ended after one year when DDR remained far more popular.

Like its sister game Para Para Paradise, it is played with touchless infrared sensors.

Debug Functions#

Menu Remnant#

The following MAME cheats can be used to access a debug menu after booting/loading is finished. However, none of the functions seem to work anymore.

    <cheat desc="Enable debug menu">
        <script state="run">
            <action>maincpu.pb@800f90d0=01</action>
            <action>maincpu.pw@800f90d4=0001</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@80018a68=00000000</action>
        </script>
        <script state="off">
            <action>maincpu.pd@80018a68=10400030</action>
        </script>
    </cheat>
    <cheat desc="Debug menu implementation (do not disable)">
        <script state="run">
            <action>maincpu.pd@800103cc=3c02801f</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@800103d0=24429080</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@800103d4=00441020</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@800103d8=80420000</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@800103dc=00000000</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@800103e0=03e00008</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@800103e4=00000000</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@80098c24=080040f3</action>
            <action>maincpu.pd@80098c28=00000000</action>
        </script>
    </cheat>

Chart Viewer/Creator#

By entering one of the in-game menus, enabling the following code and then disabling it again, it's possible to access a chart viewer/creator menu.

    <cheat desc="Enable Chart Creator">
        <script state="on">
            <action>maincpu.pb@8019AB18=26</action>
        </script>
    </cheat>

It requires a debug PC to function properly, and, as such, crashes when attempting to load a song.

Controls:

• 1P Left / Right - Change song to be played
• 1P Left + Right - Change note scrolling (CROSS/STRAIGHT/2LINE)
• 2P Left - Change game mode (SINGLE/DOUBLE/CENTER)
• 2P Right - Change difficulty (MILD/WILD/?)
• 2P Start - Change recording mode (RECORD OFF/RECORDING/RECORD VIEW)
  • RECORD VIEW only becomes available if the game detects a file at z:/data/rec/%s_rec.nte.
• 1P Start - Play

When recording a song, the game will switch to regular gameplay, but "ready" will be displayed while waiting to record, and "recording" while it's actually doing so. Timestamp and lane info are saved.

Unused Graphics#

Extracting the contents of GAME.DAT reveal several unused graphics.

Unused CD Title Graphic#

A generic Dancemania CD title graphic can be found in m_an_license_00.tim. However, it is never used.

Songlist Placeholders#

Placeholder graphics for the song selection screen, labeled as "Mada" (not yet).

Placeholder Background Animation#

Every song in Dance Maniax has an original and unique background animation (usually just a few scrolling or animated textures and lots of looping; nothing fancy). This texture was probably used as an early placeholder, since it doesn't fit in the game's final layout.

h_MADA.tim

Early Screens#

Several screenshots of what seems to be a very early version of the game can also be found within the data.

How To Play#

File: s_howto.tim

The "disc being" character (made of circles and coils) is not seen anywhere in the final game. This screen also looks very different and seems to indicate that originally "cross" scroll was the default mode of play. In the final game, both the red and blue columns scroll upwards like DDR. (With cross-scroll, the red columns scroll up while the blue columns scroll down. This makes sense since the red notes are hit high and blue notes are hit low, but it is actually very disorienting in practice. Cross-scroll was left in the final game as a hidden option.)

Mode Select#

File: s_modesel.tim

Appears to be an early version of the mode select mode. While five song banners can be seen at the top, none of these resemble any of the final images. Unlike the final game, the background is black and the colors used are rather dark. The option selection interface below is barren, without any text. In the final version, the player's options are chosen from a menu before reaching the song select. This screenshot also seems to show that cross-scroll was once the default mode of play.

Song Select#

File: s_musel.tim

Somewhat resembles the final version. The top 5 banners are the same as the previous image. The game's forgiving "coin system" for continuing play after failing a stage seems to be in place. The large banner in the center is for KEEP ON MOVIN'~DMX MIX~, which does appear in the final version. The differences are:

Parts of some song titles are barely readable. KEEP ON MOVIN' has the text "Muramasa!" and other bits of partially obscured text include: "BOMBER FROM", "Pangeo Dance", "what you gonna do", and "MANKILLER". Notably, many of these titles are actually of songs from the cancelled arcade game Rap Freaks¹, whose development was later carried over into Dance Maniax.

Unused Chart Files#

The ID test has four associated chart files, which consist of placeholder steps synced to the song BROKEN MY HEART.

Download Converted test files File: dancemaniax-test.zip (1,54 MB) (info)

Unused Nonstop Course#

Located in offset 0xDA2EB of aout.exe (which can be extracted from GAME.DAT) is data for an eighth nonstop course, though only 7 have proper names and textures. It consists enirely of Konami original songs, as listed below:

1. BROKEN MY HEART
2. ALL MY LOVE
3. GORGEOUS 2012
4. Heaven is a '57 metallic gray~gimmix~
5. AFRONOVA PRIMEVAL

Regional Differences#

The Korean version has several differences:

• The title screen (and cabinet art) refer to the game as Dance Freaks.
• The game was left untranslated except for a bit of text on the "How to Play" screen, which was translated to Korean. (Both versions are mostly English otherwise!)
• Seven new songs were licensed specifically for Korean players, and these songs also have unique animations.
  • To make use of this addition, some nonstop courses were altered:

Dance with DOC#

Dance Maniax shows players a song ID in green on every song's banner. In the original game, the songs were numbered from 1-25 with the hidden boss song taking slot #26. The seven added Korean songs take IDs 27-34. Observant players probably noticed that song #29 was missing. It does have unused texture data, though.

The missing song is Dance With DOC by DJ DOC. While it does also have chart and background animation data, the referenced sprites, as well as the song's audio, no longer exist.

Download Converted danc files File: dancemaniax-danc.zip (1,45 KB) (info)

Other/Placeholder Charts#

The Korean release of the game also has three more sets of unused charts, labeled dummy, hann and twis. Of these, twis is the only one that has reasonable chart data, and seems to sync to the song Twist King by TURBO (while the rhythms are the same, the BPM data is slower in the chart compared to the song). The other two are duplicates of the chart files for BROKEN MY HEART.

Download Converted twis files File: dancemaniax-twis.zip (1,01 KB) (info)

References#