Pop'n music 2 (Arcade)

pop'n music 2 (Arcade) pop'n music 2 is the second installlment of the peppy rhythm game series. Among the features added in this game are modifiers, which change how the Pop-kuns behave, and Party Mode, in which power-ups and power-downs are added to the playfield.

It also features several songs from the series' first console outing, albeit without some of their hidden, harder charts.

Hidden Level Select#

A hidden debug feature allows the player to freely select a song by holding down a combination of keys and then pressing the Test button in the song selection screen. These don't work if Event Mode is turned on.

Development-Related Text#

Build Date#

At the beginning of the game's HDD data, a string containing the game's ID and version can be found. The same string can be found upon merging the first and second ROMs, at offset 0x25604 (JP)/0x26030 (TW). Note that the Taiwanese version's HDD is currently undumped; the string seen below is taken from the ROMs, and it is assumed it can be found at the beginning of the HDD data as well.

Codename#

A codename can be found immediately before the build date string in the Taiwanese release only, at offset 0x2600F upon merging the first and second ROMs:

OFRA HAZA HORASHOOT -The Bridge-

This string refers to Israeli singer Ofra Haza's song Horashoot - The Bridge, from her 1992 album Kirya.

Regional Differences#

Two versions of pop'n music 2 are known to exist:

• JA - The original Japanese release, labeled as popn2 in MAME.
• TA - The Taiwanese release. It is currently unemulatable, as its unique HDD has not been dumped yet, though the ROM data exists.

Songlist#

The Taiwanese release kept all genre/title/artist name changes applied to the Asian version of the original pop'n music, and added several more:

Characters#

As with the previous game, some characters received name changes:

Japan	Taiwan

References#