Pop'n music 3

pop'n music 3 pop'n music 3 is the third installment of the colorful rhythm game series, and the last one to run on beatmania‍ '​s DJ-Main hardware. It's notable for being the first arcade installment to feature Hyper charts, though they could only be played in the also new Hyper Course mode, and also for being the first pop'n music game to have licensed tracks.

Unused Graphics#

Within the game's graphic ROMs are several leftovers for the song Surechigau futari, which appeared in the previous two games but not here.

The first leftover is found on the combined third and fourth graphic ROMs (980a03.19a and 980a04.20a), at offset 0x26000, and is a graphic associated with the genre tiles seen on the total results and ranking screens. An object featuring this graphic can be loaded in the Obj Character Test menu, as ID 1F0.

The second leftover is also found on the combined third and fourth graphic ROMs, at offset 0x28000. It is a graphic meant to be seen on the song result screen:

The third leftover can be found on the combined fifth and sixth graphic ROMs (980a07.22d and 980a08.23d), and is data of the song's title tag, seen at the top of the screen during gameplay. Curiously, it is separated in two parts, one at 0x51C00, and the other at 0xB3400.

The fourth and last leftover is also found on the combined fifth and sixth graphic ROMs, at offset 0xB6000. It is a genre graphic meant to be seen at the bottom right of the screen during gameplay.

Build Date#

At the beginning of the game's HDD data, a string containing the game's ID, version and build date can be found. It can also be found at offset 0x295A4 of the combined program ROMs (980a01.6a and 980a02.8a).

 GQ980JA  pop'n music 3 ver. 1.00  1999/09/02 (C) KONAMI

References#