Uniracers

To do: Development images uploaded by Mike Dailly to Flickr.

Uniracers is a fast-paced sidescrolling unicycle racing game for the SNES. Woo.

Not so "woo", though, was how Pixar sued DMA Design over the usage of CG unicycles too similar to the ones seen in Red's Dream. Because of the lawsuit that took place, the game couldn't be produced beyond its initial run and only 300,000 copies of the game were sold as a result.

Anti-Piracy#

US	Europe

After the title screen, the game will perform an SRAM check to ensure that there is exactly 8KB of SRAM. This is done by writing values from ROM to SRAM at $770000 and comparing it with the values from $838000. If these values don't match, then the anti-piracy measure is activated, which first replaces the main menu with the above message, then after the screen fades in fully, the instruction at 0x70800B is run continuously, which corrupts the RAM and thus crashes the game. Cartridge copiers tend to include a much larger amount of SRAM to support a wide variety of games, so they will trip the anti-piracy method.

Unused Graphics#

These tiles are the first graphics loaded into VRAM upon bootup. A message is written inside a 48×32 box: "used by decomp". This space gets overwritten by the unicycle graphic used on the "pick your uni" screen.

Unused Music#

Uniracers has two unused music tracks. The first sounds like it could have been an alternate title screen theme, while the second was probably just an additional piece of in-game background music.

Enter the Pro Action Replay (PAR) codes listed below each file to play the corresponding piece of music at the title screen.

80A0FD3B 80A10415 80A105FB

80A0FD3D 80A10455 80A105FB

Placeholder tour#

Data for an 'Error Tour' with placeholder races all named 'Unavailable' remains in the ROM after the data for the Hunter Tour. This can be accessed using a Pro Action Replay code in the range of 7E00CE2D to 7E00CE31, going through the tour select screen to a race and then exiting the race back to the tour menu. Both circuit races are for 5 laps whilst the stunt race qualifying score is 25. Trying to race on any of them causes the game to crash and all save data to be overwritten and corrupted.

Unused Combo Messages#

When a combo is pulled off, there is a chance a message will display after each trick has appeared on the screen, ranging from 'Excellent' to "I hate races!' . There are eight sets of these messages in-game which are shared by each pair of unis on the title screen (e.g. Mike and Andrew share the same set). A ninth set exists in the game's code at offset 0BD679 which goes unused since there are only eight pairs of unis on the character select screen. However, this set is accessible when playing as ghost unis Someone or Bronson using the Pro Action Replay codes 7E017D10 or 7E017D11 respectively.

The unused messages are as follows:

yes!
cool!
funky!
check that out
fight on!
ride on!
yeah!
done that!
no problem!
that was easy!
nailed it!
slammed 'em!
bingo!
crusin'!
banzai!

Version Number#

At 0x18000 is a version number that is written to the start of SRAM.

ASJIver3.30

Build Dates#

Present at 0x541 in the ROM in both versions.

Uniracer Shell, assembled 10:50am on Tuesday the 11/10/1994

Uniracer Shell, assembled 4:2pm on Wednesday the 18/1/1995

Banned Uniracer Names#

To do: Strings would be great

The game contains a list of swears, slang terms, and occult-related items that cannot be used when naming a player (the game replies "not cool enough" if you try to enter one). Even seemingly innocuous words like "face", "head", and "ball" aren't allowed. Amusingly, two of these items are "Sonic" and "Sega", obvious jabs at Nintendo's business rival at the time. Even a few words that surpass the eight-character limit are banned.

Regional Differences#

US	Europe

In the European version, the game's title was changed to Unirally and given a different logo. Part of the Uniracers logo can still be seen in the reflection on the track, though.

References#