My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Thursday December 9, 1999

Pit and Other Track Weirdness in Gran Turismo, plus Game Shark Codes

Since we're all disappointed, unable to play GT2 yet, I thought I'd mention something I only just noticed about the tracks in the original Gran Turismo. This all applies to North American version 1.1--I don't know about the other versions.

In Simulation Mode, the pits are open at Grand Valley, Special Stage R11, Special Stage R11 ii, and Special Stage R5 for all events you enter.

I had not noticed this until just recently. Well, I sort of noticed when I used a Game Shark to cycle through all possible tracks (this can be done in any of the four Res Time Trial modes, (Simulation or Arcade, Hi-res or normal), either two-player mode (race at the Test Track or Arcade Race mode (race Arcade AI cars at SSR11 or the Test Track That is, I do not know how to do it in Simulation mode AI races.

For some reason while doing that, I noticed in Time Trial mode that the Simulation SSR5 pits were open, while at most tracks they are not.

But then, the other day, I noticed that they *are* open in all Simulation mode races at SSR5! Just hang left immediately after the last corner, and take this long underpass under the Clubman track, and you come out into the pits, and finally go past the line-up of Japanese manufacturers' trucks, before rejoining the track. The trucks aren't really very well rendered, actually.

Similarly, the pits are open at Simulation Mode races for Grand Valley full-course (clockwise only), and both directions of SSR11. Now this makes sense, because otherwise the enduro events would need some means of "opening the pits" on an otherwise identical track. (That's what I had always assumed was done, though, actually). So this suggests that perhaps an SSR5 enduro event had been planned at some time, and cancelled.

The reason I didn't notice earlier that the pits were open at Grand Valley partly is because the entrance is difficult to spot. Also, early in the game you spend more time at Grand Valley East, where the pits are closed. Not sure what my excuse was at SSR11, though.

Here is a complete list of the track codes available for Gran Turismo (patch in at appropriate times to location $B63EC in the North American version 1.1 game). Okay, maybe it is still not complete, but it is a superset of any Web site I found.

If you use your Game Shark to scan the part of memory where the track names are stored, apparently in the same order as the track numbers, you see indications that there are Arcade mode SSR11 and SSR11 ii. And indeed, if you shark in the corresponding track numbers, you end up running on versions of those tracks with the pits *closed*. They seem a little more bumpy than the Simulation versions too. So this suggests that there were plans to have those tracks in the Arcade Mode, but those plans were changed. (There's also an Arcade Autumn Mini, but no other reverse-direction tracks have Arcade versions). Saved replays on sharked-in tracks do not work. (Your previous time trial's ghost similarly gets very upset and confused, too )

Two player tracks are different from either Arcade or Simulation mode tracks, the same track being used for two-player races in either mode. The noticeable differences are that two-player races have the pits open, and have no middle-distance scenery. (E.g. the grandstands around the High Speed Ring are not there).