This is a Research-style post – as I go through more games, I will keep updating it with new findings.

• Loyalty career bonuses
  • NFS Most Wanted (including Black Edition)
  • NFS Carbon (including Collector’s Edition)
  • NFS ProStreet
  • NFS Undercover (PS2)
• NFS Underground Magazine 22
• Post changelog

Loyalty career bonuses

Most games from the Black Box era grant a cash bonus if saves from the previous games are found. However, online information about this feature is incomplete, and games themselves have some bugs and leftovers related to that.

NFS Most Wanted (including Black Edition)

$10.000 is awarded if a save from NFS Underground 2 is found. On the PS2, the game checks for the following set of serials depending on the current build configuration:

• SLES-52725 in the European build.
• SLUS-21065 in the American build.
• SLPM-65766 in the Japanese build. Seems like Sha-Do Underground 2 does not give bonuses, unless this has been specifically addressed in the Japanese releases.
• SLKA-25241 in the Korean build.
• SLAJ-25054 in the Asian build.

NFS Carbon (including Collector’s Edition)

$10.000 is awarded if a save from NFS Most Wanted is found. On the PS2 (other platforms unconfirmed), this feature has a bug – by default, this feature only works with base Most Wanted saves, as the NTSC-U versions check for Most Wanted Black Edition using a wrong serial (SLAJ-25075), while PAL-E versions do not include a BE serial at all! I submitted a patch to the PCSX2 patch database to fix this.

The game also has a function to list Underground 2 saves that uses the same list of serials as Most Wanted, so it may have been planned to grant bonuses for either UG2 or MW saves. However, those remain unused, either intentionally or through an oversight.

NFS ProStreet

Carbon’s bug has been fixed in NTSC-U (but not PAL), and the game (at least in the old-gen releases) grants the player 3 Repair Markers and 1 Totalled Marker when saves from any of the following games are found:

• NFS Most Wanted
• NFS Most Wanted Black Edition (fixed in the PAL release with my above fix)
• NFS Carbon
• NFS Carbon Collector’s Edition

Once again, the game can detect Underground 2 saves, but this functionality remains unused.

This feature has a caveat – creating a new profile and starting the career through the START option will NOT grant you loyalty bonuses. You must start a new career through the NEW CAREER option.

NFS Undercover (PS2)

Exient’s PS2/Wii version of NFS Undercover is NFS Carbon in disguise, and so the code carries over all the checks from Carbon (including a wrong serial for MW Black Edition). However, these go unused, and the game grants no loyalty bonuses at all.

NFS Underground Magazine 22

For my NFS Underground playthrough, I looked into the infamous Drift Score magazine unlock conditions. Turns out they were bugged, and I now released a SilentPatch for PC and PS2 versions of the game fixing this bug, as well as a few others.

Due to the significance of this bug fix, I detailed it in a separate post.

Post changelog

• March 12, 2025 – NFS Underground Magazine 22 issues researched.
• February 22, 2025 – initial version. Later edited to clarify missing MW Black Edition serials in PAL releases of Carbon and ProStreet.

As a new Tokyo Xtreme Racer is just around the corner, I spent some time playing the classic TXR games. As I go through the games in order, I wanted to note some things I encountered.

This is a Research-style post – as I go through more games, I will keep updating it with new findings. This post is reserved for the “classic” games only; I will most likely have another post about the 2025 Tokyo Xtreme Racer in the future!

• Tokyo Xtreme Racer (Dreamcast)
  • Faulty car unlocks
• Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 (Dreamcast)
  • Aspect Ratio inconsistencies
• Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Zero (PlayStation 2)
• Post changelog

Tokyo Xtreme Racer (Dreamcast)

Faulty car unlocks

When localizing Shutokō Battle for the West, Crave also changed several gameplay aspects of the game. Unlike in the Japanese release, in Tokyo Xtreme Racer you unlock several cars by beating the opponents who own them. One of those rivals is Midnight Cinderella, whose TYPE-FDD can be purchased after you win the race.

Even though I obviously beat this rival, the car never unlocked for me. I never ended up figuring out the exact cause of this, but I know I wasn’t the only one. Other people also encountered this issue, others had the rival cars unlock too early before they defeated the rival driving them.

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest – considering how this aspect of the game has been changed by the publisher during the localization process, it is highly likely they implemented it wrong and introduced a few rare bugs.

Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 (Dreamcast)

Aspect Ratio inconsistencies

While TXR2 has a “native” widescreen option, named Wide TV, its behavior is strange. When Dreamcast (real or emulated) uses a VGA output, this option doesn’t work at all. In VGA, the game always outputs a 4:3 image, and it looks exactly how you would expect:

When using Composite or RGB outputs, the option works, but the results are rather strange:

I did not get the chance to look into the game’s code, so I started experimenting with stretching the images instead, using the formulas from the Pixel aspect ratio page on Wikipedia. Treating Dreamcast’s output signal as 720x480 and rescaling from there, I was able to get better results:

So what’s going on with Normal TV? I initially couldn’t figure out the maths behind it, but then I figured I’d try to scale it, incorrectly, with an inverse of the scaling used for Wide TV: \({720 \over 853} \approx 0.844\). This… gave me an exact match!

This makes me suspect that the game scales for Composite output more or less like:

float arCorrection = 853.0 / 720.0;
if (WideTV)
   AR *= arCorrection;
else
   AR /= arCorrection;

If this is true, it’s completely incorrect and is likely producing incorrect image on CRT TVs. If I look into the game’s code in the future, I might be able to confirm or deny this suspicion properly, but as of the time of writing this post, I haven’t tried to disassemble any Dreamcast games.

My conclusion: When emulating, don’t bother with the in-game widescreen option. Just use VGA output and a widescreen cheat.

Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Zero (PlayStation 2)

Nothing here yet, but I published a few PCSX2 patches for this game! Head over to Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Zero if you want to take a look.

Post changelog

• January 13, 2025 – initial version.

Bonus Codes

Hello! This post is just a quick update to announce the addition of new Bonus Codes generators added to the website. With the addition of the TOCA Race Driver games, there are now 6 games available:

• Colin McRae Rally 3
• Colin McRae Rally 04
• Colin McRae Rally 2005 (including Colin McRae Rally 2005 Plus)
• TOCA Race Driver
• TOCA Race Driver 2 (including Race Driver 2006)
• TOCA Race Driver 3 (including TOCA Race Driver 3 Challenge)

To recap – Bonus Codes was a Codemasters’ take on traditional cheat codes. While most other games had specific cheat codes published by the developers online and in the gaming magazines, Codemasters invented a system where players could buy their “personalized” cheat codes online or through a phone helpline. For example, that’s how this looked in Colin McRae Rally 3 – the screenshot comes from a game with SilentPatch installed, unmodded games pointed the player towards codemasters.com/bonuscodes/ instead:

The website was still up around 2011, offering a full set of cheat codes for one game for £2.99. These days, it’s not possible to buy those cheats at all, so the only surviving resources are some cheats for specific access codes shared by individuals over the years. That’s where my generators come in – allowing users to generate their cheat codes directly in the web browser.

Thanks to Wayback Machine, we can assemble a mostly complete list of games using Bonus Codes. Aside from the games I already cover on the website, those games most likely also used Bonus Codes. Some of them may have been using regular cheat codes, but Wayback Machine hasn’t preserved enough web pages to know.

Last update: November 7, 2024

• Brian Lara International Cricket 2005
• Clive Barker’s Jericho
• Colin McRae DiRT
• Race Driver: GRID
• Heatseeker
• Hospital Tycoon (no access codes, only regular cheats)
• LMA Manager 2007
• Manchester United Soccer 2005
• Micro Machines V4
• Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing
• MTV Music Generator 3 – This is the Remix
• Operation Flashpoint: Resistance
• Perimeter
• Second Sight
• Soldiers: Heroes of World War II

There are also a few games I know are missing from the 2011 version of the website but include Bonus Codes. These are (now implemented thanks to Bo!):

• LMA Manager 2003
• LMA Manager 2004
• LMA Manager 2005
• LMA Manager 2006

I am hoping to eventually publish Bonus Codes generators for as many games as I can, but not all of them may be technically doable. That said, I said the same about TOCA Race Driver 3 – until recently. In this case, the recent developments are entertaining enough that they deserve their section in the post.

How were TOCA Race Driver 3’s cheats cracked?

When I first published generators for the Colin McRae Rally trilogy, I also looked into TOCA Race Driver 3 (but not 1 or 2), and found out that the generation there is entirely different. CMR games were easy to cover – these games use a symmetric generator, or in other words, they generate all the codes for the user’s specific access code, and then they check if the sequence entered by the player matches any of them. Therefore, for my generators, I only had to accurately reimplement the in-game generation functions. This has also been done by others decades ago – cheat code generators for all 3 games, as well as TOCA Race Driver 1 & 2, date back to the early 2000s. MobCat also hosts an online database of precomputed Bonus Codes for those games.

However, TOCA Race Driver 3 is different. For this game, Codemasters switched to an asymmetric generator, using RSA; the same cryptographic algorithm that is practically the foundation of online security. This worked great – to this day, I am not aware of a single generator or a database of codes.

For a while, I expected the generator to be impossible to reverse engineer, as while the game holds the public key in its executable, only Codemasters had its private key. Only recently I revisited their implementation of the RSA algorithm present in the game, and it turned out to be flawed in a way that made the process of obtaining the private key trivial. To explain this, I need to quickly explain how public and private RSA keys work.

At the most fundamental level, data is encrypted via RSA with a pair of keys, one for each side of the communication. Data encrypted with the private key can only be decrypted with the public key, and vice versa. Therefore, with only the public key at hand, it is impossible to encrypt data the same way the private key does, and in turn, impersonate the holder of the private key.

The process of generating the pair of keys goes as follows:

1. Big prime numbers \(p\) and \(q\) are picked. They are kept secret.
2. \(n = pq\) is calculated.
3. \(e\) is picked. For the sake of this explanation, we only need to care that the common value selected for this variable is \(65537\). This is also the case for TOCA.
4. \((n,e)\) is our public key. This is the key present in the game’s executable.
5. \(d = e^{-1}\pmod{(p-1)(q-1)}\) is calculated and kept secret. This is our private key, in this case, known only to the developers.

The process of encrypting and decrypting data is then straightforward. The data is encrypted with the private key by calculating \(M' = M^d \pmod{n}\) – this (with some transformations) is what was given to the player as their personal cheat code. Later, the game decrypts the encrypted message (as in, the cheat code) by calculating \(M = M'^e \pmod{n}\). If the message decrypted with the public key matches the user’s access code and is interpreted as valid, the cheat activates.

Since \(d\) is easy to calculate if the primes used to calculate \(n\) are known, the security of the key hinges on \(p\) and \(q\) being exceptionally difficult to guess. This is typically achieved by picking huge numbers – for example, RSA-1024 uses \(n\) that is 1024 bits long, which makes for 309 decimal digits. As of the time of writing this article, this is a large enough number that it’s never been factorized (primes \(p\) and \(q\) have never been brute-forced).

If TOCA Race Driver 3 used a similarly large number, the algorithm would have been impossible to reverse engineer. However, their RSA key is much smaller. How many digits does their public key \(n\) have?

20.

The key used by the game is 8.5 bytes long (the topmost byte only uses 4 bits), which technically makes the number RSA-68. This a number so relatively small it has never been even considered in the RSA Factoring Challenge, and so small that Wolfram Alpha does prime factorization of that number even without explicitly being asked to. That’s how I “cracked” the key; I was curious to see what Wolfram Alpha would tell me about this number, but instead, it’s done everything for me right off the bat. With primes factorized, recalculating the private key is trivial, and I could update my generators to cover TOCA Race Driver 3’s algorithm.

TOCA Race Driver 3 cheats hold one more trivia. The game featured an entire section of Honda championships and a cross-promo campaign with Honda, where players could unlock those championships for free with a generator hosted at honda.co.uk/racedriver/ (archived). These Honda-specific codes use a different RSA key than the remaining cheats.

In the Bonus Codes Generator, I also included a checkbox to only generate the Honda codes, to emulate the 2006 experience of getting those free cheats (minus all the personal data Honda wanted in return).

Note for PC players

TOCA Race Driver 2 & 3 have a bug where the access code fails to generate properly on 64-bit systems and always displays 4294967 (in Race Driver 2) or ???? (in Race Driver 3). For a fix, see TOCA Race Driver (series). If I ever make a SilentPatch for these games, this fix will be included there too – but for now, a standalone fix is enough.

Introduction

As of the time of writing this post, it was yesterday when I learned that Midnight Club: L.A. Remix has a dedicated menu to input the cheat codes, but no known codes exist. Numerous claims about different cheat codes circulate, but they appear to be all fake. Inspired by the recent findings in Gran Turismo 4 and Gran Turismo PSP, I dived into MCLA Remix to look for the cheat codes.

A brief look around the game’s code reveals the game has 11 previously unknown cheat codes, with 12 more prototype-only cheat codes that are locked by default! The game locks them behind a check against the serial hardcoded in the executable – and only allows to use those cheat codes on the prototype (ULET/ULUT) builds.

List of cheat codes

This list can also be found in Bonus Codes.

These are the cheat codes supported by the game out of the box:

Prototype-only cheat codes check against the prototype serial. They can be accessed once this check is patched out:

To unlock the prototype cheat codes in the final game builds, use the following cheats in PPSSPP or in cwCheat on your PSP/PS Vita:

_S ULUS-10383
_G Midnight Club: L.A. Remix [US]
_C1 Unlock prototype cheats
_L 0x20067094 0x00000000

_S ULES-01144
_G Midnight Club: L.A. Remix [EU]
_C1 Unlock prototype cheats
_L 0x20067094 0x00000000

_S ULJS-00180
_G Midnight Club: L.A. Remix [JP]
_C1 Unlock prototype cheats
_L 0x20068A54 0x00000000

_S ULJM-05904
_G Midnight Club: L.A. Remix (Rockstar Classics) [JP]
_C1 Unlock prototype cheats
_L 0x20068A54 0x00000000

Most of the cheats are quite standard and not that interesting, but the Stronger special ability effects cheat is an exception – it makes a Roar ability look quite entertaining:

Additionally, the 5 secret biker head models appear to be reused from the PSP version of Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition:

The obfuscation algorithm

The cheat strings use an obfuscation algorithm to “hide” them, presumably to make them harder to spot when disassembling the executable. The algorithm used is simple and reversible – to document all the cheat codes, I wrote a small decryption program, and later simplified it and cleaned it up with the help of Nenkai.

The encryption and decryption routines are as follows:

def encryptCheat(cheat):
    output = ""

    inputSalt = ord('E')
    for ch in cheat:
        char = ord(ch) + inputSalt
        outputSalt = ord('{' if char < ord('A') else 'A')
        output += chr(((char - ord('A')) % 58) + outputSalt)
        inputSalt += 1
    return output

def decryptCheat(cheat):
    output = ""

    inputSalt = ord('E')
    for ch in cheat:
        charOrd = (ord(ch) - ord('A') - inputSalt) % 58
        output += chr(charOrd + ord('A'))
        inputSalt += 1
    return output

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print('Cheats:')
    cheats = [
        'nAAtxtvFMCvH',
        'xyzICwF',
        'CmtsKyIML',
        'DFnMDDKsKAzP',
        'DGFvx',
        'rDnBxJv',
        'DwvrAyus',
        'DwvrAyut',
        'DwvrAyuu',
        'DwvrAyuv',
        'DwvrAyuw',
    ]
    for ch in cheats:
        print(f'{ch}: {decryptCheat(ch)}')

    print('')
    print('Prototype cheats:')
    prototype_cheats = [
        'lxy',
        'nmz',
        'qBF',
        'nmFv',
        'nuGwtI',
        'AmEHH',
        'nmEG',
        'lxyqpIy',
        'KAAs',
        'lsEC',
        'CAnF',
        'yAEApB'
    ]
    for ch in prototype_cheats:
        print(f'{ch}: {decryptCheat(ch)}')

Introduction

Usually, when I dissect games on this blog, I don’t give much attention to demos. However, due to its troubled development cycle, Juiced is an exceptional case. Because of the game changing publishers right before the original release date, the game has changed considerably – and thanks to PC demos and leaked PS2/Xbox prototypes, we have a unique opportunity to experience the game in its original form.

This post is the first in the series of Research-style posts. I intend to keep updating posts in this category as new information comes in instead of publishing new posts about the same game, so keep an eye on this category from time to time 😉 In this post, instead of focusing on modifying Juiced, I want to showcase the game and its history through the evolution of all 6 PC demos that are available online. They all have minor compatibility issues, so for that, I’m releasing the first strictly demo-oriented SilentPatch with two clear goals:

1. Fix the demos just enough for them to be playable without compatibility issues. I wish to preserve those demos in their original state, so I focused solely on critical bugs. This means that separate Quit and Quit Game options present in the Acclaim demos are here to stay for the sake of history 😉 Despite the limited scope of this SilentPatch, it should still make for an entertaining read – since the bugs I fixed range from incorrect math behind the field of view calculations, compatibility bugs, through (for the first time) a possible compiler/optimizer bug breaking the game’s code!
2. (Optionally) unlock the demos as much as possible. Early demos had widescreen support from the console versions left unused, and they all ship more content than was made available officially. Since I want to use those PC demos as a showcase of “the game that never came to be”, I want everyone to enjoy them to the fullest.

Not interested in demos and you’d rather experience the full prototype builds? I have something for you too. As part of my research, I was playtesting those builds too, and later I created several small patches for the PS2 versions – including a 60 FPS hack and a patch to make those prototypes playable online via PS2Online! The latest builds to surface online are developed so far that you can even play them through the Internet.

Chapter 1: Who was Juice Games? What is Juiced?

The history of Juiced and Juice Games isn’t told in full without mentioning Rage Software. This British studio was responsible (among other games) for racing games like E-racer or Off-Road Redneck Racing, however, they were also working on Lamborghini – a racing game announced in May 2002 that promised to feature every single car model from this Italian automaker.¹

Unfortunately, Rage Software went bankrupt in January 2003, just before they could release the game. Lamborghini became a lost media, with only an Xbox Demo surviving, at least until May 2022, when a nearly finished beta build has been published on HiddenPalace.

Not long after, part of the Rage Software staff founded Juice Games. Even on their official website, they were always upfront about their Rage Software roots:

With a back catalogue that includes TFX, EF2000 and the critically acclaimed but unreleased Lamborghini, Juice Games developed the multi-million unit selling Juiced franchise.

Sometime in 2003, the team secured funding from Fund4Games and a publishing deal with Acclaim Entertainment (who needed a new racing title after losing the publishing rights for Burnout) for their new game, Juice. While the game was never officially referred to by this name, thanks to a very early prototype we know this name was in use at least until November 2003.

By the time Juice Games officially announced the game in January 2004, it was already known by its final name and set for a Fall 2004 release. The development process under Acclaim was relatively well documented, with multiple websites showcasing the game in its early state^{2 3 4}, and with demos on all platforms releasing around July 2004. In fact, you could say that they released one demo too many – on June 9, 2004, a PC demo was released early by the German division of Acclaim, then promptly delisted on June 11, 2004. and scrubbed from the internet thoroughly:

Juiced Demo

The Juiced demo was taken from the server because it does not show the final status of the game. A new demo will be available as soon as possible. Thank you for your interest!

A “final” Acclaim demo was eventually released on July 14, 2004, in a much better state than the first one. While Acclaim has done a good job replacing the early demo with a proper build, some downloads survived thanks to Wayback Machine and we can experience this early demo with all its issues – but more on that later 😉

Thanks to many prototypes surfacing online, we know that by August 2004 the game was nearly complete, and reviews stated the game was to be released in September 2004.

We’ll bring you more on Juiced as its early September release date approaches.

An Amazon listing attributed to Acclaim Entertainment exists and lists the release date as September 7, 2004, although this listing doesn’t use Acclaim’s cover art. Interestingly, THQ listings also exist and they have a different ASIN, but that may just be an US vs. EU Amazon.

September release never happened, though – instead, Acclaim filed for bankruptcy in October 2004 and the game’s future became unknown. This has all happened so late so some boxed copies of the game ended up turning up online years later, although there is no evidence of the game reaching the store shelves.

- work for Rage Software
- develop a Lamborghini game nearly to completion
- studio bankrupts, game never releases
- move on to found Juice Games
- develop Juiced for Acclaim nearly to completion
- publisher bankrupts, new publisher modifies the game

Folks had the worst luck :( pic.twitter.com/wIwmERTVb7

— Silent (@__silent_) September 20, 2023

Before long, THQ and Take-Two both bid to acquire rights to Juiced; Electronics Arts also attempted to join the bid but failed to meet the deadline (and, honestly, it’s good that they didn’t manage to buy a direct competitor to their own Need for Speed: Underground). THQ eventually won and moved the release date to Summer 2005, giving Juice Games 5 more months to make changes to the game. If the reviews were to be trusted, that new iteration was received better than the Acclaim’s version. The public was also able to see the changes themselves first through a round of demos released in January 2005, then in May 2005, just before the game’s release. The game was eventually released on June 13, 2005 in North America and June 17, 2005 in Europe.

This brief recap of the game’s history brings me to the clue of this article. Even though Acclaim’s Juiced and THQ’s Juiced are not entirely different games, the game went through some significant design changes. With no known full PC builds surviving, demos is all we have on this platform. In my analysis, I’ll go through all 6 known PC demos and compare them one by one in the order of their internal timestamps.

Chapter 2: Acclaim Demos

All 3 Acclaim demos have content parity, at least when it comes to officially unlocked content:

• 3 cars with an option to pre-tune them
• 1 selectable route in San Ricardo

When it comes to locked content shipped with the files, there are a few differences. In SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo, all exclusive content is “ported” to the latest Acclaim Demo.

SilentPatch includes identical fixes for all 3 demos, and therefore I’ll be only highlighting them on the latest, most polished demo. Screenshots included in this chapter are all taken with SilentPatch installed, as otherwise I would have to take them in 4:3. However, this is the only modified visual aspect of those demos.

May 2004 Demo

• Compilation date: Thursday, 27 May 2004 10:38:44
• Download links: DOWNLOAD (retrieved)
• Worth testing: NO (too buggy)

As mentioned previously, this demo was accidentally released online early, and it shows. Acclaim’s attempts to scrub this version off the internet were mostly successful, as the above download link is virtually the only source I could find online. This build has a range of issues, ranging from regular crashes, graphical artifacts, and missing PC features, to an unimplemented Quit (Alt + F4 doesn’t work either!). Even ignoring all those, as far as I can tell, a Nitrous button is completely unmapped in this build, and unlike later builds, this one doesn’t give the player an option to redefine controls.

It doesn’t even have a game icon.

Although this demo has 3 cars available by default, it also ships a 4th car – Toyota MR2. In SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo, this car has been made selectable. Since I included this car in the mod package, it’s now also available in later demos.

Unlike later demos, a Videos menu entry is available, with 3 small game teasers available – although their appearance is slightly glitchy.

SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo unlocks all shipped content in this demo, but there is a twist – in this build, the Sprint races work differently. Rather than taking place on the straight section of the road, much like drag races in other games (or Sprints in the final version of the game), these Sprints take place on small sections of regular tracks. Considering that the game mode works identically to the final game (including forced manual shifting), I initially thought it was a bug. However, as found by Eagle, the final game includes unused minimaps for the Sprint races, and one of those minimaps closely resembles a playable track in this build. It’s just speculation, but it is possible that this demo represents a work-in-progress redesign of this game mode, or it was just not finalized yet and used sections of the existing tracks as placeholders.

I also have not fixed the crashes exclusive to this demo, so it is barely playable even patched. IMO this demo is not worth the effort, except for its rarity.

June 2004 Demo

• Compilation date: Wednesday, 23 June 2004 09:22:06
• Download links: DOWNLOAD, MIRROR; the installer doesn’t allow picking an installation directory by default, see below for a fix
• Worth testing: NO (just get the July demo)

This build is a prototype demo retrieved from Duffy’s Dreamcast Collection – a bunch of prototypes from an ex-Acclaim beta tester Duffy, who passed away recently. Compared to the May demo, it’s much more polished – all issues I mentioned (except for the texts not scaling to resolution) have been fixed. Comparison screenshots show several obvious differences.

Based on my observations, I could identify the following differences between May and June builds:

• The title screen is slightly different, with PRESS ENTER relocated to the center of the screen.
• New intro copyright disclaimers.
• Car select UI has been rearranged slightly.
• New keyboard button prompts.
• Car names have been changed.
• Reflections in the car select screen are slightly toned down.
• Videos have been cut.
• Sprint races (unlocked by SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo) now work like in the final game.
• Exit Demo option has been added.
• Race HUD has been slightly changed not to feature black backgrounds.
• For some reason, motion blur is extremely overdone in this build.
• Pre-race cutscenes have different camera angles.
• Tire smoke is visible, while it was absent from the May build.
• The configurator app is slightly more fleshed out, with Shader Model 2.0 added. However, that introduced a bug where the application requires the Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode to run (fixed in SilentPatch).
• Controls can now be remapped, although instead of an in-game remapper, DirectInput Mapper ((in)famously removed from Windows Vista and newer) is used. The game must also be running in the windowed mode, or else it obscures the mapper window.

Aside from the compatibility issues of the configurator app, this build also introduced a peculiar issue where the HUD flickers randomly. Since the July build was also affected, I will explain this bug in detail below.

July 2004 Demo

• Compilation date: Friday, 2 July 2004 17:00:06
• Download links: DOWNLOAD, MIRROR; the installer doesn’t allow picking an installation directory by default, see below for a fix
• Worth testing: YES

This demo is similar to the June build, but with a few additional fixes:

• Texts are now scaling to resolution.
• The main menu has been slightly rearranged.
• Excessive motion blur from the June build appears to have been toned down.
• The bloom effect when activating nitrous is noticeably ramped up.
• Lighting (especially on cars) seems to be a little darker, as evidenced by the comparison screenshots.

Fixes included in SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo

Since I want those Acclaim demos (especially the latest one) to be enjoyable to their fullest, SilentPatch includes several fixes for the most severe issues present in those builds. As they are demos, they are inherently a work-in-progress product and so most of those issues shouldn’t come as a surprise, for that reason I also have not fixed any gameplay shortcomings. I want those demos to be playable, but I don’t want to distort their “history” by “completing” them. Here are the highlights of this release:

• All shipped content has been unlocked. This increases the amount of in-game content from 1 route in the Race mode and 3 selectable cars to:
  • 4 selectable cars (Toyota MR2 from the May demo has been added and made usable).
  • 4 routes in the Race mode + reverse variants + 1 Point-to-Point race.
  • Sprint race.
  • Showoff (Cruise) mode.
  • Solo mode.

  Additionally, the users may enable all menus with an INI option but do note that most menus are not finished and will softlock.

• 3 teaser videos from the May demo have been included and re-enabled.

• The laps limit has been lifted from 2 to 6, like in the console prototype builds from a similar timeframe.

• In night and wet races, the limit of on-track cars has been lifted from 4 to 6. This appears to have been a purely performance-focused constraint, and with modern PCs, we can easily brute force through it without any noticeable issues.

• Widescreen from the console builds has been re-enabled and further improved. The default widescreen option slightly distorts the aspect ratio and appears horizontally squashed compared to 4:3. SilentPatch corrects this and additionally supports arbitrary aspect ratios, which means ultra widescreen now looks as expected. The configuration application can now also select widescreen resolutions when in windowed mode.

  

• The default driver name Player1 can now be overridden via the INI file.

• All known compatibility issues have been fixed. JuicedConfig.exe no longer needs Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode to run.

• May 2004 Demo can now be quit by pressing Alt + F4.

• All game settings have been moved from registry to settings.ini. This makes demos fully portable and prevents them from overwriting each other’s settings.

• June and July demos introduced a bug where the UI elements flicker randomly, with seemingly no fix.

  I initially suspected this is similar to an issue present in Scarface (this is the second post in a row where Scarface gets a shout-out), and to make matters worse, applying an identical fix (removing the D3DLOCK_DISCARD flag when locking the vertex buffers) helped. However, that turned out to be a red herring, as the game’s usage of this flag was correct. I later identified this issue to be a potential compiler/optimizer bug! x86 calling conventions have strict requirements regarding the state of the FPU…

  The x87 floating point registers ST0 to ST7 must be empty (popped or freed) when calling a new function, and ST1 to ST7 must be empty on exiting a function.

  …however, the game’s code ignores this requirement when calling into one of the Direct3D 9 functions, either by a mistake in handwritten assembly code (unlikely) or due to a compiler bug:

  mov     esi, eax
  mov     dword ptr [eax+24h], 1
  call    LockVertexBuffer
  fld     st(2) ; The code assumes this value was not changed by the above
                ; function, but this is not guaranteed to be the case!
  mov     ecx, [ebp+0]
  

  I authored a fix where LockVertexBuffer saves and restores the entire FPU state, and lo and behold – the issue is fixed. This is the first time I fixed a game issue that I suspect was caused by a compiler bug, but I’m not surprised too much; I’ve already encountered such bugs multiple times in my programming career outside of reverse engineering games.

• In-game music plays with crackles and pops in all 3 Acclaim demos. This bug, later fixed in THQ demos, occurs because the game requests more data to be loaded from the disk after playback reaches a specific point in the audio track. In the case of THQ demos, this happens when passing a mid-point of the 1-second-long chunk of loaded music, but in Acclaim demos this marker is set to one byte before the end of the track. This obviously doesn’t allow the game to stream more data in time, and that results in broken music playback. In SilentPatch, I mirrored the change made to the 2005 demos.

• Last but not least, an issue I did not fix (as I said earlier, I decided against altering the work-in-progress state of those demos beyond the essential fixes), but I consider it worth mentioning anyway. For some strange reason, parts of the environment are darker when the HUD isn’t displaying. This comparison is done with the HUD disabled via a hack, but you can replicate the same scenario by using a rearview camera (by default mapped to Space). Furthermore, after Alt + Tab, this issue vanishes and the environments are dark regardless of whether the HUD is drawn or not. I haven’t looked into this issue with PIX, so I am not sure which of the two states is “correct”, but in my opinion the darker state makes the affected objects (especially the car) blend with the rest of the environment better.

  

Demo installer issues

By default, June and July demos’ installers don’t include an option to change the installation directory and instead, they always install the game to C:\Program Files (x86)\Acclaim Entertainment\JuicedDemo. Since these installers use InstallShield, I created a Transform file to re-enable the Destination Folder screen.

I strongly recommend downloading it from Downloads and running the installer via run.bat, instead of installing them to Program Files – it’s not a good idea, especially with such older, UAC-unaware games and with SilentPatch redirecting settings to the INI file.

Chapter 3: THQ Demos

Just like with Acclaim, all 3 demos from THQ have content parity. However, this content has been entirely refocused and instead of a free custom race form of the earlier demos, THQ demos are linear:

• The initial race puts the player in a Nissan Skyline in a night 1v1 race against a Toyota Supra. The player also gets an option to bet with their rival – a mechanic also present in the Acclaim version of the game, but not covered by their demo at all.
• After the race, the player gets a chance to freely tune their Skyline.
• Once they are done, a second race against 3 opponents (this time set in the morning) starts.
• After the second race, the demo ends.

It’s clear that this demo showcases the game better, as the player gets a taste of what the career mode looks like, and they can experiment with the game’s tuning system on their own, instead of relying on auto-mod from the Acclaim demo.

January 2005 Demo

• Compilation date: Friday, 28 January 2005 15:07:00
• Download links: DOWNLOAD, MIRROR
• Worth testing: SOMEWHAT (slightly different from the final game, runs with nearly no compatibility issues)

Out of the box, this demo will refuse to boot on PCs with more than 4 logical CPU cores (fixed in SilentPatch). However, this demo does not exhibit the compatibility issues present in the final game – that is, Alt + Tab does not crash the game and the Juiced requires virtual memory to be enabled is not present.

This demo is also the only one to feature more than one executable – Juiced.exe is compiled with SSE2 instructions, but there is also Juiced_NOSSE2.exe. The final game doesn’t ship multiple executables.

There isn’t much to talk about in this version otherwise, as it’s mostly identical to the final game. However, while working on unlocking its content, I accidentally reached a semi-broken Career screen – despite its brokenness, its layout is distinctly different from the final game, more resembling a career screen from the Acclaim prototypes!

April 2005 Demo (v2.0)

• Compilation date: Thursday, 14 April 2005 15:54:25 (4 days before the full game)
• Download links: DOWNLOAD, MIRROR
• Worth testing: NO (if you really want to try it, don’t bother without installing a v2.1 patch)

Content-wise, this demo is fleshed out further, but on the technical side it only gets worse – unlike the January demo, this one includes all the incompatibilities of the final game 😕

Generally, this demo appears to be identical to the final game, with all design locked in place. Based on my observations, I could identify the following content differences between January and April builds:

• Copyrights have been updated from 2004 to 2005.
• Car reflections have been updated.
• Fonts and UI sounds have been replaced. As far as I know, the old UI sounds have later been used in Juiced: Eliminator.
• Music in the garage screen has been updated to be different from the main menu music.
• Weird changes have been made to widescreen support – in the January build, the game scaled properly to 16:9, but in this build (and the final game), scaling is incorrect! According to PCGamingWiki, the Widescreen option in the full version of the game is for 16:10, not 16:9. I’m not sure why they changed it, and why they didn’t leave both 16:9 and 16:10 as options instead.

May 2005 Demo (v2.1)

• Compilation date: Wednesday, 18 May 2005 09:13:12 (30 days after the full game, 51 days before patch v1.01)
• Download links: DOWNLOAD, MIRROR; patches the above v2.0 demo to v2.1
• Worth testing: SOMEWHAT (if you really can’t try the full game)

Officially, this patch exclusive for the demo version is supposed to only improve performance:

Juiced by Juice Games - demo v2.0 → v2.1 patch

It has come to our attention that some people may have experienced performance problems with Version 2 of the Juiced PC Demo.

THQ are pleased to announce that a patch to update Version 2 of the demo to Version 2.1.

PLEASE NOTE THIS PATCH WILL UPDATE VERSION 2 OF THE PC DEMO ONLY.

However, there is more to it – the demo patch was compiled 1 month after the initial PC version of the full game, and it also seems to include more changes later seen in the regional releases in Czechia, Poland, and Russia, and possibly also some fixes later rolled out in a v1.01 patch.

mov [esp+34h+var_14], offset aControlsDx9ETx ; "controls_dx9_e.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_10], offset aControlsDx9FTx ; "controls_dx9_f.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_C], offset aControlsDx9GTx ; "controls_dx9_g.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_8], offset aControlsDx9ITx ; "controls_dx9_i.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_4], offset aControlsDx9STx ; "controls_dx9_s.txt"

mov [esp+40h+var_20], offset aControlsDx9ETx ; "controls_dx9_e.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_1C], offset aControlsDx9FTx ; "controls_dx9_f.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_18], offset aControlsDx9GTx ; "controls_dx9_g.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_14], offset aControlsDx9ITx ; "controls_dx9_i.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_10], offset aControlsDx9STx ; "controls_dx9_s.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_C], offset aControlsDx9CTx ; "controls_dx9_c.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_8], offset aControlsDx9PTx ; "controls_dx9_p.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_4], offset aControlsDx9RTx ; "controls_dx9_r.txt"

But here’s the catch – while the demo’s code supports the additional languages and even attempts to pick them by default based on the user’s system locale, they… don’t ship the language files! The result is that on my OS with a Polish locale selected, I was consistently crashing on startup and couldn’t run this demo at all until I “reverted” support for those 3 languages with SilentPatch 🙃 This almost made me drop support for this patch until a trace with Process Monitor revealed that the game tried to access controls_dx9_p.txt and failed. This, combined with the fact that the game booted fine on Windows Sandbox (that did not use a Polish locale) proved that the issue lies there, and thus is trivially fixable by “cutting” those 3 languages from the demo. Phew.

Fixes included in SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo

• All shipped content has been unlocked. Since these demos don’t include Custom Races, customization is done through the SilentPatchJuicedDemo.ini file and concerns only the second race. The following options are available:
  • 4 routes in the Race mode + reverse variants + 1 Point-to-Point race + its reverse variant.
  • Sprint race.
  • Showoff (Cruise) mode.
  • Solo mode.
  • Customizable time of day, weather, number of laps, and number of AI opponents.

  Additionally, the users may enable all menus with an INI option but do note that most menus are not finished and will softlock.

• The player’s starter car can now be customized by editing the scripts\CMSPlayersCrewCollection2.txt file. The following cars are available: gtr, nsx, supra, vette_zo6, viper.

  

• Demos have optionally been made endless. Instead of the game exiting after the second race, it returns to the garage and gives an option of tuning the car again and starting another race. Combined with the aforementioned content unlocks, this lets the player try multiple different routes and game modes in a single session, as the race configuration options in the INI file can be modified while the game is running.

• The default driver name Player can now be overridden via the INI file.

• A startup crash in the January 2005 demo occurring on PCs with more than 4 logical CPU cores has been fixed.

• Juiced requires virtual memory to be enabled error from the April 2005 and May 2005 demos has been fixed.

• Startup crashes in the May 2005 demo occurring when the OS locale is set to Czech, Polish or Russian have been fixed.

• JuicedConfig.exe no longer needs Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode or a Windows compatibility shim to run. This improves compatibility with environments where compatibility shims are not enabled by default, e.g. on Wine/Proton.

• All game settings have been moved from registry to settings.ini. This makes demos fully portable and prevents them from overwriting each other’s settings.

Chapter 4: PS2 Prototypes, briefly

As I mentioned earlier, many PS2 and Xbox prototypes of Acclaim’s Juiced have surfaced online. Although they all come from the tail end of the game’s development under the original publisher, they seem to be slightly different from one another. However, comparing all these prototypes in detail would be an enormous task, much bigger than the demo comparisons presented above (that already are quite lengthy). Most of the differences are likely also purely technical and not that entertaining for a casual reader.

That said, during the course of the entirety of this research, I came across a few findings specifically in the PS2 prototypes that warranted some attention, and I’m publishing them in the form of patches for the two prototypes that by the time of writing this are available online – June 11, 2004 and July 28, 2004 builds.

60 FPS

While the Xbox prototypes and the final game (on all platforms) target 60 FPS, both PS2 prototypes are locked to 30 FPS. This patch lifts the FPS cap, allowing the game to hit 60 FPS. When using this cheat in PCSX2, the default configuration tailored for the final version of Juiced prevents these prototypes from maintaining a stable 60 FPS, even with an overclocked emulated CPU. For an optimal experience, several settings should be changed as follows. Please make sure to use Per-Game Settings to change those, as changing those settings globally is guaranteed to cause problems with other games, including the final version of Juiced:

• Set EE Cycle Rate to 130%.
• Enable Enable Instant VU1.
• Disable Enable Game Fixes (in the Advanced tab).

Progressive Scan

The July 28, 2004 build and the final version of Juiced include an option to switch the game to use Progressive Scan by holding X + △, while the June 11, 2004 build doesn’t implement this option yet. With this cheat, Progressive Scan is enabled also on this build.

Fixed Widescreen

Just like I mentioned earlier, all Acclaim’s versions of the game have slightly defective widescreen support and the aspect ratio is “overcorrected”, causing the image to be squashed. With this patch, the widescreen proportions match 4:3 perfectly, the same as I did for PC demos.

DNAS Bypass

On the PlayStation 2, online multiplayer was protected by Dynamic Network Authentication System (DNAS), an authentication protocol that ensured pirated game copies couldn’t access the online functionality. Sony kept this service up for long after the PS2’s end of life, but finally took it offline on April 4, 2016, leaving unmodified games unable to play online. As DNAS was not responsible for the actual online functionality, only for authentication, DNAS Bypass codes have been created for various games to circumvent the authentication entirely. Thanks to the PS2Online project, the final version of Juiced has a DNAS Bypass patch that allows people to play online through OpenSpy, but that patch didn’t work for the prototypes.

With my DNAS Bypass, Acclaim prototypes can connect to OpenSpy and online play is possible just like in the final game! Prototypes and retail games see each other’s lobbies, but they cannot enter them – so it is not possible to accidentally ruin someone else’s fun by joining their game with the wrong version of the game. My tests were also done only on the June build; July build can go online too, but I’ve not had much success creating a lobby.

Downloads

f4mi has created a showcase of SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo and the improvements it makes to Acclaim’s Juiced Demo – check it out if you want to see the new content in action:

All known PC demos of Juiced, as well as SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo can be downloaded from Mods & Patches. Click here to head to the game’s page directly: Download Juiced Demos and SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo

For patches targetting the PlayStation 2 prototypes, go to: Juiced (Acclaim, PS2) Downloads

Credits and acknowledgments

• f4mi for researching the history of Juiced and making sure that my summary is accurate, and for preparing the showcase video
• Juiced Modding Community for helping me find and dissect those demos and for answering all of my many questions regarding the game