Mario Kart 64

Mario Kart 64 basically takes all the wishes and feature requests from Super Mario Kart and makes them come true. Four players! Tunnels! No Koopa Troopa! All good stuff. Except that last one, clearly.

Debug Menu
This game contains a debug menu; to enable it, use the GameShark code and press the GS button at the title screen.


 * DEBUG_MODE activates key combinations during play:
 * L+R+A+B: Reset game
 * R+B: Toggle CPU meter
 * Left: Advance player 1 and everyone behind them to final lap
 * Down: Advance everyone to final lap
 * Up: Advance player 1 and one other to final lap
 * Z or C-Down can be pressed during the race start sequence to start early. This will glitch the game if done too soon.
 * MAP_NUMBER selects the track. Available are the 16 single-player tracks plus the four tracks from battle mode.
 * SCREEN_MODE selects the screen mode, and thus the players that participate. Available values are 1 player, 2 player up/down, 2 player left/right, 3 players and 4 players. The two player left-right view is never used in the final game, and is somewhat glitchy.
 * PLAYER selects the first player. If you have more than one player, the game assumes Luigi for player 2, Yoshi for player 3 and Toad for player 4.
 * SOUND MODE simply selects the sound mode (mono, headphones, stereo).
 * PUSH B TO GET ALL GOLDCUP is fairly self-descriptive. This option only appears when the cursor is moved all the way to the bottom.

Note that if you try to start a one-player game on a battle map, the game will automatically add a second player.

XXX Sound Mode
GameShark code switches the sound mode to "XXX" on the debug menu and blank in the Options menu. Its purpose is not known.

CPU and Graphic Display
When Debug Mode is enabled, the following GameShark codes can be used:
 * Shows which master display list is currently in use.
 * Shows bars at the bottom measuring CPU usage and other resources.

Frame-by-Frame advance
The following code activates a frame-by-frame advance mode if Debug Mode is enabled: 81001760 3C03 81001762 800E 81001794 3C0B 81001796 800E 810017C4 240C 810017C6 0000 When the game is paused, player 1 can hold A and B and press L to advance a frame. This unfortunately conflicts with using A to unpause the game; you must hold A before pausing. Alternatively, adding the code makes it require only holding B and pressing L while paused.

Vertical Splitscreen
akdLMnIV7Jc This unused vertical splitscreen display for 2-player mode is only accessible via the Debug Menu. It's pretty clear why this isn't accessible normally: it's unfinished. The lap counter still displays in Battle Mode, the map goes over the second player's lap counter, and no V's and E's come out when drifting in race mode.

Crash Debug Screen
If the game crashes, it will draw a small white square with red border near the upper left corner of the screen. At that point, entering the code L, Up, Left, Down, Right, R, L, B, A will display some information about the cause of the crash.

The first line displays three numbers - first is unknown (usually 5, probably thread ID), second is the address of the faulty instruction, third is the exception code (as defined in the R4300i manual). The second line displays the $RA register. The third line is unknown (usually zero).

The GameShark code will shorten this code to simply "press L".

This display cannot be seen on most emulators, as they don't seem to continue redrawing the screen after the game crashes.

Track Scaling Function
Next to the mirror mode flag in memory (address in USA version) is a floating-point value that appears to always be set to 1.0. When a track is loaded, its height is scaled by this amount. (All polygon vertices are multiplied by this value.) Use GameShark code (default value ) to activate this feature.

This value only affects track polygons, and hit detection is not altered to compensate for the steeper hills and/or shorter vertical walls, so changing it often produces unplayable tracks and strange effects such as floating trees, low areas being considered underwater/out of bounds, and walls that are no longer solid.

No similar scaling functions exist for the X and Z axes. This may have been intended as a debugging function to test slopes, or a bonus mode that would scale tracks to various sizes.

Lightning in Battle Mode
When used in Battle Mode, the Lightning Bolt makes all other players lose one balloon; however, it isn't normally possible to obtain this item, likely because it would have made battles horribly unbalanced. Code that specifically handles the Lightning Bolt's effects in Battle Mode can be found around in RAM.

Billboards
The billboards in the Japanese version are all clever parodies of real-life companies. They were changed in the American version because this would have gotten NoA in hot water.

Marioro (a pun on Marlboro) was changed to Mario Star.

Luigip (a pun on Agip) was changed to Luigi's.

Yoshi1 (a pun on Mobil1) was changed to Yoshi.

The Koopa Air sign is colored yellow and blue in the Japanese version (a pun on Goodyear). It's white and violet in the American version.

The orange 64 ball in Luigi's Raceway (a parody of the 76 gas station) was changed to blue.



The orange ball can however still be seen on the track preview even in the American version.

The Nintendo logo is blue in the Japanese version and red in the American version.

Moo Moo Farm
The course "Moo Moo Farm" is called "Moh Moh Farm" in Japan. This is because mooing in Japanese sounds like "mō mō", which sounds like "moh moh", with a long "O" sound.

Trophy Ceremony
The trophy ceremony in the Japanese version displays the text "You are in (position)". The American version changes this to "You placed (position)". The punctuation was also removed.

Course Names
Courses have different names depending on the region.

Credits Differences
7sv5LFddn6U In the Japanese version, completing the Special Cup on 150cc will display a Japanese-language version of the credits. This was removed from the English version for obvious reasons.

Additionally, the Japanese version has six voice actors, while the English version only has three. Charles Martinet (the voice of Mario) is the only one to be credited in both versions. Additionally, his name is misspelled as "Charles Martinee" in the Japanese version.

Inaccessible Item Boxes


Hidden underneath the Big Donut arena are two inaccessible item boxes. These item boxes can be seen by getting the camera behind the green bars and waiting, eventually the two item boxes will float up into view.

Hidden Music Loop In Winning Results Track
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The "Winning Results" track was likely intended to alternate between two ~100 second sections of music, each composed of a 50 second segment repeated twice. Due to a binary counter bug, the first segment repeats 64 times (for 54 minutes and 39 seconds!) before the second segment ever has a chance to play -- at which point it repeats twice and correctly returns to the first segment.