Cars 2 (Wii)

Cars 2
Developer: Avalanche Software Publisher: Disney Interactive Platform: Wii Released in US: June 20, 2011 Released in EU: June 23, 2011 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has regional differences. This game has anti-piracy features.

Cars 2 is a game based on the Disney/Pixar film with the same name.

Unused Text

Cmdline.var Comments

AI takes over control of player car right away (from Spencer)
AI always takes hint (note that AI will NOT take a drive-to-target hint if he’s driving backwards, or turboing, or in the air, etc)
tokyo c, before tunnel with hopovers
All Wiimotes must be awake for this to work.
Worlds.db is ignored now, default is 3

cmdline.var has some developer comments.

They're probably referring to Spencer Parkin, who is the associate programmer at Avalanche Software.

Data.zip

Filelist.txt

The "permanent" section is the place to put files that should only be loaded once, and they stay memory-resistent permantly after that.
this guy needs to be loaded first before geoms are loaded

In assets/data.zip, there's a file named filelist.txt.

Soundocc.txt

Sound occlusion table
material= volume factor; pan factor;
if the material is missing, it is 100; 100
 	(no volume reduction, no panreduction)

In assets/data.zip, there's a file named soundocc.txt.

File Path Strings

data_wii/sound/DIALOGRU/dialog_str.lst has a list to a ton of sound effects.

Dol

/title/00010004/52464e4a/data/RPHealth.dat

The dol has a path to a save file for Wii Fit Plus on the Wii System Memory.

Regional Differences

The German version of the game removes the Gatling Gun sequence and an explosion from the intro. The explosion sound effect still plays however, making it seem more like a normal car crash sound.

Anti-Dolphin Code

During gameplay, Cars 2 attempts to write garbage data to lower MEM1, where important data is stored. However, it writes just enough that the data is never actually written to RAM and instead is only written to the CPU cache, which the game requests to be cleared right after. Because Dolphin does not emulate the CPU cache and instead makes all writes go immediately to RAM, the game proceeds to crash due to important data being overwritten with garbage. Dolphin's development team suspects that this behavior was purposefully implemented to target Dolphin, and implemented a hack to prevent the game from attempting to trash its own memory.

(Source: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-report-january-2017/)