sozai unlocked data with no scores, for beatmania III THE FINAL

Overview

In order to unlock sozai mode, you need to play the designated songs and record score data for them.

I found a way to use a bug to unlock sozai mode without recording scores.

This is ideal for players who are thinking:
“Unlocking sozai is a hassle, but I don’t want to use data that contains someone else’s scores.”
“The original user’s scores were too high for me to keep track of my own scores.”

Download

Extract the zip file and copy its contents (BM35.DAT) to your floppy disk.

Explanations

What is sozai mode?

sozai is a free play mode common among the games in the beatmania III series.
You can play any song on any stage, and even if you fail to clear a stage you will not get a game over.

Unlock Conditions and Score Recording

Clear the designated songs, or play them at least three times.

For this reason, save data with sozai mode unlocked generally has high scores recorded.

Creating the Data

The bug

When a player uses a floppy disk during Battle Play, the first one who presses their Start button is considered the player of that floppy.

However, if the floppy-using player fails the song but the non-floppy-using player clears it, a clear mark will be recorded on the floppy.

This is evident from the fact that the clear mark appears on the song selection screen from the next time onward, and that the song in question is displayed in blue in the results at the end of play (i.e. marked as cleared with a score of less than 95%).

Procedure

The non-floppy-using player clears the designated songs, and the floppy-using player does not perform any actions.

After clearing all of the designated songs, the bug causes the save data to look like this:

• The floppy records the data for having cleared the designated songs.
• High scores are recorded as 0.
• Each song has been played only once.

You might be able to use this bug to create similar data for games in the III series other than THE FINAL. (Untested)