Gran Turismo 4 / PSP Courses found in Gran Turismo 5

[elston87]

Over at the "Searching for Hidden Things in GT" Discord server, a huge discovery was recently made:

@j0nny0093 figured out how to load hidden courses in Gran Turismo PSP, documenting his findings over at The Cutting Room Floor, but then we started getting the idea that GTPSP and GT5 shared some very similar code. Turns out, they do! This reveals that there is a plethora of hidden courses leftover in the game's data, most of them being classics from Gran Turismo 4, and a bunch of strange outliers from Gran Turismo 3, and even Pikes Peak from Gran Turismo 2 of all things.

The Discord community compiled as much data as we could and I've compiled all of these hidden courses found in the game on a page over at TCRF as well. The list is pretty much complete, but there are still things to be tested. Below in this post are the first ever pictures released of these classic courses being played in the game:

(IMAGE SIZE WARNING)

Tsukuba Circuit (GT4):

Test Course (GT4):

Pikes Peak:

EDIT: There is an overwhelming amount of messages and posts regarding "how to do this", so I'm going to quote two posts from Page 2 to answer this question for people who are posting:

It's a brand new discovery so I don't think anyone has made a tutorial yet. And also we won't be able to make a tutorial on GTP as it is against the rules (emulation + hacking don't sit well around here unless you "show, don't tell")

the method used to do this is against the AUP of GTPlanet to publish. At the Discord server, people might be able to help you if they find the time to.

The Discord server welcomes anyone who wants to join, but please keep in mind that the server is more on the topic for finding hidden and unused content and less on the topic of emulation, help regarding running emulators and related subjects to that, so please keep this in mind before requesting to join the server.

 

[j0nny0093]

I still can't believe that the cXXX loading method I found for GT PSP was so helpful regarding GT5 hidden stuff. This is GT HD Classic content for sure.

 

[Hdbd04]

Test Course in GT5 feels so surreal...

 

[TheAdmiester]

Just caught up with how the guys are loading alternative courses and I gotta say it's pretty promising...

 

[j0nny0093]

 

[TheAdmiester]

Complex String and Valencia work too. CS looks like Eiger scenery.

 

[j0nny0093]

 

[j0nny0093]

Seattle

 

[TheAdmiester]

Seattle lap:


Also... Apricot Hill... with AI and rain

 

[ARTAsean]

Mother of god

 

[TheAdmiester]

We've concluded that almost every track from GT4 works - Hong Kong and the Cathedral trail tracks crash the game, George V Paris doesn't start properly, and Paris has no visible roads, but pretty much everything works. Apricot Hill, Midfield, Infineon, Valencia, etc. all work with AI pathing and replay cameras.

Even Complex String and the 100R circle circuit from GT3 are in there and successfully load, for whatever reason.

Also, Pikes Peak renders slightly more in split screen. Only the track renders, but it's functional. God knows why it's in there but it is.

 

[j0nny0093]

In total there are 81 unused tracks: 40 out of 81 works

 

[TheAdmiester]

Some rainy New York pics. Ran at 4K to avoid the jaggy edges on rain spray.

 

[Overload_35]

Congratulations guys! I didn't imagine there were these tracks inside Gran Turismo 5. Great discoveries, i hope there are more! :*

 

[GuardsmanBlue]

Impressive work guys!,pretty astonished by Pikes Peak presence...but anyway,keep it up!

 

[TheAdmiester]

The majority of tracks that work also work with a 16 car grid.

 

[Amir Hussain]

Here's Seattle Circuit one of the left over tracks being played on RPCS3 via cheat engine.

Only if this was finished for the final game, let me know what you think of it

 

[elston87]

A majority of the GT4 courses are indeed present in pre-2.00 versions of the game. Version 2.00, as a guess, dummied out all of these old courses (I'll investigate this soon), so all of these courses, with whatever glitches and knacks they have, are playable on any version of the game up to Version 1.13.

A few images I took from last night; All of my images were captured on real PlayStation 3 hardware:
(IMAGE SIZE WARNING AGAIN)

Chamonix (GT4):

Swiss Alps (GT3/4):

New York (GT4):

Ice Arena (GT4):

Seoul Central (GT4):

Circuit de la Valenciana (TT/GTPSP):

...and that's all of the screenshots I can post for now. The community in the Discord server is compiling a spreadsheet of what courses are present and working, which ones are not, among other details; I will be publishing these details to The Cutting Room Floor within the next few days (it's going to take some time to compile and organize all of the data as neatly as possible), so look forward to that pretty soon!

In what is probably the biggest discovery ever for Gran Turismo 5, this has shocked and surprised us all, but I can't be too surprised. Most of these courses use existing data from Gran Turismo PSP; most parts of the course, recommended gear, driving line, textures (for some), and collision (for some as well), it's present in most of these courses. Chances are if it was in GT PSP, it's present and working here, with a few unfortunate exceptions (Hong Kong being one of those), but hey- we'll take what we found!

There's been some really surprising outliers amidst these discoveries, too, such as the License Circle from Gran Turismo 3 of all things, a very buggy and mostly textureless Smokey Mountain also from GT3, and the weirdest of all, a skeleton of Pikes Peak from Gran Turismo 2, which appears to work properly in 2P Battle mode, but the second half of the course is missing the road.

Some people have already started uploading videos of these courses running on RPCS3, a PlayStation 3 emulator, but I have tested most of these courses working on real PlayStation 3 hardware, which is awesome. That being said, I'll be working on the TCRF page soon enough, so stay tuned (once again)!

 

[queleuleu]

OK. This is simply amazing.

 

[P0T5]

Can this be done with just a standard PS3 ? is it just a menu glitch or something crazy someone found this all theses years later great work guys

 

[TheAdmiester]

Can this be done with just a standard PS3 ? is it just a menu glitch or something crazy someone found this all theses years later great work guys

Only on an emulator/debug unit right now. It’s done by replacing the reference to the track you want to select in memory, which isn’t possible on a retail console.

 

[elston87]

The page on The Cutting Room Floor is currently up! I managed to get the bulk of it done today. I feel like there's more that can be added, but the bulk work of the information has been added. As a result of this, the Courses page for GT5 on TCRF is gonna need a complete re-do due to this discovery.

 

[j0nny0093]

Impressive work guys!,pretty astonished by Pikes Peak presence...but anyway,keep it up!

Well Pikes Peak is surely a strange presence but not so much. GTPSP has pikespeak but it doesn't load on that console: I almost have no doubts that the track is in that game, especially after its presence in GT5, but we can't say for sure until we can open the VOL.

In GT5 there are tracks from almost every GT game:
- pikespeak from GT2
- smokey mountain, complex string and circle60 (working ) rome circuit and route 11 (not working) from gt3
-almost all GT4 tracks ( some are missing like las vegas drag strip and tsukuba wet )
-valencia and test course from Tourist Trophy ( you can see TT logo in the pic Elston posted at the beginning )
-Cathedral Rocks Trail III from GT PSP - funnily the forward version is untextured

Circle60 is the name of a GT3 license track ( its actual name in GT3 is L_circle60_dry1 ) : it's a circular shaped circuit.
In Gran Turismo PSP, alongside other unused tracks, there's circle60_ps2: this time however the track is Tahiti Dirt Route 3 and not the circular track.

As you can see, its name in GT PSP's memory's cXXX area is "(Temp)circle60_ps2" , meaning that the name was going to change at some point.
When they worked on GT5 and bring all this content from past GT's, they surely readed the filename and just pick that circuit from GT3. That's why we got this in GT5. Simply a misunderstanding.

^ Quick comparison however :3

 

[TonyJZX]

This is absolutely incredible nay cataclysmic news for us really. I loved GT5... Spec 2.0 was an amazing feat.

I would probably break out one of my two copies and run it on emu if even only the tracks that are 99% complete and proven to work are re-instated.

What kind of PC do you need? You know what, who cares. Let's just spend the money on a new Ryzen 3000 box and get it up and going for this.

Its worth it at any cost.

Although many of us are on the GT Sport train I feel like so many features in GT5 and 6 are just super to Sport.

 

[jontikis]

Very good stuff guys! This thread gave me the feeling of "the hidden treasure's discovery", like this one did &, specifically, this post, around 5 years ago. The efforts on trying to find many of the old track classics in the files were a difficult task since back then. The fact you managed to make some of them -sort of- playable is insane! Hats off to you 👍

 

[TheAdmiester]

The hilarious part is that we didn't even make them playable ourselves. GT5 right now is practically unmoddable. The tracks were already functional with no modification, they just aren't present in any menus whatsoever, so you can only access them by swapping the course codes in memory, meaning the game thinks it's loading High Speed Ring or Deep Forest for instance, when in reality it's loading Seattle or Valencia.

 

[Shinu]

I guess they were testing which ones to "update". Plus GT5 was probably built on top of legacy GT4 code

 

[j0nny0093]

As you can see from GT PSP Research Topic, I really love to dig into that game. Some time ago I managed to find a new way to load the circuits: changing the cXXX code: if I swap c004 ( tokyo ) with c071 (gymkhana) the game will think I'm playing tokyo , loading tokyo name and map, but instead the actual track will be gymkhana.

Few weeks ago I discovered that Gran Turismo 5 has a pretty much identical structure: at that point I thought if It was possible to load these unused tracks, since we already know they were in game. At first only 2-3 track worked (Test Course, Pikes Peak, Tsukuba), but with some optimization ( playing on lower version ) we managed to load almost all of them.

There are 81 unused tracks in total:
-30 works perfectly: race, time trial, replays, and also drifting
-10 have few small stuff like missing textures, anyway no crashes or freeze
-5 have some trouble and require you to play "carefully" to avoid crashes ( use a particular camera, disable ghost etc )
-36 crashes during loading, not playable for now

I also just made this, just for better explanation. Anyway, considering that 81 tracks are an huge amount of unused tracks, have 37% fully functional is a great results, plus the yellow one (minor issue) will not crash either, mostly texture issues, increasing the "no crash" area to almost 50% of them.

 

[j0nny0093]

Elston managed to found 3 thumbnails of.... wedding cars

 

[Overload_35]

I can already imagine the event where you need to be a driver and take the bride to church immediately. Thats Fantastic! Nice Find :*