What the English Community Knew

Why this page exists

The English sources describe World Edition (Rev A through C) and its 2005 update World Edition EX (Rev D): the export game most Western cabinets actually ran, including most of ours. It is not the game the Japanese wing documents. It has a different race structure, renamed venues, renamed races, a printed earnings gate on the G1, and a scene, an economy and an ending that happened nowhere else.

Two things make this wing's material situation the mirror image of the Japanese one. First, the official record survives almost completely: the entire US operator document set (manuals, bulletins, wiring diagrams, flyers, press releases) is preserved, hash-verified across three independent hosting lineages. The Japanese wing had almost no first-party paper. Second, the community record survives far worse: the central forum is recoverable only through roughly 6,800 Wayback thread captures, the biggest club site lost 43 of its 44 pages, and the deepest strategy sites survive as scattered snapshots. What follows is what could be saved.

How to read this

A lot of what these players concluded is right. Some of it is wrong. Some of it was one person's guess, quoted onward until it sounded like fact. And unlike the Japanese wing, this record includes Sega's own printed statements, which get their own tag. Every substantive claim carries a status:

Three rules that go with those tags

• Repetition is not confirmation. The single most important structural fact about the English corpus is that most of it is one textual lineage. The Shety Stables pages, the World of HEEHEE blog, the dude8901 mirror, the RUN Stables strategy pages, the IS Guise roster and the three DOC Racing Handbooks share sentences, tables and even typos (the shared misspelling "formitable"). The Handbook's own introduction says so plainly: "I have taken things from the forum... nothing in here is from my own mouth." When five of these sources agree, that is one source, not five.
• The English corpus is partly translated Asian knowledge. OOP, the doc.rbcb.net FAQ author, credits the internals model to "the info the Hong Kong Boys gave us after two years of figuring it out". The Great Escape whip charts are credited "Thanks to expertdoc in Hong Kong". And the Advanced Handbook's "Tokyo whipping charts" survive as the original Office files, whose metadata names a Japanese author, Ken Sakagami. When the English and Japanese records agree, check the credit chain before calling it independent corroboration: it is often the same knowledge, twice.
• Where the English community and our ROM work agree, that is still strong evidence, because our decode was done a quarter century later without reference to either community. Two such agreements exist, and they are the flagships of this page: the leg-type rule and the floor-average breeding formula.

The sources, and their people

This is the one place this wing outruns the Japanese one. The Japanese wing works from the writings of people it will likely never find. Here, the people are named where the record names them, or where the project owner has identified them firsthand, and several of them are in the community today.

Genuinely independent voices on the same facts, usable for corroboration: the FunTrivia quiz, the freewebs Nashville page, Ayelis's guide, Richie Perez's richei_basics, the official Sega documents, and the 2022-2025 English ROM readings on Arcade-Projects. Raw captures, with source URL, archive snapshot ID and retrieval date, are held in the preservation archive.

The knowledge lineage, drawn once

The playdata sweep proved the family tree, and it should be kept in mind on every claim below. Most of the English corpus is one river with two springs: the Asian scene, and Sega's own localised paper.

Japanese scene (1999-2001)          Sega official (1999-2009)
        |                                    |
   Hong Kong: expertdoc, Mr.P,          hitmaker WE FAQ, brochures,
   "Ken Sakagami" Tokyo charts          manuals, bulletins
        |                                    |
   doc.rbcb.net (2003-05): Oop's Corner, Resource Section
        |
   ONE textual corpus: Shety = HEEHEE = Handbooks = RUN Stables
   = IS Guise = dude8901 (shared sentences, shared typos)
        |
   the long tail: freewebs Nashville, ATXStables, DOC Ex Racing

The physical proof of the Japanese bridge is lovely: the Advanced Handbook's "Tokyo whipping charts" survive as the original Office files, and their metadata names a Japanese author, "Ken Sakagami" (machine name "Thunder", code page 932, one Japanese race label still intact), with the handbook's own honest caveat, "created for DOC2000". The US expert corpus was partly translated Japanese material, and the handbook said so.

The export game's structure

This is the section the Japanese archive cannot supply, because it describes a different game.

Sixteen rounds, six races each, G1 last

Community claim  The World Edition season is a 16-round rotation. Each round is six races: 1R (a Handicap), 2R, 3R ("Special", higher purse), 4R, 5R, and the round's G1 as race 6. Multiply attested within the main lineage, independently by FunTrivia, and consistent with Sega's own printed race schedule, which runs six races per program with race 6 as the feature. The Japanese versions run the G1 as race 8; no recovered English source even mentions the Japanese 8R structure.

The venues: six names

Community claim Disputed on the count  The English game's venues, with the community's abbreviations: Eastern City (E.C.), Western Hill (W.H.), Northern Park (N.P.), Central City (C.C.), Southern Park (S.P.), and a sixth venue literally named Sega (SEGA), which hosts the Super Dirt Grand Prix and the season-closing Derby Owners Cup. The official US race schedule names five; the community consistently used six. Whether "Sega" is a sixth venue in the ROM's venue table or a special label on two races is an open ROM check. One nice piece of localisation lore (community claim, via FunTrivia): the Japan Cups run at Eastern City because Eastern City is Tokyo, the "Eastern Capital", renamed.

The $1,000,000 G-1 gate, in Sega's own print

Official  The centerpiece of the official record. The Sega Enterprises, Inc. (USA) World Edition sales brochure (12 pages, NTRA co-branded, c. 2002), page 7, states verbatim:

The community record matches the official one exactly. The Beginner's and Mini Handbooks (2004): "Before you can enter one of the Grade 1 (G1 or 6R) Races you must have at least $1,000,000 of total earnings for your horse." FunTrivia, independently: the horse becomes "Grade 1 Eligible" at $1,000,000. The gate is official and independently preserved by the community; it is not yet confirmed, because we have not located the check in the ROM. That is now a well-motivated, single-afternoon RE target.

Community claim  A separate, also earnings-driven rule: every round's 1R is a Handicap race, and the weight is set by total earnings only, "not related to your wins or the number of races" (Shety Q&A). The developer's own English FAQ says the same and adds a number in yen ("every 100 million yen = five to six horse lengths at 1600m"): the FAQ was localised without converting the economy, so the dollar-game conversion is unknown.

The sixteen G1s, as the community recorded them

Community claim  One lineage (RUN Stables, the Mini Handbook, Shety's grid, Oop's Corner), directly checkable against our WE ROM schedule table.

The naming is itself a localisation finding: invented American names (American Derby, American Oaks, the DOC Guineas) sit beside retained Japanese ones (Japan Cup, Mile Championship, Queen Elizabeth II Cup). Sega Retro states the mapping explicitly: the Yushun Himba and Tokyo Yushun became the American Oaks and American Derby.

Confirmed  The "Hong Kong/American" double-naming that FunTrivia and richei_basics recorded is not a dispute or a dual label, it is a region setting. A World Edition machine put into Hong Kong 6R mode substitutes two of its races for regional variants: the Hong Kong Derby (race option 17) in place of the American Derby (round 7), and the Hong Kong Oaks (race option 18) in place of the American Oaks (round 6). Same slots, same distances and rules, different name, not new races. That is exactly why the period sources saw both names for the same two events.

One engine-shaped claim, repeated across the lineage and worth a rig test: "For some reason, horses run a lot faster in G1's than they do in any other race."

Retirement and the arc of a career

Official  The WE brochure: "After your twentieth race, you'll be asked if you want to retire your horse... Eventually your horse will no longer be competitive (this usually occurs between 30-45 races, depending on just how good your horse is)." The UK official site adds: retiring to breed is irreversible.

Community claim  Retire at 20 races if breeding is the goal; mares "start slowing down around 28 races", males around 30. Roughly consistent with our own race-driven growth plateau finding (~25 to 30 races), though we frame it as a growth plateau, not a slowdown; the two are not the same claim and should not be merged. The wind-down is signalled by the in-game question "Do you bet the Farm?" around race 35 (Shety).

What they knew about the machine

The leg-type rule: the first flagship agreement

Confirmed  The English community had it exactly right from at least 2003. OOP, on doc.rbcb.net:

That is precisely the rule our SH-4 decode recovered: running style is Start's rank among the five non-Corner externals. The corpus also carried the fifth case, Almighty when all are equal, and FunTrivia adds the tie-break ("If the start stat is tied with another stat, Start gets the higher priority"), which matches the Start-wins-ties behaviour in our decode and in the Japanese sources. And there is an official capstone the Japanese wing never had, the developer's own English FAQ, in Sega's voice:

The floor-average breeding formula: the second flagship

Confirmed  The English community had it right, with a worked example, by 2003-2004. Oop's Corner, "Retirement Stats":

This is the same operation the Japanese community published in June 2000 and the same operation our SH-4 decode found at the foal-build routine: an exact floor average, per stat. But do not count the English statement as a third independent derivation: the English corpus is downstream of the Hong Kong material, which is plausibly downstream of the Japanese scene. Two independent derivations (JP observation, our disassembly) plus one probably inherited restatement (EN) is the honest accounting.

What the English record adds is a myth-kill, from Haynekine, against the belief that racing performance raises breeding stats: "You will never turn a single circle horse into a double circle... That one is still going around here in Hawai'i."

The symbol legend

Community claim  Two independent lines, internally consistent. The English scene read breeding strength off the four marks, and the numeric sire/dam tables print symbol and number side by side, which resolves the mapping exactly:

This is the same hidden 1-to-16 scale the Japanese 16-Step Theory described, with the same off-by-one caution our JP wing documents: treat the 1-to-16 convention as the community's display-side model of a 0-to-63 byte drawn in 16 blocks.

Best Right: the community's internals oracle

Community claim  The cleverest piece of English play-science recovered. Best Right is a CPU benchmark horse that reliably appears in specific 4R races and "pulls all double circles when no players are present". The community, unable to see internals, built a measurement instrument out of him: take a fresh foal from a maxed line, give it exactly two solo trainings with "Cool" results and plain foods, and enter its second race in a 4R where Best Right appears. If your debutant steals Best Right's first- or third-column double circles (Stamina or Sharp), it is a "Jackpot" horse; one stolen circle is a "Mini-Jackpot". The second (Speed) circle "is too strong to steal."

This is the English scene's equivalent of the Japanese "the odds leak the hidden stats" discovery: both communities learned to read the game's own evaluation of hidden state off a public display.

Disputed  Best Right's actual numbers: folklore put his internals around 52/60/54; a 2022 Arcade-Projects ROM reading gives 31/53/51. The same modern thread adds a claim new to us and testable: player horses capped at 60 per internal, rewritten back to 60 after each race in non-G1 mode, while CPU horses exceed 60.

The roster warning

Disputed  The single most important caution on the community's numeric sire/dam rosters: they do not match the ROM. Arcade-Projects (2022) reads Maple Syrup's externals from the Rev C ROM as 15/3/6/10/4/12, where the Shety/IS Guise table gives 15/4/8/9/5/13. Same shape, different numbers: the 2004 roster was almost certainly observational, read off gauges and breeding results. We publish the community tables only as the community's working model, diffed against our byte-exact WE tables, never as ground truth.

What the English community never found

The gaps matter as much as the hits. Nothing recovered in the entire English corpus mentions:

• the ~1-in-32 jackpot/dud bands on foal internals (our confirmed ±12/±5 roll),
• the 45 internal birth cap and the over-45 soft clamp,
• the internals-sum-160 growth wall on Rev D,
• the hearts thresholds gating internal growth (24/36/42), or hearts as anything more than a relationship meter,
• the training damper driven by the externals total,
• that running style is recomputed before every race rather than stored (they knew the rule; no source states the derivation is re-run).

Where the Japanese community was a mechanics-research culture, the English community was a technique and logistics culture: whip charts, schedules, records, tournaments, trading. The deepest western play knowledge that provably existed, the lost binders of "whip charts, feeding values, training payoffs" (BGSO, reddit, 2015), was never published anywhere we could recover.

Exact English wording, recovered from the game

One of this wing's deliberate assignments: recover the export game's on-screen English, for lining up against the Japanese tables and our ROM strings. Everything below is transcription by period players (community claim as to exactness) unless tagged official. The [sic] marks are preserved deliberately, because the export localisation's errors are themselves findings.

The birth comments, and "bright feature"

The best birth comment is "Your horse has a bright feature": the in-game misspelling of "bright future", attested first-hand on doc.rbcb.net, where a player who typed "future" was corrected twice:

A partial ladder, roughly worst to best as the community ordered it (order disputed in-thread): "meet your expectation", "your horse really meet your expectation", "your horse has real thoroughbred body", "potential is excellent", "Your horse is a gifted horse", "bright feature"; worst of all is no comment. Compare the Japanese nine-tier ladder on the Japanese wing: same design, different (and rougher) localisation. Character announcements at birth: Imposing = "Your Horse has a Reagal Presence" [sic], Rough = "Your Horse is a naughty Horse". The Honest, Coward and Sloppy birth strings were not recovered.

The five characters and their farm tells

Community claim  Five characters, identified by the farm animation (press and hold in the corral): Imposing (rears up on hind legs), Rough (gives a mule kick), Honest (shakes its head and body), Coward (startled, shimmies), Sloppy (lays down, falls asleep). "Shy" is a FunTrivia decoy, not a sixth character. These are the export names of the Japanese five.

The care menu

The English care vocabulary, as the menus printed it: Blandish, Praise, Encourage, Flatter, Apologize, Comfort, Hug, Ignore, Leave, Soothe, Psyche Up, Astonish, Scold. Two full response guides survive: Matt Barlow's "Keep Your Hearts" (RUN Stables) and Ayelis's Relationship Guide v0.6 (GameFAQs, 2007). Sample per-character rules, from OOP, who flags his own table as "not Complete, or 100 percent Accurate": every character, "Blandish after 1st G-1 win"; Honest "may be the only horse you can hug", "Do NOT hug after wins"; Imposing "DO NOT flatter when 'confident'", "Scold when 'satisfied'".

Post-race strings, as the Mini Handbook printed them

Status and UI strings

"Grade 1 Eligible" (the $1M gate's on-screen face). "Do you bet the Farm?" (the retirement wind-down question, ~race 35). Training's top grade prints "Great!!"; the community ladder is Great / Cool / Good. The race HUD strings "HORSE CONDITION" and "WHIP EFFECT (LOW)" anchor the whip-chart vocabulary: a "Rocket Start" is whipping from the gate to the letter "H" in HORSE CONDITION, a "Super Start" to the "C", and the "W hit" is a whip timed to the bar falling back to the "w" in "low". Co-op training's target is a "Dead Heat".

The WE vs EX fork, and the glitch-horse era

The export game forked once, in 2005, and the English community documented the fork from the inside because it happened to them.

The official changelog

Official  The segaamusements.com "Derby Owners Club Ex" product page, in Sega's own words: a new race call by Richard Grunder (the Tampa Bay Downs / Canterbury Park announcer), 30 new sires and 30 new dams, tournament software with 3 competition modes, on-screen display of your 6 prior race results, and a new "classic Trumpeter Call to Post" attract audio.

The fork as the players experienced it

Confirmed  EX renamed sires and dams "to make it more difficult to identify the strong breeding pairs." We matched every horse between the decoded Rev C (WE) and Rev D (EX) rosters on its exact stat vector: 36 were renamed (33 unambiguous, 3 where a mare's stats match two EX names), 30 are EX-only additions, and 24 WE horses were dropped. A few examples:

EX also handicapped over-developed young horses (the window is internally disputed: "the first three races or so" versus "before 10 races"), and the jackpot definition changed: WE = steal a symbol from Best Right; EX = any symbols drawn in the first race. Version identification, as taught to players: "If you see EX on the screen [at the pre-race logo], you are running EX software."

Double-circle horses: the export's glitch aristocracy

Community claim Disputed in mechanism  All-double-circle horses, breeding grade maxed in every column, "came into existence in Hong Kong": players took DOC 2000 v.2 horses with all-X stats and ran them on World Edition machines, where the stats "went down" past the bottom and wrapped around into all double circles, "based on binary math" (OOP). The cards were then duplicated and sold worldwide on eBay "until present at nearly every location". The claimed properties: DC horses mature much faster, stop responding to training by 5 to 10 races, are indistinguishable from a normal horse by about 20, and cannot be bred onward usefully. OOP's arithmetic on why breeding a DC toward Thunder Boy converges below a native line lands on the corpus's bluntest sentence: "It's a waste of time. And money. Live with it."

And the freewebs Nashville page closes the arc: EX was "the patch released by Sega to stop the Glitch horses that were sold on Ebay", with DC horses handicapped at birth on EX. The underflow mechanism is directly testable against our card byte format. Nothing in the Japanese record describes this, because it is a cross-version phenomenon that required JP cards migrating onto export machines: a Hong Kong artefact, faithfully preserved only in English.

The scene: tournaments, whip charts, the card economy, the end

The whip charts: the English scene's native art form

If the Japanese scene's monument is the 16-Step Theory, the English scene's is the whip chart: a per-distance, per-leg-type schedule of exactly when to whip and when to hold. "The Great Escape", the front-runner meta chart for every distance from 1200 to 3200m, is credited "Thanks to expertdoc in Hong Kong"; Start Dash, Last Spurt and Stretch Runner charts survive per venue. The chart that mattered most, "Wing's Menu", was deliberately withheld ("Yes, I have Wing's Menu.. and No, I'm not going to post it") and is not recovered.

The production template the printed charts were built from was itself recovered: a 2003 spreadsheet whose metadata names the author "gerschsf" and dates it 2003-02-23, two years before the Super Juicer, the earliest dated US-scene analysis tool the archive holds.

Read all of it against our race decode before believing any of it: our confirmed whip findings (one grade-blind whip input, a 16-tick refractory lockout, placement worth nothing at matched whip count) mean the charts cannot work for the reasons the community thought. But the charts prescribe spaced whips at counted intervals, which is exactly what a refractory lockout rewards: the technique may have been right while the theory was wrong. And the sentence every arcade rat needed to hear, from OOP: "If you are losing close races, it is not your horse that is the problem... it is your jockey skills."

The tournament circuit, on two continents

• Official  The Sega May Derby, May 2004: the UK national tournament, run by Sega itself. Sega Amusements Europe coordinated a national DOC tournament across nine UK sites with a £4,500 total purse, a £1,000 best-horse prize, text-message registration, and a national standings page. Sega's copy floated a possible "Trans-Atlantic battle". Nothing like it exists in the Japanese record: the only known case of Sega running a national DOC tournament in the West.
• Community claim  The 2004 DOC National Championship, Chicago, April 24-25, 2004: $110 entry including an awards banquet at D&B Gold Coast, organised around DHR Tony's Chicago scene; 2005 Nationals in Philadelphia; RUN Stables' "Chi's Cup Tournament" and an Atlanta event on 2004-04-10 (photo page captured, 17 players named).
• The tournament horse was a doctrine of its own: because G1 (tournament) mode never writes back to the card, players built "convertible" horses, tuned for the 16-G1 loop but undamaged by it. The mode itself is a test-menu setting the players learned anyway: Game Assignments, "USA G1", set back to "USA 6R" afterwards.
• Eight-seat cabinets in crowded venues produced written social law: "Thou shall not race any horse over 15 races in 2R, 4R and 5R... not over 20 races in 3R". The Japanese scene raced the dead hours instead; the US scene wrote etiquette codes.

The card-editing arc

The English record documents a complete arc of cheating and countermeasure that this arcade's own anti-cheat work descends from directly.

• Official  June 18, 2004, Digital Bulletin 1: Sega warned operators that players had bought Sega 5575 master keys on eBay, opened the card-reader and service doors, and cheated two ways: swapping their "A" horse card out after losses so only wins were written back, and granting themselves service credits. Sega's fix was to replace the locks. This is the 2004 ancestor of exactly the stale-save and card-swap abuse our own hardening blocks today.
• 2005: the Super Juicer is born. Lance Woodrum's editing workbook carries metadata created 2005-02-17. The editing tradition the modern community knows is two decades old and starts here.
• 2007: a commercial editor ships. "DOC Card Modifier", a VB6 application with Write Card and Scan Card functions and a paid registration form (it shipped under the maker handle "Solinox"), attributed by JJ Kam, who resold it, to Chris of Steel City Stables. Long known only from a corrupted copy, the intact program was recovered in 2026 from a club member's files. It is a separate hand from the Super Juicer's: the US card-editing tradition this arcade's anti-cheat work descends from was built by more than one person.
• The Shety shop: "Horse Juicing", $5 a horse ($80 for 20), editing any field, plus pre-built maxed starter pairs at $25 to $155. Run by JJ Kam, the same man whose Q&A pages taught half the scene its mechanics. The editing scene and the knowledge scene were the same people.
• The market around it: foals at $5 to $20 on eBay, peak-era horses "as high as $50 a pop", the first Thunder Boy x Ferranti's Folly pair at over $100, pre-loaded "Racer Pack" bundles sold into the mid-2010s. The period tell for a manufactured card, on both continents, was the same: a record and earnings profile that does not add up. Our anti-cheat work uses the identical tell.

The business the players never saw

Official  The WE brochure: three US test games averaged over $850 per day; average price per play $1.75; and the number Sega led with, "93% of DOC players are starting their game with an existing DOC card... a figure that is quite simply, off the charts." The NTRA licensed DOC WE as its official interactive video game in 2002. Minnesota's gaming-law enforcement treated DOC WE as a gambling device in 2003; Sega lobbied and won an amendment to the Minnesota Gaming Act legalising it statewide. Official Sega service for the NAOMI DOC machines ended March 31, 2017.

Community claim  The player's side of the same economics: "at $2 per race, it'll take about $2000 to build a 20 gen line"; an Austin operator on serious players spending "5 thousand or more dollars over a year".

The end of the venues

The English record uniquely documents the game's death, venue by venue. Removals begin 2004-2005 ("Goodbye Vegas DOC"). Dave & Buster's corporate's stated reasons, from employees: lack of play, floor space, and parts shortages, above all cards: "due to cards no longer made... If someone sits down and tries to play it, no card, it just hangs." How the machines died, first-hand, from a D&B Jacksonville employee in 2016:

The last public US machine left a Dave & Buster's in 2021. In June 2025, "Derby Owners Club is becoming un-extinct": Bragging Rights Amusements, Gainesville FL, put one back on a public floor. The UK today has exactly one running machine, varjak0's year-long restoration, "one of 3 in Europe".

First-person accounts worth keeping

• "There were people that carried FULL PHOTO ALBUMS full of cards (horses)!! That is a SERIOUS addiction!" (Scotty, a former truck driver, on the TA truck-stop machines.)
• "players roll up with three-ring binders full of horse cards, kinda like MtG players" (reddit); "My friends and I spent thousands of dollars in a bar in New Orleans... Had binders full of horses."
• "It's not uncommon to see a player sit down at DOC at 1:00 pm and stay on the game until after 12:00 midnight" (a Jillian's Baltimore manager, in Sega's own brochure).
• And the modern coda: "It's honestly the reason I quit smoking. To hopefully stay alive long enough to see playing DOC in my home become a reality." (massyglass, r/MAME, 2017.)

What came back, what is still missing, and the living-source advantage

Plenty is still gone, and "not recovered" is a result, so we say these out loud:

• The strategy, whip-chart and bloodline pages of derbyownersclubex.com that the recovery did not reach, and most of the club's 12 Flip Video race recordings (8 never archived; video IDs known).
• Wing's Menu, the scene's most-referenced whip chart, deliberately never posted.
• The verbatim birth-comment and retirement-comment ladders in English. Partial birth strings only; zero retirement strings. Best recovery route is the ROM string table, then back-fill the archive.
• Old Man's four 2012 Google Docs; Digital Bulletin 3 ("Card Reader Maintenance"); the POS sheet; the UK brochures; the EX sell sheet; ATXStables' guides and 2011 whip charts.
• BGSO's binder and every other private play-data corpus like it; the Facebook and Discord era (login-walled); the entire RePlay / Play Meter / Vending Times trade-press run for the DOC era.
• The horse database that once lived at michaelpule.com/doc/database/horses.php: ask Michael Pule, who is reachable today.

A closing note

If you take three things from this page: the export game is its own game, and numbers from the Japanese wing do not transfer without checking which game they describe. Trust the two flagships (leg type, floor-average breeding) and audit everything else, the rosters above all. And read the English record for what it uniquely holds: the official paper, the whip charts, the tournaments, the etiquette, the card economy and its countermeasures, and the end of the venues.

The Japanese scene, given the game first, built instruments and theories. The English scene, given the game second and the answers secondhand, built institutions: handbooks with credit pages, national record tables, tournament rulebooks, etiquette codes, and a forum that linked every stable site on the continent. Both scenes ended the same way, holding cards for machines that were being thrown out the back of a Dave & Buster's. The cards outlived the venues. That is why this archive exists.