Derby Owners Club
Hong Kong Archive
Derby Owners Club crossed two things in Hong Kong at once: an ocean, and a language. The game arrived as Japanese DOC 2000; it left Hong Kong as something the English-speaking world could read. The other two wings of this archive are what a community knew, data records of a scene. This wing is different. It is a transmission story: where the knowledge crossed, who carried it, and what Hong Kong genuinely added versus what it faithfully relayed. Recovered from dead fan sites, the first English board, and Sega's own paper, and checked against a byte-level decode of the ROM.
Sister pages: what the Japanese community knew (the game and the instruments) and what the English community knew (the institutions). This wing is the span between them.
The Japanese wing and the English wing each document a scene that mostly worked its game out at home. This wing documents the seam between them, and the seam turned out to be load-bearing. When you read the English corpus and the Japanese corpus and they agree on the internals model, it is tempting to call that independent corroboration, two scenes reaching the same truth. It is not. The agreement runs through Hong Kong, and through Hong Kong it runs back to a single upstream document. Getting that right is the whole reason to draw this wing separately.
Japan gave the game and built the instruments (the 16-Step Theory, the breeding math, the odds-leak read of hidden stats). Hong Kong carried it across, ran the first English-language board, and added the whip-chart art. The West institutionalised it (handbooks with credit pages, national record tables, tournament rulebooks). This page is the middle panel.
A word on scale and honesty up front: this is the newest wing of the archive, and the thinnest. The Hong Kong scene left far less standing paper than either neighbour, its central board survives only in fragments, and its one live Chinese-language community thread is walled off from every capture tool we have. What follows is a careful reading of the two Hong Kong sites that did survive, the official Sega document they both cite, and the trail of credit the Western scene left pointing back at them. It is a real story, honestly incomplete, and still growing.
None of the period findings here are ours. They belong to the Hong Kong players named below, credited by their public handles and public roles, which is all the record gives and all we would publish anyway. Our contribution is narrow: recovery, provenance, and saying clearly which claims trace to Sega's own text, which trace to Hong Kong's own testing, and which our ROM work has since touched.
The chain is now traceable end to end, and it has a spine worth stating before any single claim: most of what the English scene calls "the Hong Kong internals model" did not originate in Hong Kong. It originated inside Sega, in an official English FAQ Sega itself published for the export game. Hong Kong's two flagship sites cite that FAQ on every page. They were the conduit, and an honest one.
Sega / Hitmaker, Japan (1999-2001)
hitmaker.co.jp/game/doc2/ and /game/doc2000/
the official DOC 2000 strategy corpus (~250 pages, Shift-JIS):
breeding, race, training, food, bloodlines and nicks
|
v
Sega official export FAQ (English, 2002)
hitmaker.co.jp/game/DOCWE/ ("Sorry Japanese Only" shell,
but its faq.html carries the Speed / Stamina / Sharp type
descriptions and the "type = highest internal" rule, in English)
|
v
Hong Kong relay (English, 2002-2004)
expertdoc.topcities.com + Small Wing's Farm
run by HK players of DOC 2000 v.2 (Japanese) AND World Edition.
They paraphrase the FAQ into "the internals model," add
first-hand DOC 2000 testing, host the FIRST English board.
|
v
US / Western scene (English, 2003 on)
doc.rbcb.net, the Handbooks, Shety, IS Guise.
Credit HK by name, then ADD their own: OOP's Best Right
jackpot method, the numeric rosters, the 2022+ ROM decode.
Provenance English-and-Japanese agreement on the internals-type wording is one source, not two. Both derive from Sega's own English FAQ, which Hong Kong relayed. Only the parts the Western scene added independently (the Best Right method, the numeric sire and dam rosters, the modern ROM readings) are genuinely downstream-independent. When you see the same internals language in a Japanese page and an English page, check the credit chain before you count it twice: it is often the same knowledge, relayed, not two scenes confirming each other.
This does not diminish Hong Kong. It sharpens what Hong Kong actually did. Their role was relay and translation, not discovery, and that is to their credit, not against it: they told you where the knowledge came from. Their sites literally print, on every page, "Some information are quoted from DOCWE official web site http://www.hitmaker.co.jp/game/DOCWE". An honest conduit is a rarer thing in fan history than an original genius, and Hong Kong was the honest conduit.
Two cases show the relay working in opposite directions. In the first, Hong Kong paraphrased Sega almost verbatim, and got it right because Sega was right. In the second, Hong Kong simplified Sega, threw out a hedge Sega had printed, and got it right anyway, because the simplification is what the export ROM actually does.
This is the intellectual centre of the page. Read the two quotes together. The left is Hong Kong's flagship site; the right is the Sega FAQ it was paraphrasing. They are the same text.
"3 main factors affecting the horse potential. Speed (SP): The maximum speed a horse can reach. Stamina (ST): It determine the proper race distance for the horse. Whip effect will be low for high ST horse, but it can race in long distance race. Sharp Runner (SR): Whip effect will be great for high SR horse, especially in the final dash."
"There are three horse types in DOC. SPEED RUNNER TYPE: The horse can run relatively fast. STAMINA TYPE: The lowest whip effect in three types. However it doesn't use its stamina much so it's good at long distance races. SHARP RUNNER TYPE: The highest whip effect... The highest point in the horse ability such as Speed, Stamina and Sharp is set as a horse type."
Official The internal set is Speed / Stamina / Sharp; a horse's "Type" is the highest of the three; the whip-effect ordering (Stamina lowest, Sharp highest) and the stamina-usage ordering are Sega's own wording. Even the abbreviation the whole scene uses, "SR" for Sharp, comes straight from Sega's label "SHARP RUNNER TYPE". The internals model the Western scene credits to "the Hong Kong Boys," and that Hong Kong in turn relayed, is a near-verbatim paraphrase of an official Sega document. Hong Kong's contribution here was to find it, read it, and carry it into English. That is exactly what a bridge is for. (Of these, only the three internal names Speed / Stamina / Sharp are separately Confirmed in the ROM string table by our own decode; the rest is Sega's printed claim.)
Hong Kong's flagship stated the foal formula as flatly as possible. expertdoc's breeding.htm: "The calculation for the foal ability (both internal and external) is simple -- RoundDown((S+D)/2)," with a worked example (sire total 57, dam 56, foal 55). Small Wing's Farm reached the same clean floor-average from first-hand testing.
But Sega's own official Japanese breeding page had explicitly said the foal is not an average:
これは、２頭の能力を平均するわけではなく、２頭のうち、遺伝力の強い馬の血を引く可能性が高い
"This does not simply average the two horses' abilities; the foal is more likely to inherit the blood of the parent with the stronger heredity." Sega then layers on bloodlines and compatibility "nicks".Confirmed (matches our RE) Hong Kong threw out Sega's hedge and asserted a clean floor average. Our own byte-level decode of the export ROM is a deterministic floor average, per stat. So the Hong Kong simplification is the one that matches World Edition, and Sega's vaguer "not an average" wording is the outlier: it describes the fuzzier DOC 2000 presentation, or is deliberately soft marketing. This is the striking result: on breeding, the relay was more accurate than the source it relayed. (Two things our decode adds appear in no Hong Kong source: the roughly one-in-thirty-two jackpot and dud bands on foal internals, and the birth caps. Hong Kong had the clean rule, not the rare exceptions to it.)
"The Hong Kong Boys" is not our phrase. It is what the American FAQ author OOP called the upstream players: "The order is taken from the info the Hong Kong Boys gave us after two years of figuring it out." They are credited below by their public handles and public roles only. No private contact detail is published here, and one name is flagged as an attribution we could not confirm.
| Who | Public role | What they carried, or made |
|---|---|---|
| expertdoc | The Hong Kong collective behind the flagship site expertdoc.topcities.com and the VoyForums board 109792; a group of "experienced players of both DOC 2000 v.2 and DOC World Edition" | The single most-credited contributor in the entire scene. Ran the internals, breeding, racing, whip, record and location pages; posted daily "Updated!" changes 2002-2004. DHR Tony, on the board: "the one person who has done MORE for the DOC community than ALL OF US COMBINED." |
| Wing / "Small Wing" | The DOC 2000 breeding master; his site doc2000.topcities.com/docwe/ is "Small Wing's Farm" | Author of the eBay-sold "Wing's Menu" (the Great Escape front-runner chart plus last-spurt and whip-point tables). Ran his own first-hand breeding tests. His ruling was treated as canon: "After 20th generations there is NO difference. Just basis on you LUCKY to born the GOOD horse." |
| Mr.P / "Mr. Puckman" | The second revered Hong Kong expert, near-always paired with Wing on the boards ("Wing or Mr P: Please HELP") | Contributed the time-conversion tables and the "Pescape", a dirt-course variant of the Great Escape front-runner technique. His real identity survives only inside the forum corpus. |
| April Stable | Hong Kong player, active on the board late 2002 | Posted the first Hong Kong track records (2002-11-18), the seed set that populates expertdoc's Hong Kong records column. Also the source of a plain, useful caveat quoted in the record section below. |
| William | Hong Kong player on the board | A voice of the scene ("cool down... I play DOC nearly 2 years," 2002-11-20); representative of the everyday Hong Kong players behind the named few. |
| Tim Howard Community claim | A genuine board handle (posts dated 2003-08-21, recovered in the long-tail sweep), and a menu/whip-chart author alongside Wing | His posting handle is now verified from primary capture (earlier flagged unconfirmable); his Great Escape variant reached the US via the forums. That he was a real contributor is settled; who he was, real name and location, is not. |
"Small Wing's Farm" was long assumed to be a lost separate domain. It is not: it is Wing's own doc2000.topcities.com/docwe/, captured years ago but never identified as his until this sweep. That single correction is why Wing's first-hand breeding tests can now be read as Hong Kong evidence rather than orphaned pages.
The relay finding could be read as deflating. It is the opposite. Once you subtract what Hong Kong relayed from Sega, what remains is a real body of original Hong Kong work, and it is substantial. These are the things Hong Kong made, not carried.
Community claim This is Hong Kong's native art form, and the Western scene credited it inline, by name. The canonical front-runner meta chart, "The Great Escape," carries the credit line "Thanks to expertdoc in Hong Kong" on the American sites. Wing's Menu was the single most-referenced purchasable chart in the scene, traded and argued over ("wing's vs expertdoc menu," "where to get Wing's menu"). expertdoc's own lastspurt.htm gives a full 12-distance whipping-point and final-dash-point table, young horse versus elder horse. Read the charts against our own race decode before believing the mechanics they assume: our confirmed whip findings mean the charts cannot work for exactly the reason the scene thought. But the charts prescribe spaced whips at counted intervals, which is what a refractory lockout actually rewards, so the technique may have been right while the theory was wrong. Either way, the craft of writing them down, per distance, per leg type, is a Hong Kong invention.
Community claim expertdoc's VoyForums board 109792, opened in 2002, is the first English-language Derby Owners Club board on record. Before doc.rbcb.net (founded August 2003) became the American hub, this Hong Kong board was where the English scene actually talked. The American forum did not just inherit Hong Kong's knowledge; it inherited Hong Kong's venue for having the conversation.
Community claim The first English-language national records were Hong Kong's (see the record section). And the origin story of the export game's most famous artefact is a Hong Kong story: the all-double-circle "glitch aristocracy" horses "came into existence in Hong Kong." Hong Kong players took DOC 2000 v.2 horses with all-X stats and ran them on World Edition machines, where the stats wrapped past the bottom into all double circles, then spread worldwide by eBay. Wing's own myhorses.htm is first-hand Hong Kong evidence adjacent to this: he bred all-16 and 13/16 double-circle pairs and concluded "the point (+) or (-) for different ability comes out by random," and that below a certain parent grade "the ability bar for the new borne foal cannot reach the middle line." The wraparound mechanism is directly testable against our card byte format, and is on the RE list.
"that @@@@@@ is from Hong Kong and bred from Japanese version cards."
A first-hand board post naming the all-double-circle horse as a Hong Kong, Japanese-card creation, upgrading the origin story from repeated lore to primary testimony.The long-tail sweep clarified why Hong Kong was a translator and not only a player: the HK experts' home cabinet was DOC 2000 (the Japanese edition), not World Edition. Wing, on the board: "We do not have any DOCWE in HK... but we do have a lot DOC2000." They mastered the Japanese game, read Sega's English export FAQ, and relayed World Edition knowledge to the West by card and board exchange, without playing much World Edition themselves. That is the bridge in one sentence: a scene fluent in one edition, documenting another, for a third audience. (The only DOC 2000 machine known in North America, per the same threads, was in Toronto.)
Community claim expertdoc's special.htm is the origin of the colour-horse odds table the Western scene later repeated: eight colours (White, Silver, Tiger, Zebra, Cow, two Pandas, African Deer) with breeding odds running from CPU x CPU 1/256 up through Self x CPU 1/64, Self x Self 1/16, CPU x Special 1/8, Self x Special 1/4, to Special x Special 1/2, with the rule that if either parent is special the foal is special or grey. This is precisely checkable against the ROM, and is a Hong Kong origination, not a relay.
Community claim (US origin) The Best Right jackpot method, the American scene's clever trick for reading a foal's hidden internals off a benchmark CPU horse, is absent from every Hong Kong source. expertdoc's cards.htm is an empty stub; neither expertdoc nor Small Wing's Farm mentions Best Right or symbol-stealing at all. It is documented elsewhere as OOP's work on the US side, built on top of the Hong Kong internals framing. We do not credit it to Hong Kong. Getting the direction of that arrow right is the same discipline that makes the internals finding honest: relay where it was relay, invention where it was invention.
Beyond the ideas, Hong Kong left a small but real body of primary data: where the game ran, at what price, and which horses held the records. This is the material texture of the scene the rest of the page is about.
Community claim expertdoc's location.htm names the two Hong Kong venues that ran World Edition, and their prices are the quiet surprise of the whole sweep: Hong Kong players paid a fraction of what Americans did per race.
| Venue | District | Price | Approx US$/race |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silvercord 新港中心 | Tsim Sha Tsui 尖沙咀 | HKD 10 / 3 credits | ~$0.43 |
| GoldStar | Tsuen Wan 荃灣 | HKD 10 / 5 credits | ~$0.26 |
For comparison, the US venues in the same records ran roughly $2.31 to $3.50 a race. A Hong Kong player could breed and campaign a horse for a fraction of the American cost, which is one plausible material reason the deepest early testing (Wing's generation runs, the whip-point tables) came out of Hong Kong: the game was simply cheaper to study there.
Community claim expertdoc's record.htm (last updated 2003-03-24, seeded by April Stable's 2002-11-18 posts) carries a full Hong Kong column across all six venues. The horse names are their own small archive of the scene's voice, a mix of English and in-jokes: Big Rock, Space Sega Pig, Blissful April, April Athena, Big General, Sterling Town, GLAY PRIZE, Night Hunter, Time Strong, Tom's First, the LIGHTN'- line (elephant, power, dolphin), and Universal.Prince-F. The naming of "Blissful April" and "April Athena" alongside the fact that April Stable posted the seed records is the kind of detail that makes a dead board feel briefly alive.
"AND DOUBLE CIRCLE HORSE is not that useful, all horses above are not double circle horse."
A Hong Kong player, posting the region's first records, quietly noting that the export's famous glitch aristocracy did not actually top the Hong Kong charts. First-hand, on-the-record scepticism about the double-circle horse, from the place the double-circle horse came from.Community claim Nine years after expertdoc's peak, a single Cantonese thread on discuss.com.hk records the scene's endgame. It was Cloudflare-walled with no Wayback capture, and was recovered for this archive from the live web in 2026. A young arcade worker writes that by 2011 the only Derby Owners Club 2000 left in all of Hong Kong stood in a basement arcade (地牢機鋪) at the corner of Jordan Road and Woosung Street (佐敦道 及 吳松街, beside DBS Bank), four stations, where the whole surviving player base had converged. New horse HK$3, HK$5 for three games. Then the detail that says everything about how this game died:
"Because the manufacturer no longer makes DOC 2000 magnetic cards, please bring your own MTR ticket 地鐵車飛 or a scrap Wangan Midnight card 灣岸廢車卡 to use as a new horse card."
By the end, Hong Kong players fed spent subway tickets and waste cards from another arcade game into the reader, because the game's own cards had run out. It is the same cause that killed the machines everywhere: not the hardware, the cards. A World Edition horse was only ever a few hundred bytes on a magnetic stripe, and any stripe would do.A modest bilingual note is fitting for the language-bridge wing, but the Hong Kong sites themselves were written in English, citing Sega's English FAQ, for an English-reading audience across the oceans. So English stays primary here; the Chinese appears only where it is authentic, in the venue and district names above.
This wing is newer and thinner than its two neighbours, and it is still growing. "Not recovered" is a result, so, like the other wings, we say the gaps out loud rather than paper over them.
Unlike a purely archival page, the bridge has a live edge. The discuss.com.hk thread was captured this way. The VoyForums long tail can be walked next. And the Hong Kong scene, like the Western one, may still have living members who remember expertdoc, Wing and Mr.P by more than a handle. This is the youngest wing of the archive by design, opened last because the seam it documents was the last thing we understood. It will get thicker.
Japan was given the game first and built the instruments: the theories, the breeding math, the trick of reading hidden stats off the public odds. Hong Kong was given the game next, sitting on a real language border with cheap machines, and did the one thing neither neighbour could do alone: it carried the game across, honestly citing where the knowledge came from, running the first English board, and adding a craft of its own in the whip charts. The West was given the game last and the answers secondhand, and built the institutions that outlived all of it. Three panels, one picture. The reason the picture reads as one and not three is Hong Kong. The cards outlived the venues, the knowledge outlived the cards, and the knowledge only became one shared thing because it crossed a bridge in Hong Kong. That is why this wing exists.