What the Japanese Community Knew

Why this page exists

Most of this material lived on Yahoo! GeoCities Japan, which shut down in 2019, and on 2ch (now 5ch). Most of it is dead. What survives, survives in web archives — and archives rot too.

So this is a durable copy. Every source is named, dated and linked back to its original URL and its archive snapshot. The original Japanese is kept alongside the English, never replaced by it, because a translation is an interpretation and the source text is the evidence.

How to read this

A lot of what these players concluded is right. Some of it is wrong. Some was one person's guess that got quoted onward until it sounded like fact. So every substantive claim carries a status:

Two rules that go with those tags

• Repetition is not confirmation. Most numbers in the period corpus trace back to a single anonymous "card analysis" (解析) that circulated on a bulletin board and was quoted onward. A 2ch poster in June 2000 records that the analyst was publicly told, by someone claiming a friend at Sega, that "only about 25% of what you're saying is correct." Every figure descended from that analysis inherits the doubt.
• Where the community and the ROM agree, that is the strongest evidence here — because the two were derived independently, twenty-five years apart, by completely different methods. Those agreements are flagged explicitly.

The sources

Eleven principal sources, plus 52 archived 2ch threads (~6.2 MB). Thread IDs are unix timestamps, so the ID is itself the creation date.

Raw captures, with source URL, archive snapshot ID and retrieval date, are held in the preservation archive. A summary is not a preservation copy — the originals are kept.

The race calendar

Confirmed  Recovered from かぐらステーション (Wayback snapshot 2000-03-04) and since verified against the game itself. The Japanese versions run 19 rounds of 8 races, and every round's 8R is that round's G1. (The Western releases differ: they run to 6R.)

Venue names are given in their Western forms. In the Japanese originals these are 東京 (Eastern City), 阪神 (Western Hill), 中山 (Northern Park), 京都 (Central City) and セガ (SEGA). Four of the nineteen — 桜花賞, オークス, 秋華賞, エリザベス女王杯 — are fillies' and mares' races, matching real Japanese racing; a colt cannot enter them.

The stat model

1 · Nine numbers, in two families

Confirmed  Every horse has six externals (表パラ, "front parameters") and three internals (裏パラ, "back parameters").

This split was posted to 2ch on 2000-06-22 with all six externals and all three internals named correctly. Our ROM carries the same three internal names in a static string table ("Speed", "Stamina", "Sharp"), and the six externals as a contiguous six-byte block on both the horse record and the card. Six for six and three for three, from two completely independent investigations twenty-five years apart.

A caution: the fourth string in that ROM table is "Friendship". That is the hearts/bond stat, not a fourth internal.

2 · The gauges you can see: 0–63, drawn as 16 blocks

Confirmed  The externals are single bytes running 0 to 63, drawn on screen as 16 blocks of 4.

Our decode agrees: the write clamp in the ROM is mov #63,r13 — 63 is the real code cap, and there is no 60-clamp on any stat byte. On the physical card the six externals are stored as value minus one.

The "60" everyone remembers is a practical ceiling, not a code cap: the period build targets all top out at 60 and no one ever explains why.

3 · The 16 steps, and what the marks mean

Community claim  The most influential idea in the whole Japanese corpus is the 16-Step Theory (16段階理論), published by Y's Lab and posted independently to 2ch the same month. Behind each on-screen mark sits a hidden value with four levels inside it.

So an all-○ horse scores 12 points, and a perfect horse scores 18.

Where this sits against the ROM. We have not found a separate hidden 4-bit field. What we have is the 0–63 external byte drawn as 16 blocks. The community's "16-step value" is most likely the block count — the byte divided by four. That reading makes their inheritance arithmetic and the ROM's inheritance arithmetic the same operation, which is exactly what we observe. Treat "16 steps" as a good working model of a real thing, not as a separately confirmed field.

Two comment ladders, and they measure different things

The game prints a comment when a foal is born, and a different one when a horse retires. They run on separate ladders, and the corpus is careless about which one it means.

Community claim  すみだDOC (coment.html, snapshot 2001-04-05) recovered the birth ladder whole: nine tiers, printed at birth, reading the internals.

The page's own guidance: tiers 1 to 4 return roughly a 50% record, tiers 5 to 7 will win at best half their races and may not win at all. Tier 1 was believed not to exist in practice, requiring “so much money and luck”. Tier 3 is what people actually aimed for.

Community claim  The retirement ladder is a different animal: seven texts, collected by Y’s Lab and ordered worst to best. He credits win rate for raising the tier, allows that a large number of G1s may do it too, and hedges the whole thing himself: 確実ではありませんが, “it is not certain, but”. Players named the top tier after its opening word, 費美 (“praise”). When a post says a horse 費美で引退した, that is what it means.

Breeding: the inheritance law

This is the single most important thing the Japanese community worked out, and it is the strongest agreement in this archive.

And one poster had the internals right before anyone — かぐらステーション post [1811], poster MA, 21 March 2000:

The worked example, preserved

The 2ch post taught the rule with Sunday Silence, and it is worth reproducing because it is how players actually learned it.

Read what the poster drew from it, because that is the practical lesson. Start went ○×◎ and came out ◎; Corner went ○×◎ and came out ○ — same marks, different results, because the dam's Start was 16 and her Corner 15. Competing was 9 × 10 and came out 9: the half point is thrown away. もったいない — “what a waste.”

The ceiling trap

Community claim  and it follows from the arithmetic. The CPU horse スケアクロウ (Scarecrow) is ◎◎××◎◎ — values 13, 13, 1, 1, 13, 13. Breeding to it “again and again never produces a ◎”, because 13 mated to the best available ○ (12) gives floor(25/2) = 12, still ○. A 13-grade parent is a trap: nothing available can improve it.

What carries to the foal, and what does not

Dirt and heavy-going aptitude

Disputed  Three ways, and this is the messiest area in the whole corpus. Three accounts of what aptitude even is:

The 2001 thread makes the sharpest point in the corpus on the subject, and it is the part that has held up:

The branch rule, and why stacking CPU dirt horses works

Community claim  The most specific aptitude claim recovered (京都DOC, snapshot 2005-05-10) says the rule branches on whether the parents are yours or the machine’s:

The same page tabulates named CPU dirt horses with two separate numbers, an aptitude and a bonus:

The bonus is clearly a separate authored field, not derived from the aptitude. Two horses both at 70 carry bonuses of 1 and 2, and Wakaoh Raiden at 74 has a larger bonus than Abukuma Poro at 78. If the branch rule is real, then Wakaoh Raiden and Lemon Palm are the better breeding partners even though Abukuma Poro has the higher aptitude. Unverified, and worth testing.

The one thing everyone agrees on, and the useful part: aptitude is a graded quantity that every horse has, it is heritable, and it decides dirt races.

Training, feeding, and the damper

The menus, and what each one raises

Community claim  The structure is regular and worth memorising: each solo menu raises exactly one external by a lot, and each paired menu raises two, one a lot and one a little.

Rest is genuinely unsettled, and one author contradicts himself on it. One site says rest raises three stats a little. ばあにん☆ says ゲージの上昇はほとんどありません, almost no gauge increase, and that rest is for fatigue recovery. Then on another page the same author warns that when levelling a horse for Almighty you must take Corner to the very limit first, “because if you do not raise it to the limit, rest will push the parameter up”. We have not checked it.

The grades, and exactly what they pay

Community claim  What counts as which grade:

And what each grade pays, in gauge points, for a horse at the start of its career:

So a better-bred horse trains faster as well as starting higher. The scheduling advice that falls out of it is sound: train the stats your horse is good at, and use food for the ones it is not.

Why your horse stops improving

Every period source noticed this and none could measure it.

A 2ch thread put it in numbers in 2000: “with nothing but Perfects it stops growing from race 10 to 12, whereas at a moderate pace it grows to race 14 to 15.”

One player called the cause correctly in February 2000. GUTCHI, writing on だーめーおーやーじくらぶ, warned that a high Out-of-box is 不利 — a disadvantage — “because when the Out-of-box parameter is high, the speed of parameter gain dulls sooner.” Four months before anyone else.

Failure, and using it on purpose

Community claim  Failing costs a flat amount, and the stats that drop are deliberately not the ones that menu normally raises.

Paired penalties are exactly double solo penalties at every grade, mirroring paired training’s larger gains. Which stats drop:

Hearts: the mechanic nobody in period got right

The community treated hearts as a bond meter and a whip-response modifier. One poster noticed that “on a horse two or three races from debut the whip bites poorly because it has no hearts.” That is as far as it went. There are no numeric heart thresholds anywhere in the 2000-era sources.

Low hearts quietly rot a horse. Crossing a threshold flips +1 into −1, or −1 into −3. Recovery is easy and none of it is race-gated: feeding a favourite pays +4/+3/+2, a hated food costs −2/−4/−8, a care action is +4, and finishing at or above expectation is +8.

Food

The foods that matter

Community claim  From the 44-entry DOC 2000 table (競馬エクウス, page dated 2000-06-28), the strongest single feeds and how to unlock them:

Note the design: the best food is gated behind a campaign, not a single result. Several G1s of different kinds, then a back-to-back Great Success.

Beer

Confirmed  and it is a lovely piece of trivia. 生中 (nama-chū, a medium draught beer) is a real, feedable food in the ROM at ID 43, with 黒生中 (dark draught) at 44. Both records are fully populated and structurally identical to every other food. Their stat payload is all zeros, and they are the only foods in the game with an all-zero payload.

Beer is special-cased at three separate code sites, writes its own reaction-state byte, and has its own dedicated animation pointer arrays. Sega built a beer that does nothing at all except play a reaction.

Disputed  The Japanese sources credited it with Out-of-box and Tenacious large, with raising the internals, and with raising dirt and heavy-going aptitude by +1 (or +2 for the dark). All of that was disputed at source: two days after the aptitude claim, another poster on the same board replied that if beer raised dirt aptitude his own Seiun would have maxed long ago. Eight years later a DOC 2008 thread template still marked the beers’ effect with a question mark.

Running style

Confirmed  This is the flagship agreement of the whole project. Running style is not a stored property. It is re-derived from the stats before every race, from a single comparison:

Among the five externals excluding Corner, where does Start rank?

Two details his page carries that our decode also has: Start wins ties, and a horse whose Start is at MAX is always a front-runner unless it is Almighty — a corollary, not a separate rule, since at MAX nothing can outrank Start. His advice follows:

The period build targets

Community claim  These are the six-stat targets the Japanese scene actually played to, on the 0 to 64 scale. Note that every one of them tops out at 60, never 64, and the author never says why.

His notes are worth having. For the front-runner: do not rush Start to MAX, weight Corner over Start because Corner matters more as G1 distances lengthen. For the stalker: few people use it, but it is strong at middle distances and “invincible in the Arima Kinen” with an uncontested lead. For the closer: strongest under any conditions and therefore the most popular, so Competing matters, because the mid-race scramble and the slugging match at the post are unavoidable.

And one piece of advice from 2ch that only makes sense given the rank rule: stop about 3 dots short of your target, so that one carrot can still flip the leg type when you need it to.

Route one: the precision build

Community claim  Target: 48 in all six. This is the most sophisticated piece of play in the archive, and it is built entirely on food dislikes and deliberate failure.

Route two: banana-pickling, the brute-force Almighty

This is the technique the 2ch board settled on, and it is much simpler. Big Banana raises all six externals by a small amount at once, and a poster reporting the actual effect wrote 全部１ずつ上がったのでラッキー～♪, “all six went up by 1, lucky!”

How long it takes, per the board: “just keep feeding Big Banana, 20 or more times might do it” (October 2000), and “banana-pickling will take 25 to 26 races” (May 2001). The same 2001 post gives the fast alternative schedule: races 1 to 2 earn over ¥100 million, race 3 take one G1 crown (ideally with Vegetable Salad), race 4 a second, race 5 a third, race 6 Big Korean Ginseng for 4 dots.

Getting a style back after you overshoot

Community claim  and it works because of the rank rule. Style is re-derived every race from current stats, and a failed training drops specific stats by a known amount. So you can put a horse back to the style you wanted. Raised Start too far and turned your closer into a front-runner? Fail a menu that drops Start. Food does the same job in one-point increments, which is why the whole precision maintenance routine is built on rest then food.

Things they found that we would never have guessed

All Community claim unless marked. This is the section that justifies the whole archive: none of it is recoverable from the ROM, because it is about how the game was played.

The ten cards Sega gave away

Handed out at the Shibuya location tests and deliberately stronger than normal horses. They sat outside the normal breeding pool, which is why the community treated them as an unfair advantage.

Disputed  on one cell, and it is a good illustration of why the marks hide things. 京都DOC gives Seiun Sky 15 in Start where Y's Lab gives 13. Both list Silence Suzuka at 13. If 京都DOC is right, then two of these cards display identically on screen — six marks the same — and are not the same horse. The display literally cannot show you the difference.

The card whose value depended on never being used

Under DOC 2000 Ver.2, a horse whose marks sum to 14 points or more is knocked down a whole mark band across all six externals at retirement:

Narita Brian is the only 14-point card in existence.

A Narita Brian that has never been raced on Ver.2 still breeds at full strength. Race it once and it is permanently a 9-point horse. A card whose entire value depended on never being used.

And the drop is a filter in the new ROM, not a change written to the card: take a parameter-dropped horse back to a Ver.1 cabinet and it breeds at full strength again. Players were running two incompatible rule sets off one physical card, and choosing which cabinet to insert it into.

Total-54, and why the scene became a monoculture

Community claim  Y's Lab's 総合54理論 (“Total-54 theory”) held that every stallion and broodmare inside the cabinet has its six values summing to 54 — revised to 56 after Ver.2, with 54 as a guaranteed floor.

The consequence players actually felt

Repeated floor-averaging toward a fixed strong parent converges. The community lived it, and said so in March 2001:

He reports six of eight horses at one tournament were the same Seiun Sky stat spread. That is precisely what repeated floor-averaging toward a fixed parent predicts. It is field evidence for the arithmetic — and it is why the scene developed a monoculture.

“Atari” horses: two theories, and what the ROM says

当たり馬 (atari — a hit, as in a winning lottery ticket) was the period name for a foal that came out stronger than its inheritance implied. There were two explanations, and they cannot both be true.

That 2.55 is suspicious in an interesting way: it is exactly 255/100 — the ceiling of an unsigned byte read as hundredths. Either the informant had really seen the field, or it is a plausible-sounding invention.

But there is a real bloodline bonus — and it rewards matching

Confirmed  The game counts, across the six externals, how consistent the parent and second-line rows are — scoring a point where a row is strong and a point where it is weak.

Then the internals are hard-capped at 45.

Their tool, rebuilt: the foal calculator

The period sites all taught the inheritance law by worked example. This is that arithmetic, made usable — running the rule we and they independently derived. Enter both parents on the community's 1–16 scale and it shows the foal, the marks, and where the half-points leak away.

Every export horse is a real Japanese champion

Confirmed  When Sega took the game West as World Edition, it could not license the real racehorse names, so the roster was renamed. Matching the decoded DOC 2000 (Japanese) and World Edition rosters on their exact stats reveals the map: 144 horses line up one to one, and the plain English names are famous Japanese champions in disguise. A few:

Only nine horses stayed Japan-only and nine were new to the West; fifteen kept their romanized name. The full 144-horse map is decoded from the rosters.

What is still to come

The synthesis is now transcribed in full: the stat model and both comment ladders, the inheritance law, dirt and heavy-going aptitude, the training menus, grades, damper and failure tables, the food tables, running style and both Almighty build routes.

What remains is not transcription but testing. The open questions worth the most are the ones where the community contradicts itself or contradicts the ROM: whether the dirt aptitude branch rule is real (and so whether Wakaoh Raiden really beats Abukuma Poro as a breeding partner), whether rest raises stats at all, and why a Big-Banana Almighty draws longer odds than a Ginseng one with identical gauges. Each of those is answerable on a cabinet.