Versions and regional differences
Twinsanity shipped six times, plus a Russian localisation, and the versions are not cosmetic variants of each other. They differ in resolution, in frame timing, in which bugs are present, in checkpoint placement, in enemy population, and in at least one case in level geometry. The community has catalogued this in unusual detail.
This mod targets PAL PS2 (SLES-52568 v1.01), so this page is partly context and partly a list of things you already have - and a couple of things you do not.
The six retail masters
| Version | Mastered | Released |
|---|---|---|
| NTSC PS2 1.0 | 5 Aug 2004 | 28 Sep 2004, North America |
| NTSC Xbox | 13 Aug 2004 | Sep 2004, North America |
| NTSC PS2 2.0 | 20 Aug 2004 | 12 Jun 2007, in the Crash Bandicoot Action Pack |
| PAL Xbox | 28 Aug 2004 | Oct 2004, Europe |
| PAL PS2 | 3 Sep 2004 | 8 Oct 2004, Europe |
| NTSC-J PS2 | 3 Sep 2004 | 9 Dec 2004, Japan |
A Russian release also exists: NTSC-U 1.0 with a localised font and text. The PAL Platinum re-release is identical to the original PAL version.
PAL PS2 is the best-behaved build
The PAL disc is, by a clear margin, the most fixed version - which is a large part of why it is worth modding.
Fixed or improved in PAL:
- The Dingodile crash is gone. On NTSC-U the game could crash after the Dingodile fight, specifically when his model travelled too far after being beaten.
- Less gameplay lag overall.
- No slide deviation bug - see below.
- Body-slamming onto higher surfaces snaps less.
- A stunned Coco no longer damages Crash.
- Resetting Nina's wall-jumping tutorial is fixed.
- A save-cancelling confirmation was added.
- Lives are deducted and shown immediately when the death animation starts, rather than after the fade.
Regressions and oddities in PAL:
- The menus are very slow.
- Evil Crash has pathing problems in Bandicoot Pursuit, running in circles in some places.
- Walking near the fence at Farmer Ernest's farm detaches Cortex from Crash.
- The room before the last classroom has no enemies.
- The Spyro trailer is missing from the disc entirely. It is the only version of which that is true: the Japanese disc still carries the file, it just cannot be reached from any menu.
- The font is smaller, because it has to carry five languages' worth of letters in one texture.
The 100% completion reward also differs by region: NTSC-U gets the therapy session FMV, PAL and NTSC-J get a short animation montage.
Resolution
| Version | Output |
|---|---|
| PAL PS2 | 512 x 512 |
| NTSC-U PS2 / NTSC-J PS2 | 512 x 448 |
| Xbox, both regions | 640 x 480 |
The PAL PS2 build renders 512 x 512 - a taller framebuffer than either NTSC PS2 build, which is what you would expect from a 50 Hz PAL target.
The slide deviation bug, and why this mod should care
The single most notorious gameplay bug in the game: on NTSC-U and NTSC-J, a slide or slide jump will sometimes throw Crash in a direction he was not pointed in. Speedrunners describe optimising movement as "more or less just praying not to get thrown into wonky directions", and it is bad enough on Xbox 360 back-compat to make that platform unattractive.
The community's explanation is that it is tied to the 60 Hz refresh rate, not to the region as such: the PAL disc does not show it because PAL runs at 50 Hz, and the same sources note that slide jumps at 60 Hz are shorter, and possibly slower, than at 50 Hz.
This mod deliberately runs the PAL game at 480p / 60 Hz with matching frame timing, which is exactly the combination that would reintroduce the bug if the community's explanation is right. So it was worth measuring rather than assuming.
Measured on the rig
One fixed slide jump in the Earth hub, driven frame-by-frame off the game's own frame counter at 0x309B68 so both
builds receive an identical number of updates of identical input. Each build was measured from two clean cold boots,
four trials each; every trial in a boot replayed to the same three decimals.
| original disc, 49.99 Hz | this mod, 59.97 Hz | |
|---|---|---|
| Slide-jump distance | 9.848 | 9.746 |
| Deviation from the run-up heading | +0.65° | +1.02° |
| Peak height | 1.841 | 1.862 |
| Airtime | 0.820 s | 0.818 s |
Slide jumps at 60 Hz are about 1% shorter. That is real and it reproduces exactly, so the community is right about the direction of the effect - but a tenth of a unit on a ten-unit jump is not what runners are describing when they talk about praying not to be thrown into wonky directions.
The deviation did not reproduce. About one degree at both rates, which is the jump's own fixed bias rather than anything random, and the difference between the two is well under what a player could perceive.
That is evidence against the community's explanation, and it narrows where the cause can be. What was tested is the PAL build at 60 Hz - and the PAL and NTSC builds differ in far more than their refresh rate. So if the rate alone does not produce the deviation, the likelier home for it is something in the NTSC builds themselves, or a trigger this test cannot reach. "It is the 60 Hz" is the one explanation these numbers make less likely.
The bug is reported as intermittent - "sometimes". Every run here is deterministic: the same save state and the same frame-exact input give bit-identical results, which is what makes the 1% figure trustworthy and is also exactly why this cannot rule the deviation out. A replay that never varies cannot sample variation. What this shows is that 60 Hz alone does not force the deviation, not that the deviation cannot happen.
Two measurement traps worth recording for anyone repeating it. The player object's position at +0xD0 is
ground-projected and its y does not move at all while Crash is airborne, so the height has to come from +0x284
(height above ground) or +0x064 (vertical velocity). And Crash clips scenery around frames 32-56 of a straight run
in the hub, deflecting his heading by 17°; a run-up that ends inside that window measures the collision rather than
the jump.
NTSC-U 1.0 quirks worth knowing
Useful mostly for reading other people's videos and speedruns, which are often NTSC:
- A big tree next to the farm which is not in any other version, and which lets players bypass Totem Hokum easily.
- Cortex's and Mecha-Bandicoot's plasma blasts are much larger.
- Crates exist that no other version has.
- There is no checkpoint outside the top lab's interior, and Cortex starts far from the entrance inside it.
- An extra checkpoint next to the world checkpoint at the start of Rockslide Rumble.
- Enemies in the corridor just before the final boss, which PAL removed.
- Dying while triggering the first Boiler Room Doom cutscene locks Crash in place.
NTSC PS2 2.0, the Action Pack build, back-ports the PAL crash fixes onto the American version.
Beyond Twinsanity lists "skipping FMVs requires waiting a second" as exclusive to NTSC-U 1.0. It is not repeated above, because this project measured the same roughly one-second delay before ✕ takes effect on the PAL disc - see The movie player, where ✕ ends a movie in 6.8 s against 7.0 s untouched. Whatever the difference between the versions is, "PAL skips instantly" is not it.
Japanese version
- Many menu actions and cutscene skipping use circle instead of cross, per Japanese convention.
- TNT and Nitro crate textures were changed, as in every Japanese Crash release.
- Rusty Walrus's pathing is broken.
- Sliding is as tight as PAL, but the random deviation from NTSC-U is still present.
- Characters in the galleries have more fingers than in other versions.
Xbox versus PS2
- Textures are better; lighting on characters and some environments is different and generally darker.
- Particles are sparser and shorter-lived, and are not cleaned up immediately after a death.
- Cutscene transitions show the game's logo in the bottom-left corner.
- Some cutscenes desync from their audio because of in-game lag.
- Getting an extra life at 100 Wumpa plays no sound.
- The Extras menu calls the movies "FMV" rather than "Movie".
- PAL Xbox is missing the ':' character from its font, which affects save-file times, the sound options and the worm minigame timer. It also has no Spanish localisation.
- NTSC Xbox is region-free; nothing else is. The Xbox version runs on Xbox 360 with heavy slowdown. The PS2 version runs on early PS3s, but PAL has game-breaking issues there.