According to this article Christmas Nights originally booted as Nights: Limited Edition. It didn't change to christmas nights until christmas eve? Is that correct? I can't find info on Nights limited edition online anywhere. Checked Sega Retro and Wikipedia. Someone might wanna update the wiki article.
I'd have to check the exact dates, but it's definitely NiGHTS Limited Edition for most of the year, then Christmas NiGHTS in December and Happy New Year NiGHTS in January.
That's the normal title screen for the game. You have to use one of the presents (which is always available) to switch into xmas mode.
IIRC, the "Limited Edition" is just a regular demo, with the Spring Valley level in its regular form. In November, January, and February, it becomes Winter Nights.
I don't recall an Easter mode, but on 1st April you get an extra present to play as Reala. Wikipedia mentions a Halloween mode, which I'd never heard of before. I'll have to go through and check all the dates, take screenshots etc.
There's tons - most are written down, and there might be more. As far as video games go you'll be hard-pressed to find one as attached to a console's internal clock as Christmas NiGHTS.
Low Context Burning Rangers wrote a post about the date and time features in Christmas NiGHTS: https://32bits.substack.com/p/the-christmas-nights-advent-calendar That post has more details about the different title screens, character costumes etc than are currently mentioned on the Sega Retro wiki page. For example it mentions the Santa appearance from December 24 at 12:00 to December 25 at 11:59. This table for the falling objects is mostly similar to what's on our wiki, except it says that the moons start falling at 09:00, whereas the wiki currently says it happens at 08:00: However when it comes to the Spring Valley backgrounds, our wiki just says that they vary by time of day, but according to this table, they also depend on the day of the month: Looks like the clock features were originally added to the wiki in 2011 by @Black Squirrel. Should we go ahead and change the current version of the table to what's listed in that Substack post? (I know it's not our responsibility, but there are also things mentioned in the post that contradict the NiGHTS Fandom.com wiki - for example, it debunks the idea that the game associates Valentine's Day with the falling hearts.) (The two other posts on that Substack are about putting Tails and Knuckles in Sonic 3D's Special Stages, and how NiGHTS and Burning Rangers handle rounds.)
Always fix errors The posts above are a little old - I went through and took screenshots a couple of years ago. The related forum posts are buried in the general info thread. I figured this sort of thing would happen which is why there's now a cheat code topic. But this was before then.
The function loaded at 0602fcec does the background computation. It reads one of 3 tables, depending on the day of the month: 1st through 5th: 0603001e 2nd through 15th: 06030006 15th through end of the month: 0602ffea The tables are (hour, background index) pairs. The game reads up to the hour that's greater than or equal the current one (last hour in the table is always 0x17/23) and then picks the background index from that. The code is a little convoluted, but Ghidra can decompile it enough to make it sensible.
