Gemini Sector Frontier Expands With Discovery of Test Bed System

If you've been following LOAF's Wing Commander Privateer exploration lately, you've read about how the game's code refers to a Test Bed System that the Origin developers used while making the game. It's not linked from anywhere in the Gemini Sector, but it's still a "real" place that exists since it's pictured in the manual. To our knowledge, no players have managed to find it, until now! Rylex has accomplished an amazing feat by hex editing his way on over. There's not actually a whole lot to do - enemies spawn, but there are no asteroids or landing bases. But it's pretty incredible to be able to fly around in a previously undiscovered star system after nearly three decades. You can read up on the process and jump to the Test Best System yourself with these instructions!

So as you might know, it's possible in Righteous Fire to fly directly to Eden from the beginning of the game. Just go to Rikel and use the hidden jump point that I mentioned before. You can land on Gaea Retro base, but you can't visit the temple.

But now the interesting thing: You can use the jump point back to Valhalla. But as the jump nav point 4 is not yet visible, you don't get to the position of the jump point but to the coordinates 0,0,0 right to the center of the map. And there is no jump point, so you can't get back. Now I've played with the sector data. Even though there are casts and sphere IDs, you can easily change a nav point target. Just use the sector number in the JUMPTYPEJUMP block and change it. The game seems to look in the target sector, if there is a jump point that leads to the sector you are coming from and puts you there. If the target sector has no connection to the sector you are coming from, then you get to coordinated 0,0,0 and no jump point is there.

That being said, I've tried out Perry Nav 1 and changed it to all 68 err.... 69 .... yes, 69 ... sectors as target. In the systems, that are connected to Perry, you get to the specified jump point. In the sectors, that are not connected you get to 0,0,0. So that means, there is no jump connection from Perry to another system. Even not to Rikel... there's just the text "JMPRIKE" ... even if you use the reserved Cast ID 4 for Rikel ... it does not work.

Anyway, I've changed Nav point 1 in Perry to target system ID hex 45 (=69) ... and oops... I've reached the TestBed. The image shows the modified GAME.GOG file opened with an hex editor. I changed "2f" to "45". The positions 24 and 1d underneath show other system target IDs. 45 = TestBed.