Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus: JP Append

Separately, the stage select grants one Slash stage per hour from 86 to 101 hours. That is why Max play time unlocks the same content.

Character ids (used by the per-character codes and the field map): 1 Sol Badguy, 2 Ky Kiske, 3 May, 4 Millia Rage, 5 Axl Low, 6 Potemkin, 7 Chipp Zanuff, 8 Eddie, 9 Baiken, 10 Faust, 11 Testament, 12 Jam Kuradoberi, 13 Anji Mito, 14 Johnny, 15 Venom, 16 Dizzy, 17 Slayer, 18 I-No, 19 Zappa, 20 Bridget, 21 Robo-Ky, 22 A.B.A, 23 Order-Sol, 24 Kliff Undersn, 25 Justice.

How to pick the unlocked versions on the character select screen:

• EX character: press Start to open the panel, set CHARACTER to EX, close the panel, then pick the character.
• GG / GGX mode: the same Start panel, MODE row (AC / GG / GGX).
• Gold: press R2 until the bottom-left reads SLASH COLOR, then pick with R1.
• Black: press R2 until it reads RELOAD COLOR, then pick with R1.

Gold and black (Shadow) are not just colours. This is already documented by the community, for example in Dustloop's thread on EX, Gold/Shadow and SP characters:

• Shadow characters have infinite Tension.
• Gold characters are a "boss mode" with per-character buffs. For example, Gold Sol has permanent Dragon Install, infinite Tension and health regeneration.

What we add is how this executable encodes it (S2, Sol against the same Arcade opponent with identical input timing):

• The pick. The character select stores the chosen colour as index 14 for gold and 19 for black (11 for an ordinary SLASH COLOR pick). The select handler turns it into a per-player variant word at 0x3C6B78 + 4·player: 0 normal, 1 gold, 2 black. This encoding was checked for all 25 characters.
• Round start. Gold and black Sol both begin with the Tension gauge full (10000), against 0 for normal Sol.
• Gold Sol. His opening differs: the fight state at the same frame is about 3 seconds further along, and the shot shows a flame effect on Sol, consistent with the documented permanent Dragon Install. We did not test its mechanics further.
• Where the variant is read. 86 code sites in 68 routines read the variant word, most of them inside character move code. That is where the per-character buffs live.