As I mentioned in my, I've been working on translating Magical School Lunar! I've also been working on translating Silver Star Story! I'm planning on using the original translation from the PS1 version, including WD's English dub; I'll also be providing an option to play with Xseed's dub.
I'll be releasing patches for both the original release and the MPEG version. Progress has been very good so far! Here's where I'm at:. 95% of both English dubs have been retimed to the FMVs for both the releases. I've written a tool to redub the FMVs from the original release. Script format is partially reverse-engineered; I'm able to insert new text, and understand most of the control codes. In-game voice format is understood, and I'm able to insert new voices.
New font, created by a friend; it updates the English PS1 font with the higher-quality shading the Saturn version uses for its text. Here's a sample screenshot of where I'm! The punctuation is currently wrong, but it gives you a good idea of where things are. And here's a video showing the original release's FMVs dubbed in English (with no in-game text or voices): Here's an incomplete TODO list:. Finish writing my font-generation tool. Adjust the spacing between letters in dialogue to match the English version; the Japanese version uses wider spacing.
Identify and translate the menu text and graphics. Decide what to do with the few FMVs which have issues with the WD dub. Come up with a workflow to insert the full script in both games' maps. FAQ: Q: Why bother when the PS1 version is in English? A: A few reasons!. The MPEG version has much better FMVs!. The graphics are better in a few places.
The music is different. I'm a Saturn fangirl, and I want to be able to play all three Lunar games in English on the same system! Q: Will you translate the VCD version? I'm planning on releasing patches for both versions, so the six other people with VCD cards have something to look forward to. Q: Will anything in this patch be different from the PS1 version? A: A few things, mostly technical:.
A few FMVs, including the opening song and Luna's boat theme, will have better-quality music than they did in the PS1 version. I'm using the soundtrack CD as a source, so those scenes can have stereo, CD-quality music. The in-game voices will be slightly lower quality. I plan on restoring the hints to the Vane dungeon puzzle, which Working Designs removed, and using the fancy special characters that exist in the font for it.
I won't be using any of the gameplay changes Working Designs made. All of the gameplay, including the difficulty level and chest placement, will be the same as in the Japanese versions. I won't be using the visual edits Working Designs made to the FMVs.
This means that the flashback cutscenes late in the game won't be sepia-toned. Q: Will anything in this patch be different from the normal, unpatched Saturn version? A: Aside from text, I might be able to improve the quality of the audio in the FMVs in the original release. There will be extra room on the disc, and there's room within the bitrate budget for higher-quality audio. Q: Wait, what's this about problematic FMVs? A: Working Designs altered the lengths of several cutscenes. In some cases they repeated shots over again to add room for more dialogue; in one scene they actually slowed down the entire FMV by about 10 or 15% to increase the length and add room for more dialogue.
I'm not sure how I'll handle this yet; I don't want to trim down dialogue if I don't have to, but reediting and reencoding the cutscenes might be hard. There's also one cutscene where the audio lines up, but a shot was zoomed in to mask the fact that the voice acting doesn't match up well with the lip movements. Not sure how I'll handle that either. Tea wrote: Q: Wait, what's this about problematic FMVs? Q: Working Designs altered the lengths of several cutscenes. In some cases they repeated shots over again to add room for more dialogue; in one scene they actually slowed down the entire FMV by about 10 or 15% to increase the length and add room for more dialogue. I know I noticed that WD altered the opening sequence, since I watched the Saturn version enough to commit it to memory, (effects of years of anticipation and being a teenager I guess, ) but I never noticed other alterations!
I would love to know more about them if you have a chance. Shiva Indis wrote:I know I noticed that WD altered the opening sequence, since I watched the Saturn version enough to commit it to memory, (effects of years of anticipation and being a teenager I guess, ) but I never noticed other alterations!
I would love to know more about them if you have a chance. Here's a list of what I can remember:. AN004, the party meeting Quark - The final two shots of Quark speaking were repeated in order to fit in more dialogue. AN011, the party meeting Royce - The entire video was slowed down in order to fit in more dialogue. AN014, Ghaleon speaking in his office - Ghaleon's lip flaps from 0:16 onward were looped an extra eight seconds in order to fit in more dialogue.
In addition, the intro was given a creepy distorted clock ticking sound; the original scene didn't have a creepy ambiance. AN019, Lemia speaking - Lemia's lip flaps from 0:19 onward were looped an extra three seconds in order to fit in more dialogue. AN021, Magic Emperor Ghaleon intro - Ghaleon's mask's glowing is extended by an extra six seconds in order to fit in more dialogue. AN031, Alex's nightmare - The audio track is completely different. It stays longer at a black screen at the beginning, before the fade-in, in order to accommodate the different intro. I handled this one by fading into the audio a bit later. AN040 and another scene I can't remember right now, flashbacks of Dyne and Althena: Fully sepia-toned in the WD dub, with no colour.
In the Japanese and Xseed versions, these are sepia-tinted with desaturated colours to obtain a nostalgic look without fully removing all colour. AN049, Alex rescuing Luna - The second half of one shot of Luna was turned into a new shot by zooming in further so that Luna's mouth can't be seen. This hides the fact that the English dub doesn't match the lip movements.
The audio for most of the party member bromides is different, since the Japanese versions were based on character omake songs that weren't dubbed. The biggest change is that Luna's bromides are clips from the boat song, while WD's dub uses simpler clips of Luna singing.
These are pretty pervasive! I feel like I should have noticed that the WD version has full-on sepia, but nope, didn't catch it. I do remember the some of the audio stuff - never could quite decide how I felt about Ghaleon's ticking clock. (Is it too on-the-nose, or is it just the accent that scene needed? ) Your workaround for the changes in the nightmare scene sounds like a good solution.
Many of the changes seem minor, but clearly headache-inducing for the project. Especially when the extended part isn't at the end of the video! Speaking of which, I have an idea for AN021. Maybe it's too drastic. If the looped frames are in all that silence that WD filled with Ghaleon monologing, maybe just cut the voice out of that part? Many of the changes seem minor, but clearly headache-inducing for the project.
Especially when the extended part isn't at the end of the video! Speaking of which, I have an idea for AN021. Maybe it's too drastic. If the looped frames are in all that silence that WD filled with Ghaleon monologing, maybe just cut the voice out of that part? Yeah, at this point I basically have two options, both of which are a bit painful:. Trim some dialogue from the WD dub so it matches the timing of the Japanese video. Find a way to reencode video for both versions of the game so that I can create new video with timing that matches the dialogue.
With the second option, at least I can use the PC version's FMVs to have have a high enough quality to work from - but coming up with the tooling to reencode compatible FMVs for both versions of the game would be a total pain. Sonic# 'Than seyde Merlion, 'Whethir lyke ye bettir the swerde othir the scawberde?' 'I lyke bettir the swerde,' seyde Arthure. 'Ye ar the more unwyse, for the scawberde ys worth ten of the swerde; for whyles ye have the scawberde uppon you, ye shall lose no blood, be ye never so sore wounded. Therefore kepe well the scawberde allweyes with you.' - Le Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory 'Just as you touch the energy of every life form you meet, so, too, will will their energy strengthen you.
Fail to live up to your potential, and you will never win. ' - The Old Man at the End of Time. This is extraordinary.
There's a lot of dedication going on here. I always knew there were a good chunk of technical changes in relation to the PS1 release but it's good to see them explained and how you'll work around them. Are you planning on any work outside of LUNAR for the Sega Saturn? I'm not super obsessive with the Saturn but years and years ago around the turn of the 21st century I discovered imports and since then I've been importing Saturn titles periodically when I find them cheap. I've amassed a small collection of mostly visual novels (Sakura Taisen, El Hazard, TokiMemo, those sorts of things) that were released during that time.
I don't think a lot of people realize it but Japan got many MANY more Saturn titles released domestically than were released in the United States. It'd be fantastic to see someone finally translate something like Tokemeki Memorial or some of the other obscure shovel-ware visual novels into English considering the Saturn did these sort of titles fairly well for the time. I remember back in the day for TokiMemo in particular I had a notebook I had to piece together to actually play the game as I wasn't able to read Japanese that well. Made some more progress in the last bit! I've been working on FMV tooling on and off for a few months now, and it's finally paying off.
I've been adding support for creating Saturn FMVs to an open source program called FFmpeg; it's basically the video swiss army knife, with support for a huge number of formats, and it's used by a ton of other tools. FFmpeg has had support for decoding Saturn FMVs, and encoding the video codec that the Lunar games use, but it doesn't support actually putting it all together into a Saturn-playable format.
I've been writing what's called a 'muxer' - something which takes separate audio and video streams, and combines them together into a full video file. My goals for this are:. Support taking the original video as-is, and adding new audio to it. While I already had my own tool to do this, FFmpeg will be a lot more flexible and will let me do things like use higher-quality audio than the original game had. Support encoding brand-new video. This would be useful to do things like add subtitles to MSL, and to create new videos for SSS which match the timing from the English PS1 version.
The first of these now works perfectly! The second is still in-progress because FFmpeg's Cinepak encoder isn't 100% compatible with the Saturn yet, but I'm looking into fixing that as a followup. My muxer is complete now, so I've submitted it to FFmpeg and I'm hoping it'll get accepted. The Cinepak encoding is still in kind of a weird state. My first experiment didn't go so well: Silver Star Story crashed while decoding the first frame! Doesn't look so good, huh?
Grandia Sega Saturn English Patch
I eventually realized that FFmpeg's default Cinepak settings are a bit different from all of the Saturn videos I've seen, and so it wasn't going to be compatible. I tested setting one option to match what I've seen in Saturn videos, and got a bit further: SSS got about two frames in before crashing this time. I'm going to experiment with a few encoding settings to see if I can find something that's compatible.
If not, I'll examine the qualities of Saturn Cinepak movies a bit more closely and figure out what's different, then look at adding an option to FFmpeg that'll make its Cinepak encoding Saturn-compatible. I've made a bit more progress, but I'm not there yet. I took a look at the source code to AVItoSaturn, which is the only Saturn community tool I know of that produces Saturn-playable Cinepak videos. Unfortunately, it turns out it doesn't actually have a Cinepak encoder at all; it uses the builtin Windows encoder, and just tweaks the packet header to make it look like the Saturn is expecting. That's basically the same as what I do in my own muxer, so it didn't give me much extra information - except that it means the Saturn.can.
Castlevania Sega Saturn English Patch
play back standard Cinepak, so the FFmpeg encoder is probably fixable. On the advice of someone who has some Cinepak experience, I tried forcing V4 encoding only - and it worked! I also tried V1 encoding only, and that worked too.
So I suppose something is buggy about how it divides the frame between V1 and V4 vectors. At least that gives me a bit of a hint as to what's wrong. To test, I've been encoding the Sonic Mania intro and replacing the Silver Star Story intro with it. If it plays back without crashing, I count that as a success. The V4-only version looks beautiful, but it takes up an absurdly high bitrate.
The fact it works at all, though, I'll take as a win, and I'll try to figure out what to do from here.
I agree that it would be a lot of work, but it would be a lot easier to take the PSX version's text and put it into the Saturn's version. That would be relatively easy.
You wouldn't need a translator; probably only one or two programmers could do it alone. If I knew anything about Saturn coding, I would start the project in an instant! But, since I don't, that's probably not a fair thing to say. That being said, does anybody know where I can find some tutorials on Saturn coding? I'm willing to learn. Marurun wrote:romhacking.net also has lots of information on hacking/translating.
They also have individuals who might be able to be recruited. If you just copy the PSX text then you're still suffering a poor translation, though. It's not all about the translation though the Sega Saturn version of the game was also much better graphically. C windows prefetch readyboot readyboot etl. I would LOVE to see this happen, but I think the biggest problem will be getting people to do so much work for a translation that already exists on another platform.
I agree that it would be a lot of work, but it would be a lot easier to take the PSX version's text and put it into the Saturn's version. That would be relatively easy. You wouldn't need a translator; probably only one or two programmers could do it alone. If I knew anything about Saturn coding, I would start the project in an instant! But, since I don't, that's probably not a fair thing to say.
That being said, does anybody know where I can find some tutorials on Saturn coding? I'm willing to learn. Marurun wrote:romhacking.net also has lots of information on hacking/translating. They also have individuals who might be able to be recruited. If you just copy the PSX text then you're still suffering a poor translation, though. It's not all about the translation though the Sega Saturn version of the game was also much better graphically.
I would LOVE to see this happen, but I think the biggest problem will be getting people to do so much work for a translation that already exists on another platform.
Contents. Story In a humble port town, Justin is playing games with his friends, while rumors are circulating that a new continent has been found. Meanwhile, the Garlyle forces, the main militia of the game's primary villains, are hunting for information regarding power sealed inside of the ancient ruins of past civilizations. Justin, along with his friend Sue, dream of going on the same adventures that Justin's late father undertook before him. Managing to get an entry pass to the adventurer's society, he is eventually led on a tour of the ancient ruins near his hometown. Inside, he opens a door with the help of a spirit stone and discovers that the legends of these cities may be a reality.
But when the Garlyle forces go after him, they learn of what he has found and from there the adventure begins. Gameplay Grandia was distinct from many JRPGs of its time, in that players can see the enemies on the world map. Whether or not an enemy is caught from behind or vice versa, can trigger a first-strike surprise battle in a separate screen. The battle mode is also semi-tactical; players do not move through a grid but a series of several spots in terms of evasion or reaching enemies. Attacks are performed as a meter goes up, and this is the same for enemies, meaning whoever is first in line will be next to attack. Certain skills require more time to be process and even recover after use. Players can level up individual weapons, for which each character is capable of using a different set.
Magic is also leveled up, like weapons, through use, though they must be obtained using mana eggs. The field also allows people to interact with objects, which either results in something as pointless as causing a tool to rattle, or triggering a door, bridge, and such for another player to travel.
History Legacy The original Saturn version was a hit at the time of its release and won a Japan Game of the Year award. It sold nearly a million copies, and alongside, is one of the system's best selling titles.
It has since become one of the system's most beloved titles. In 2015, Dengeki Online, a major video game publication in Japan, did an article recollecting the Saturn's history. In it, contributors were asked to name their 20 all-time favorite Saturn games, with Grandia receiving a nearly unanimous recommendation.
The Saturn version never saw a release outside of Japan. However, the PlayStation port, released in 1999, was published in both US and PAL territories. In Japan, although the PlayStation port entered the greatest hits line, it did not perform as well in sales numbers as its Saturn counterpart. In the west, Grandia was looked at as a cult classic but did not become the phenomenal hit that many english publications were expecting. Many gamers in the west view Saturn's definitive JRPG as either,. Neither of these became a major success in western territories, and are sought after because of their limited production. Saturn was being discontinued in the US when Grandia debuted in Japan, where it continued to be produced until 2001.
During the 1997-1998 period, Saturn's main competitor for an RPG blockbuster was PlayStation's Final Fantasy VII by SquareSoft (now Square-Enix). Although Saturn could never rival the sales of Sony's console and it's highlights, the Japanese market's acceptance of Saturn helped usher the lighthearted Grandia into commercial success. In this region, it was viewed as the system's answer to Final Fantasy VII (as some US outlets even suggested) though the two are quite different in style. The PS version features some downgraded graphical effects, mostly due to 2D layering. For example, the Saturn version has a higher definition battle background. The Saturn version also had an expansion disc called, which allowed players to use their save files from the original game with a variety of bonus dungeons and unlockables. Versions Fan Translations A fan translation in Korean exists for the Saturn version and is attributed to a South Korean ROM hacker known as CyZero.
Most of the text is translated to Korean except the battle icons and the voices, which remain in Japanese as in the original. Magazine articles Main article:. Promotional material.
Grandia Sega Saturn English Translation
As always, I like to repeat in such threads that playing a burnt/patched game on Saturn does not require anything else than the console and the original game (and a way to play other regions game eventually). Simply load the original, pause the game, wait for the disc to stop spinning, open the tray (needs to have put tape on the switch so that the console does not see that the tray is open), replace with the burnt/patched disc, and soft reset (abc start). That's great news. I will definitely try Policenauts on Saturn! Hope to one day see the same thing with Grandia.
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