Information on Phantasy Star Collection
Mar 10, 2019 16:33:05 GMT
Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Mar 10, 2019 16:33:05 GMT
So while I am still working on Grandia, I've been curious about Phantasy Star Collection for some time and decided to poke around the disc for a bit today. And while I may jump into this once I finish up Grandia, I thought I'd post my findings if anyone else wants to take a crack at it. The 4 games seem work like this:
So what looks like was done is that the games were ported to the Saturn hardware similar to Sonic Jam, but instead of having the data there in individual files, the original ROMS are used instead for the game data. So it should be possible to translate these games by swapping out the ROMs and then updating the pointers in the EXEs to point to correct offsets in the English ROM. To test this theory I tried it out with Phantasy Star II and got the following results:
Unfortunately the game crashed at this point, but it still proves that this should work as I probably missed an offset or changed something incorrectly.
tl;dr, this shouldn't be too hard for a team of people to do if they have a good understanding of the original Genesis ROMs and how the English and Japanese versions differ. Phantasy Star IV would be the special snowflake however that would require some extra work.
- Each game has it's own dedicated EXE (PS1.EXE, PS2.EXE, PS3.EXE, and PS4.EXE)
- Each game has it's own directory, PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4. These hold PCM files for the games sound effects and music, as well as the original game ROM.
- Phantasy Star 4 is the one special snowflake since it's ROM is too big to fit into RAM, so the game is broken up into different files.
- When each game is running, the EXE is loaded into HWRAM and the original Game ROM is loaded in it's entirety into LWRAM, again PS4 being the exception here.
- The EXE has multiple pointers in it that point to specific LWRAM offsets for data from the game's rom.
So what looks like was done is that the games were ported to the Saturn hardware similar to Sonic Jam, but instead of having the data there in individual files, the original ROMS are used instead for the game data. So it should be possible to translate these games by swapping out the ROMs and then updating the pointers in the EXEs to point to correct offsets in the English ROM. To test this theory I tried it out with Phantasy Star II and got the following results:
Unfortunately the game crashed at this point, but it still proves that this should work as I probably missed an offset or changed something incorrectly.
tl;dr, this shouldn't be too hard for a team of people to do if they have a good understanding of the original Genesis ROMs and how the English and Japanese versions differ. Phantasy Star IV would be the special snowflake however that would require some extra work.