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Post by Anthaemia. on Sept 27, 2018 0:45:11 GMT
Has anyone tried reaching out to Gemini (AKA Loboto 3) about the possibility of his expertise in translating 32-bit era games being enlisted to help create an English version of Grandia for the Saturn? He's got quite a few projects on the go right now, though I can imagine this being the kind of challenge that might interest him...
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originalname
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Post by originalname on Sept 30, 2018 13:40:50 GMT
Dug up my old account just to encourage you and say THANK YOU for all the hard work you've put in so far. I have a long history with Grandia on the Saturn, importing it as a kid and being disappointed that I couldn't make headway in it. It's one of the games that made learning Japanese seem worth it to me as a huge Saturn fan. I'd love to get to play it on Saturn without the headaches of having to look something up every other text box. Good luck and keep us posted!
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Oct 4, 2018 6:09:36 GMT
So time for some news. First thanks to some help from Klarth/Mr.Conan over at SegaXtreme/Romhacking.net I've found out how to enable the 8x16 English font. The address 0x0601CEA4 has a byte that seems to control this. When it's set to x00 we get the 16x16 Japanese font. When it's set to x01 we get the ASCII 8x16 font. Digging further in the debugger for YabaSanshiro I was able to find the assembly code that controls this. At 0x0601E2A4 there's these lines: extu.b r0, r0 shlr2 r0 and #0x01, r0 mov.b r0, @r3
The last 2 lines are the important code here. This code sets r0 to x00 and then writes it to the address at r3. That address happens to be 0x0601CEA4. Doing some testing, I was able to successfully force the game to use the 8x16 font by changing the code to this: extu.b r0, r0 shlr2 r0 mov #0x01, r0 mov.b r0, @r3
This seems to do the trick. When viewing the memory address for this code I found these values: 600C 4009 C901 2300 This appears to align with the Opcodes for these instructions according to the SH-2 manual. If I'm understanding things correctly, I believe I need to change it to this: 600C 4009 E001 2300 Which would align with the Opcode for the replacement mov instruction. The problem is however, I can't seem to find this sequence of hex values anywhere in the game's executable, or anywhere in the games BIN/ISO for that matter. I found 2 values that were close, but they didn't seem to make any difference when I changed them. So I'm not sure what to do here. Moving on however, I have some more news concerning this. I have continued work on my program for converting the files and I believe I may have successfully converted the PS1 script data over to the Saturn format. When combined with the memory edits above, I was able to get this: Now this still isn't perfect. As while this cutscene plays fine, the game seems to hang afterwards when it tries to load Parm. The music and sound effects play, but the screen is black and the game doesn't seem to be progressing any further. Also not all the sound effects and voice clips seem to be playing during that first cutscene. So probably some debugging is needed to find out what's gone wrong. However the fact this seems to work in some cases looks promising that we can convert the English PS1 files over to the Saturn game rather easily. I intend to release my code as I get it cleaned up as it's a bit sloppy at the moment. But if I get it working nicely, I'd imagine it could make it really easy for any future retranslation projects to apply their translation to both versions of the game.
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Oct 6, 2018 5:42:34 GMT
So I've been able to figure out how to get the game to use the 8x16 font by default. Turns out the reason I couldn't find the code that I needed to change is because it doesn't exist in the games compiled code. Instead those instructions are generated at run time based on values the game reads from other files. This could be a form of compression, or it could be some kind of automated code generation. I'm not really sure which.
However, I was able to find what value it's using to generate the code that determines what font to use. Turns out it's in the SCNRL.BIN file. At offset 0x22A4 is the value 0x9D. This value get's XOR'd with the value 0x54 to create 0xC9. This corresponds to the And instruction for SH-2. Changing this value to 0xB4 will instead result in the value 0xE0 being created, which is the Mov instruction we need instead to use the 8x16 Japanese font.
Now the game is still crashing after the intro cutscene when it tries to load Parm. However I think this is due to the MDT file having an issue with it, as when I swap back in the original Japanese one it no longer crashes. So I'm going to need to dig back into these files and figure out whats wrong.
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Post by zyrobs on Oct 6, 2018 16:46:58 GMT
This is extremely good news!
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Oct 7, 2018 5:44:58 GMT
I removed the MDT file that was causing the game to crash and replaced it with it's Japanese counterpart for the time being while I figure out whats wrong. On the bright side though some of the other areas look to be working ok with some minor graphical glitches: From the looks of it, in this area the palette data is wrong. So I probably need to figure out where it's trying to read from the wrong spot and fix it. The English PS1 version added/removed chunks of null data from the files, probably to increase/reduce padding for this very issue.
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Oct 16, 2018 5:28:41 GMT
So I'm still working on trying to figure out the Palette bug in some of the areas. It seems to be related to file size expansion, but it's kind of odd. Basically the offset in the MDT file header at 0x0D8 seems to be the entry that points to this data. And while the offset was updated in the file, it seems the game is only partially obeying it. Basically the game is still starting the read of the data from the correct spot in when it writes it into RAM. However it's stopping at what would be the originally stopping point for the original offset prior to the file size changing. The size of this data hasn't changed and it's still correct in the header. As a result of this, old data from the previous MDT file is still in RAM and is being copied over as Palette data, which isn't correct and is causing the partial graphical corruptions I'm seeing. So I'm not entirely sure why this problem is happening. The only explanation is that it must be getting the value for where to stop reading from somewhere else. But where it's getting that info I haven't been able to track down yet. In other news, I've put the code for the tools I've been writing up on GitHub: github.com/TrekkiesUnite118/GrandiaTranslationThe tools are written in Java and hopefully should be easy to figure out. I'll be putting more info on the file formats as well as how to use the tools in the next few days when I have time. If anyone wants access as a contributor so they can add code/make changes let me know and I can add you.
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Oct 31, 2018 3:57:38 GMT
So it's been a while since I've posted an update, but I've finally solved the palette bug I'd been having with the automated conversion. Turns out the offsets in the MDT header 0x180 & 0x1F4 specify how many sectors need to be copied over from the CD for the file's data. This wasn't being updated so the game wasn't copying over all of the data. I've updated the tools to account for this and properly update the values when reconstructing the MDT files.
So with that out of the way I can move on to fixing some of the more minor issues that seem to be related to control codes. Basically audio isn't syncing as expected, and some of the text boxes aren't being positioned correctly or cleaning up correctly. I'd imagine this is probably some subtle difference between control codes across the Saturn and PS1.
Now, for something a bit more fun. I thought you guys might like to see some footage of the translated text in action. So here's a small bit I recorded from Mednafen:
Now to reiterate, this isn't perfect yet and there are bugs. So you'll get to see all of those as well.
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Nov 5, 2018 5:22:36 GMT
So I was able to fix the Text Box bugs that were visible in the previous video. Basically for the smaller text boxes the game does a calculation based on the number of characters in it to determine it's size. The game was still acting like the font was 16x16 instead of 8x16 which was causing the boxes to be bigger than they should. This was resulting in some having an overflow and bugging out. I did some digging and found that when the game read the 0x03 control code, it calls another subroutine for these text boxes that sets a value at the memory location of 0x06001ECC. For 16x16 font this value is set to 0x00, for 8x16 it should be set to 0x01. I was able to find where this value was coming from in the SCNRL.BIN file and make it so it permanently is set to 0x01 which has fixed the text boxes as you can see in the below picture: With that out of the way I think I have the bulk of the issues ironed out with the main script. What remains to be done for the main script is the following: 1) Fix any other bugs that come about through play-testing (I'm expecting more to crop up that were similar to the fade-in issue with Parm). 2) Fix the audio synchronization issue. The first will need to be done on a case by case basis as issues are discovered through play testing. The latter though is going to be tricky to figure out. One thing that really makes it hard is that emulators like Mednafen seem to draw faster than a real Saturn. So the audio synchronization is different between emulators and real hardware. On Real hardware the audio for the most part always plays, and the text severely lags behind in speed. So I'm thinking it may be an issue of text speed. I've reached out to the creator of the UnDub PS1 patch for help and they've been giving some suggestions to look at. For now though I'm thinking of shifting focus onto the menus and what not as what remains with the main script isn't as pressing of an issue I'd say.
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alf
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Post by alf on Nov 14, 2018 9:07:35 GMT
Looking forward to this <fingers crossed>
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mick_aka
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Post by mick_aka on Nov 23, 2018 11:00:09 GMT
This is incredible work Trekkies, I can't wait!
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Post by barryburton on Nov 23, 2018 11:30:00 GMT
Amazing levels of persistence and skills to work this all out.
This would get me to actually play Grandia one day.
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Feb 9, 2019 5:03:25 GMT
So I figured I'd post an update. I've still been working on this and I've now successfully translated the following: - All Menus (Save/Load, Config Options, Items/Equip/Magic/Moves/Status, Shops, Item Get, etc.)
- All Items
- All Monsters and their attacks.
These have been done by pulling the data out of the Playstation version and injecting it into where it needs to go into the Saturn version. For the items this wasn't too hard as I just needed to put the English data into the file and adjust the pointers. For the monsters it was a bit more painstaking as there was no consistent pattern and all 200+ monsters had to be manually changed. Menus I was able to somewhat automate it with a tool that looked for pointers/offsets in the BIN files for those screens, and then updated those values based on the new data I wanted to put in to replace the Japanese text. This worked successfully for the most part, with only a few files needing hand adjustments afterwards. I'll be committing these tools to github after I take some time to clean the code up a bit. Here's some screenshots to show the progress: However I have hit a snag. It seems that the English PS1 version created additional MDT files for some areas where the text was too big to fit into RAM. Basically the created a duplicate file from a parent MDT file, and put the overflow text into that one. This new file then takes the place of the original after certain story events have happened. I've looked into the possibility of recombining these files but I'm not sure if it will work as we may hit the same problem. So I'm curious if it's possible to do the same thing the PS1 version did and create these clone files and find a way to make the game use them. However that's probably going to take some time to figure out.
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Post by xDerekRx on Feb 9, 2019 8:37:12 GMT
Great work so far, there seems to have been a lot of hurdles but hopefully work arounds can be found. Even if this was only partially completed it would definitely get me to finally play Grandia on the Saturn.
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Post by bultje112 on Feb 9, 2019 14:41:25 GMT
great to hear you are still working on it. maybe other translators can give advice like shiningforce central?
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