1

Personal Projects / Re: Arcturus - The Curse and Loss of Divinity

« on: March 18, 2022, 10:10:37 am »

As an update on my own end, I found a way to encode music for the game.
Sadly Bonk's link wasn't useful at all -- different formats.
But I made a version of FFMPEG that can convert to the game's type of ADP through a lot of work, given I already knew FFMPEG could convert from it.
And the game does indeed support higher quality music (48kHz works fine) which especially surprised me...

2

Personal Projects / Re: Arcturus - The Curse and Loss of Divinity

« on: March 15, 2022, 05:09:38 pm »

Quite a few more than just 4. Pretty sure I figured out how to get the game to recognize the books. I mentioned getting a data.pak dump from someone else, which contains the books with improper unicode names. The game recognizes those.

Yeah, it'll recognize the filenames as long as they are in whichever codepage your system is currently running. So if you use Windows in English by default for example, it has to be mangled the same way Korean would be mangled by the English codepage. If you use Windows in Korean by default (or run the game through LocaleEmulator in Korean codepage), they have to be in proper Korean. Etc. It's that kind of situation. That said, I can only find 4 book text files in the latest version from Helly, so I'm not sure where the others have come from! If you have Helly's versions of them then that would be very useful for us to finish up Helly's patch. I know how to get the original files for all of them (as shown in your picture), it's Helly's translation that concerns me.

The game should "switch over" to a higher quality version of the soundtrack while it's running, from 11khz to (apparently) 24khz. At least, it does so for me.

The ADP files in the BGM.pak file are 22,050Hz, but this is still very low quality audio compared to what is common nowadays -- it just doesn't sound very good by modern standards. I'd personally gladly redo all of the music files using the official soundtrack as a source if I had a way to encode IMA APC ADPCM.

3

Personal Projects / Re: Arcturus - The Curse and Loss of Divinity

« on: March 15, 2022, 01:26:32 am »

I'll have to look into the animation editing again -- it really has been an extremely long time for me.

I actually have two physical copies of Arcturus JP DVD, one open (and complete) and one factory sealed. I could probably extract the soundtrack's files if you find a way to replace them in-game.

As for this at least, I can say I do have the files extracted (adp format) and understand what the files actually are -- they're basically IMA APC ADPCM, though I don't have any encoder for that codec.

4

Personal Projects / Re: Arcturus - The Curse and Loss of Divinity

« on: March 14, 2022, 11:36:40 pm »

I was part of the mirror moon group working on the old fan translation of Arcturus.

A lot of issues come from filename localization problems, if I recall.
We had all of the books working just fine in-game, for instance -- the issue there ended up being that you needed to actually use the Korean item names as filenames and run the game in Korean locale (or use mangled versions of them converted to other codepages when running in those codepages).
Do we know if Helly ever actually released their full translation of the books? Does anyone have it?
There's only like 4 books' files in the existing patch I think?

As a sidenote, the game surprisingly has fairly robust support for other aspect ratios such as 16:9 if you manually edit it to use them, but there's no way to do that by default, too.

I think if Helly isn't going to come back and finish this translation and fix its issues, I'd be happy to support any efforts to do so.

Regarding the pain sounds, those would be attached to the animations (act files) associated with the sprite files; It's definitely possible to restore them.
There's robust spr/act editing tools for RO that work well enough with Arcturus. It should be possible with those.
It's been a long time since my RO private server development days so I don't remember the details at all, though.

Now, what I personally want most is a way to extract and re-insert the music files because the quality on them is atrocious vs the official soundtrack...

5

Gaming Discussion / Re: Which Sweet Home translation to play?

« on: March 28, 2021, 07:16:57 am »

It seems like the more recent translation by JMN and The Siege is the superior one overall.

6

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Struggling to find graphics in a GBA game

« on: January 24, 2021, 10:27:54 pm »

Just because some of the graphics aren't compressed absolutely does not mean that all of them are not compressed.
It's common to find a small few uncompressed graphics even in heavily-compressed games.

7

Gaming Discussion / Re: Fire Emblem 1 official localization announced for Nintendo Switch

« on: January 02, 2021, 11:16:34 pm »

Isn't this the same obstacle we're experiencing with dumping the translated roms from Double Dragon & Kunio-Kun Retro Brawler Bundle? There has be to be a way to have the translated roms dumped.

Here's the deal. Effectively the emulator is live-translating a Japanese rom using techniques beyond just emulation. In a distant way it's more comparable to things like texture packs than to actual translation (and in fact on some consoles' emulators there are games you can translate using only texture packs). All of the methods for displaying the new translation are part of the emulator, so there is absolutely no way to make a rom of it, because it is doing things that aren't even actually supported by the system per se, especially not on the mapper the game uses.

From what I understand some of the games in the Retro Brawler Bundle really are similar cases, but not sure. With Fire Emblem it's definite.

8

Personal Projects / Re: Arcturus - The Curse and Loss of Divinity

« on: November 07, 2020, 08:00:51 am »

starting the game and what the hell does this mean?

The game launcher has the resolution, sound etc. settings and you need to set them before the game will run.

9

Personal Projects / Re: Rockman Zero/ZX HD textures

« on: September 26, 2020, 03:00:04 am »

Yeah, fair enough, it's not nearly as clean as ZX or ZXA but still a very noticeable improvement. Thanks, and good work!

10

Personal Projects / Re: Rockman Zero/ZX HD textures

« on: September 24, 2020, 06:37:17 pm »

I'm using this mod (and have completely replaced the "texure" files, so there's no chance it isn't being used), but so far Zero and Zero 2 still seem to have pretty bad textures that look closer to the left example images. Was there not much you could do about the earlier games, maybe?

11

Personal Projects / Re: Emotémon: Crowd Control esque utility for Pokemon FireRed

« on: August 29, 2020, 06:42:54 pm »

This looks like a lot of fun. I hope you can get saving working!

12

Gaming Discussion / Re: RPG Maker Thread (probably again)

« on: June 06, 2019, 02:38:35 pm »

My own terrible game. Normally I don't post it anywhere, but... whatever.

13

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [PSP] Corpse Party - Crash

« on: January 23, 2019, 05:36:54 pm »

I'm extremely well aware of how the file formats and layouts work, probably better than anyone else.
My guess is that you've messed up (or even overwritten) some of the event triggers in the file when editing the text.

14

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [PSP] Corpse Party - Crash

« on: January 22, 2019, 08:29:20 pm »

In the script files for this game, choices use labels with the exact same text to indicate where the choice itself begins.
You must translate both of these instances of the choice text identically.
If you don't, the game will freeze when such a choice is reached.

I can't go into much more detail, but probably needless to say that I know this particular scripting engine quite well.

There is one more possibility, that pointers or file sizes are messed up, but given the game's engine, I would doubt it is the case.

Edit: Given you actually haven't translated the choices yet, possibly the translations have overflowed in a way that overwrote the labels used for the choices, causing the freeze.

15

Personal Projects / Re: Zelda II Redux

« on: November 30, 2018, 12:34:58 pm »

Personally think the first shield looks best.

16

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [BUG] - Breath of Fire 2 HUD line behavior glitching

« on: October 18, 2018, 01:57:10 pm »

Your display isn't at any risk from flickering. You can play without any worries, though may want to just play on Snes9x so as to be less distracted.

Burn-in is caused by something staying on screen for a very long time, unchanging, and doesn't afflict LEDs as easily as it afflicted CRTs besides.

17

Personal Projects / Re: Un-Worked Designs: Working Designs minus bullshit difficulty (Latest: Lunar 2)

« on: July 20, 2018, 12:55:51 am »

I can confirm these things. The Saturn version of Lunar 2 uses streamed audio, and the PSX version is sequenced. Personally, I like both.

18

Personal Projects / Re: Majin Tensei II: Spiral Nemesis

« on: May 12, 2018, 06:18:14 am »

Sort-of, but think less SMT and more Fire Emblem in some respects.
One of the best soundtracks ever to grace the SNES' SPC chip, though!

19

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Snes emulators (Canoe, Snes9x) -- game problems and fixes

« on: May 02, 2018, 11:39:47 pm »

Just chiming in to say that I've played Bishoujo Wrestler Retsuden tons in the past, and it's quite obviously going to be a problem -- it uses high-res almost everywhere in its menus etc.

20

Personal Projects / Re: Squaresoft BRR Database

« on: March 17, 2018, 08:06:19 pm »

It's no surprise that Breath of Fire and Secret of Evermore would be a problem.
Breath of Fire isn't a Square game at all. Square only did the localization. So... It wouldn't use a Square-like engine.
Secret of Evermore was developed in outside of Japan. in its own engine without the original SquareSoft teams, so it wouldn't use a similar engine either.
(They unfortunately could not get the source code to Secret of Mana to use as a base and had to do everything from scratch.)
So these games would be in different enough of engines (including the sound/music engine) to naturally be issues, alas. x_x