[RHDNBot]

Update By: Gideon Zhi

Today AGTP releases a complete translation for Laplace's Demon, a Japanese-style RPG with a lot of western RPG sensibilities and a healthy dose of Lovecraft in its atmosphere. Set in the fictional town of Newcam, Massachusetts in the year 1924, Laplace's Demon follows a team of paranormal investigators as they look into the disappearance of local eccentric Benedict Weathertop.

The original translation released in 2001 was... not up to snuff. There were loads of technical problems, not the least of which involved the font overwriting itself during text printing and the battle narrative almost always being out of order. The new translation fixes all of these; it is complete and mostly without any issues. See the readme for two known problems, at least one of which may be a bug present in the original game. There were a lot of those.

Given the enormity of the difference between the original v0.95 and the current release, it's being tagged as a v2.00. Enjoy!

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[SylarDean]

Congrats guys, nice release.

I've been putting this game off for years cos of the text overflow and other problems it seemed to suffer when i tried to play it many years ago.
NOW I can finally play it with no problems at all thanks for giving this old translation a face lift.

[mziab]

Congrats on the release! I remember playing the old patch for this when it was released... way back in 2001. Wow, this makes me feel so old.

[CrocMagnum]

Nice one.And thank you kindly.

I have a soft spot for games set during the Roaring '20s. They're somewhat rare.

And when available they're often about "horror" or "mafia mobsters" for some reason. ^^

[saldite]

I was actually under the impression the old one was unfinished, but now that the new version is out anyway I guess that doesn't matter!
I'm thinking I'll make this my Halloween game for the year.

Thanks for the release! 

[noneother]

Nice. I'd always avoided the old translations cause I couldn't tell if it was fully playable or not, and I didn't expect AGTP to release something not Robot Wars-related, so this is a cool surprise. Thanks, Ghideon Zhi.

[Gideon Zhi]

I was actually under the impression the old one was unfinished, but now that the new version is out anyway I guess that doesn't matter!

It wasn't finished, at least not by any reasonable standard of the word "finished." I'd rushed something out for Halloween in 2001, and while what's there was fully translated there were a huge number of essentially game-breaking technical problems with the patch and I eventually voluntarily pulled it from the AGTP website. If I'd just fixed the broken issues and released an update it might have warranted a v1.00, but this new version improves substantially upon pretty much all aspects of the prior release to the point where calling it "version 1" would have been disingenuous.

[Zandig]

Nice! I've been looking forward to this. Been wanting to play this for a long time and understand the plot.
Very much appreciated.

[Romero]

I've been waiting for this, just joined to say thanks for a really good job.

[Googie]

Wow Gideon, you know I gotta try this out right? This totally came outta the blue, thanks man for working on this translation.

[Q]

I've been wanting to play this one for a while now. I'm pretty curious to see how a 90s JRPG will depict Massachusetts. Thanks for all your hard work!

[getter77]

Fantastic to see this finally get there and in fine fashion at that.   

[Griever_GF]

Wow! Wow! Wow!
That's a great release!
I completed Demon of Laplace (SNES Version) twice, but the previous translation was really rough.
This game deserves more, because it's true ancestor of Sweet Home -> Resident Evil. And it has great plot and mechanics too...

[travel27]

Hi, you know Aretha was released about a week ago.  How come that did not get a topic or even a mention in recent news on the homepage?

[cccmar]

Hi, you know Aretha was released about a week ago.  How come that did not get a topic or even a mention in recent news on the homepage?

Well, if the authors didn't do it, probably it means they don't want to, have no time right now, or intend to do it later. Seems the patch isn't submitted either, but anyone can submit news/patches, not just the authors, so it's not a big deal I guess. 

On topic: thanks for this translation Gideon Zhi! This was one of my most wanted works from you by a long shot, great to see it finished.

[aqualung]

I'd like to inform about a really strange problem I've had with this game. When playing the patched rom in snes9x 1.54 and above, some tunes sound distorted and strange. For instance, the background music when you're in the city overview, and also during the battles.

I've tried 5 different roms, assuring they're the correct rom size and they have no headers with the tool mentioned in the readme. Also tried to patch them with several rom patcher tools.

The Japanese original rom does not have that problem in snes9x 1.54 and above, everything sound ok. In the 1.43 version of snes9x both the original and patched rom work fine. Zsnes 1.51 works ok as well.

It's really strange, I've never came across something similar.

[DracoSerge]

I'd like to inform about a really strange problem I've had with this game. When playing the patched rom in snes9x 1.54 and above, some tunes sound distorted and strange. For instance, the background music when you're in the city overview, and also during the battles.

I've tried 5 different roms, assuring they're the correct rom size and they have no headers with the tool mentioned in the readme. Also tried to patch them with several rom patcher tools.

The Japanese original rom does not have that problem in snes9x 1.54 and above, everything sound ok. In the 1.43 version of snes9x both the original and patched rom work fine. Zsnes 1.51 works ok as well.

It's really strange, I've never came across something similar.

Enable 16-bit Sound in the Sound menu

Edit: It happened to me today, but, if you save your game on the 4th. floor pentagram and resume from there, the battle music and the overworld map music has some, uhhh... "layers"? of music turned off and sounds weird. Can be fixed, at least in my case, by saving at the hotel and reloading from there.

[Griever_GF]

But why you name it as "Laplace's Demon"? The correct name is "Demon of Laplace", in my opinion.

[mziab]

That's because the title refers to a scientific theory by a scientist of the same name.

[Gideon Zhi]

That's because the title refers to a scientific theory by a scientist of the same name.

It's more philosophy than science, but yeah. The plot refers to it as well.

Spoiler:

Pierre Simon Laplace exists in a pocket dimension with an intelligence that embodies the philosophical construct. The player's party is able to thwart the Demon because they aren't part of the pocket dimension, thus the Demon cannot predict their actions.