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Grandia Saturn English Patch10/11/2021
Would be great to have the text in English but keep the fantastic JPN voice acting.So I thought I'd snoop around in Grandia's files and do some comparing and contrasting with the US and JP PS1 releases to see how different they are. Grandia has some technical hurdles to translation. It's playable, but there's still lots of editing and revision being done. Grandia and Shining Force III are really the holy grails of Saturn fan translation, and Shining Force III is humming along nicely.3 (translation patch), Shining the Holy Ark, Shining Wisdom. Complete list of Saturn RPGs playable in English. The File Structure between the two games is actually rather similar, unlike that of Lunar Silver Star Story.Grandia Sega Saturn. So far this is what I found.
Grandia Saturn English Patch Full English ASCIIMagic Knight Rayearth.I was wondering if there is an English translation patch for the Saturn version of Grandia. Grandia (incomplete translation guide online) Story of Thor 2 / Legend of Oasis. The rest of the game uses a compressed 16x16 fixed width font.Dragon Force II (translation patch) Blazing Heroes (aka Mystaria) Wachenroeder (guide online) Princess Crown (guide online, translation patch in development) Langrisser III (incomplete) Langrisser V (guide online) Albert Odyssey. There's an uncompressed 8x8 font that has a full English ASCII font for menus. The Saturn version has 2 fonts stored in FDATA.BIN.I know there is a US Version for Grandia on the Playstation but thats not the same as playing it on the Saturn, which gives the gorgeous 3D graphics quite a different note. However this seems to be more aimed at bin files and system specific formatted stuff like audio files, video files, fonts, etc.Id LOVE to have a Grandia translation, actually. Some files don't exist on the Saturn version and some don't exist on the PS1 version. There are Sega Saturn games from a variety of different genres and categories, so the entertainment is guaranteed.That said there are still some differences. Get an emulator to be able to load the games from your computer or phone or play the online unblocked versions instead. Download Sega Saturn ROMs and play free games on your computer or phone.The English PS1 script is completely uncompressed in the.MDP files. I'm pretty sure these contain the games script. In the Saturn data these are.MDT files, in the PS1 version these are.MDP files. In both versions there's a Field directory.In this directory there are numerous files with hex values for their file names. At 07:46I believe I've found the script for the English version. The FONT does have an all Caps English font in it, but from the looks of things I'd bet this one isn't a variable width font. If you run them on FDATA.BIN you can get the 4BPP font and can load it up in a tile editor of your choice. The font for the Saturn version is in the FDATA.BIN directory as mentioned before by CyberWarriorX, and his compression and decompression tools that he wrote appear to work just fine. So there may be some compression going on here, or it could just be that I don't have a Hex Editor that can properly decode it.I tried one that claimed to have Shift-JIS Support and I also tried various different UTF variants but none really seemed to reveal anything too useful. ![]() This is probably the equivalent of the ITEM.BIN file in the PS1 version. Which looking at the changes and gameplay footage, I'm guessing this is where the menu text lives. Looks like they changed character names from Japanese to somewhat English versions. The MDT files have been modified, which would seem to confirm that those contain the script.ITGET.BIN has been modified. File sizes appear to be identical to the Japanese version.The font has definitely been changed as I'd expect it to be. So I did take a small peak at the Korean translated version and this is what I've found. This is most likely Shop Menu text by the looks of things.SVLD.BIN has been changed. SHOP.BIN has been changed. This again looks to be like menu text, guessing Config menu based on the name. Again this looks like either Menu text, guessing command related based on what's in it and the name.CNFIG.BIN has also been changed. This file looks to contain item names and descriptions, but I can't really find an equivalent to it in the Saturn version just yet. I did some quick spot checking in the BATTLE Directory and nothing really stuck out as changed, but I didn't really dig that deep into it.I also noticed while looking at these and back to the PS1 version that some of these files seem to have been either reduced or eliminated with a new WINDT.BIN file being mentioned at the start of many of them. That's what appears to be different so far in the FIELD Directory. WDATA.DAT has been altered, my guess is this is Weapons info maybe?.SWN6M.DAT has been altered, no idea what this one is. All the AMAP#.ADD files have been modified.My guess is this is text in the map screens or dungeons?. I still need to figure out the control codes for the text boxes, but the text itself is actually pretty simple.Basically the hex values for the text correspond to the sequence number of the font character in the font table. So more fun info, in comparing the script files between the Korean version and the Japanese version I think I've figured out some of the encoding. Original Japanese Saturn: Hacked Korean Saturn Font: English PS1 Font: There were some 8x16 Japanese characters in the English PS1 font as well, but I didn't see a reason to include them. And when watching it in action you can actually see some spots where the spacing looks a bit odd, specifically around thin letters like Lower case L's and I's: And here are the fonts for each version of interest. Reason being the English font is 8x16 in size, but every letter is scaled to that size and is perfectly centered. After looking at it I'm starting to wonder if the English version actually supports VWF. ![]() So honestly, once the control codes are figured out I think this might actually be a pretty straight forward hack. However for an English hack we might not even need to care about that as we wouldn't need over 1000 characters to begin with. But this encoding can at most go up to 255 if I'm understanding it correctly.So I'm not sure how it's dealing with characters beyond that limit. Now the odd thing here is there's over 1000 characters in the font if I'm counting correctly. The offset for this cutscene and where I started making changes is x5AA. Some codes are also used differently. The English PS1, Japanese PS1, and Saturn versions seem to use the same control codes with some catches.The PS1 versions seem to add additional values in the codes between text lines/new boxes. The Japanese PS1 and Japanese Saturn version use the same encoding for their text. So doing some more digging I've found a couple more nuggets of info. After that it would just be injecting the new font and then editing the script files.This is probably what they did for the Korean translation, but without the font size change, as Korean is still a Fixed Width Font so they could stick with the 16x16 font size easily. The size of bytes seems to be the same in the Japanese and Korean Saturn versions, and in many cases the same values. Sega Saturn RpgsNow after the end code however, there seems to be varying bytes of data. The PS1 sometimes uses 0E00 where the Saturn version uses 090F, but then there's instances where both are using the same values. Code: 0E00 090FThe problem however is I can't seem to find consistency for which is used where. When the scene starts, we can see this code before the text across all 4 versions. This is the file that contains the intro scene I edited earlier among other things. Obviously more research is needed here as well as some experimentation, but this seems to be consistent when stepping through the script file in sync with the cutscenes so far. This would seem to indicate these are perhaps pointers.I have no idea what the additional data that's added into the PS1 version is though. However there is still some data that matches, however bytes are flipped which is consistent with endian differences. There's additional data added in. I did a simple test where I took the English PS1 font and stretched it to now be 16x16 in size.
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