Originally posted by croft@Sun, 2005-10-09 @ 10:06 AM
Hi Justus,
I read the post on modding the audio of Sega saturn games.
I am very interested in doing this aswell and was wondering if you could point me in the right direction.
I would like to add my own audio to games like radiant silver gun but do not know how to go about this. 
If you could give any info that would be much apreshiated. 😉
My bro is a whizz on the old pc and he could probably help me out.
Thanks,
Ian (uk). :thumbs-up:
[post=140511]Quoted post[/post]
Believe me, it's not very hard at all in Silvergun's case. I am NOT a hacker by any means like I had said, just a sound engineer.
It was really an accident. I saw online about the extra content on the RS disk if you open it in Windows, and thought I'd check it out. Then, much to my surprise, my auto insert notification (which I usually keep turned off, but I had just installed a fresh OS), offered to play audio tracks. When I opened the audio tracks, there was the voice acting!
That's right, the voice acting is all in CD audio, and you can hear it by simply popping your RS disk into any CD player. This is highly unusual, since most games keep audio like that in an ADPCM format, which I've never experimented with changing.
But changing CD audio is a cinch! Literally all you have to do is get a good rip of the data track as an ISO, then burn a mixed-mode using YOUR wav files instead of the original tracks.
Doing the the audio for the video files is a little tougher, since they are in the Saturn's native Cinepak format. If you can locate the .CPK files for the videos on the game's disk, there are a number of software tools that can digitally convert them to .AVI for Windows (and still using Cinepak compression, which was actually a very common Windows codec before DivX). You can find any number of such tools on this very site under the "Saturn Dev" section if you click on "Saturn Development Tools" and then look under "Saturn video tools". The one I used was called Winvdt2, and worked like a charm. There's another tool at the top of that list that claims to be able to convert .AVIs back into the standard .CPK Saturn format. I haven't ACTUALLY tried it yet, but I'm sorting of hoping that it'll be as easy as editing the ripped .AVIs, converting them back to .CPK, and then burning the disk with the new .CPK files. If that won't work, I'll have to get back to Mr. ofDragons here about it. If it DOES work, then I imagine that you could do the same with ADPCM audio and all that by finding appropriate tools. And if it requires a little hacking to pull off, then you can also do what I did and ask for help.
I think this is a great idea.
Well I'm glad SOMEONE does. So far, harecore Saturn-ers seem to think messing with it is blasphomy, and everyone else thinks I'm wasting my time. Good thing I'm not actually doing this for anyone else's sake, or it'd never get done.
Heres some of my thoughts:
I hope you do have some very talented voice actors for the parts.Thats really the whole make or break of some animated character on screen is the voice.
I agree wholeheartedly. However, a big part of the dubbing process that I feel is often overlooked is the role of the director. Despite what you might think, I'm actually not really into dubs. I'd generally prefer to experience anything from Japan in the original language with subtitles. This is, in large part, because dubbing is almost always crap. It can almost not help but be crap though, because the emotions, emphases, extra noises (grunts, sighs, etc.), ...even the onomanapea (sp?) of Japanese are so foreign to the English language. Beyond the character of the speech, the words themselves are foreign to English-speaking culture, which actually makes a "good" dub next to impossible to do. However, it's ALSO generally crap because dubbers tend to rush through a dub process without giving it the time it needs for a really complete translation, and these studios also generally don't take the time to educate the actors and rehearse before recording. The studios that do most dubs do it the way Disney does theirs - one character in the studio at a time. It works for Disney because, since they record the voice acting before they draw the animation, the animators can draw the animation to make the emotion look perfectly natural, so Disney's voice actors have a lot of choice in creative interpretation. In Japan, the animation is done first, because the emphasis is put on the artwork. As a result, Japanese voice studios get all the actors they are using together in the same studio, and they all take turns on one microphone, responding to each other naturally (which is why Japanese voice acting tends to have such a more natural-sounding flow than anything else, even if the actual acting is crap, which it usually is actually, more than the non-Japanese speaking people could ever understand). Just about every voice studio that dubs anime (and games) chooses to take Disney's approach, despite the fact that it's proven not to work well for anything where the video's already been done. I've decided to mix the two, and record the dub as if it were a play. I'm having my actors actually rehearse (both with and without microphones), and make eye-contact and all that stuff. When I DO record, all the actors will be in the isolation booth, but unlike the Japanese, I'm giving each actor his/her own microphone, so that they can keep making eye contact and respond to the lines in a natural physical way (you'd be surprised what a difference this can make to the voice!).
As for the actors I'm using...I won't lie, I'm not poor, but I'm not rich, so much as I would like to, I can't afford to hire top guns of the voice acting world like Alan Oppenheimer or Michael Bell. I can't even really afford to hire "professional voice actors", nor would I want to try. As I mentioned, I'm trying something different, and as such would like different sorts of actors. For a number of the actors I'm using, I've tugged on contacts I've kept from my alma mater, and everyone involved is either a professional or talented amateur actor of SOME kind. For most of these people, this will be the first time they've ever tried voice overs before. A lot of them are stage actors (which is why my "play" approach ought to work well). The guy I have playing Tengai has a lot of experience doing narration for local documentaries and independant films, the guy playing Igarashi is a seasoned radio veteran, etc. etc. I'm also hoping, as I would hope to have implied by now, that I can fix a lot of problems by using good direction, something that is often overlooked. I believe that if you find someone who has the right character of voice, and you work with that person long enough, you can get him and her to sound like whatever you want as long as you have a solid vision for the project. The only thing I'm really worried about is that most of the guys I know who I can use are in their twenties, so getting really young-sounding voices or older-sounding voices is a challenge, but I'm hoping I can make it work! At any rate, I'm mostly doing all this for experience, and because I want to try. After I do this and Ys 4, I'll probably never try doing this again (after all, like I said, I prefer watching and playing in Japanese anyways).
Have you got some effects to get the 'creators' voice right?
You have no idea. I've got all kinds of filters and manglers to try! Originally, I was actually planning on creating a 100% synthetic voice, but I think I can make something that sounds cooler by altering a human's voice. That being said, you might notice that there hardly any effects on the original Japanese voice. It pretty much sounds like a high-pitched Japanese guy doing his best to imitate a robot naturally. Whatever I end up doing will sound way way more robotic than that. I at least plan to use an auto-tune and ring modulator. If it doesn't kill the legibility of the lines, I might use a mild multi-pitch chorus effect and a distortion as well...I dunno, the chorus effect tends to sound more like the "killer death" type of robot. We'll just have to see! I do want the lines to remain very legible though. Did you ever see Battlestar Galactica? You know the Zylons? Yeah...more legible than that, way more.
One thing I didnt like about justus script was all the use of heavy swear words like fuck and shit.
Did the japanese words really reflect this strong a language? I dont think that the original authors intended it to be that way , since im sure they knew there would be a young audience. And when you have language like that in something like this, it really dumbs the whole thing down.
Most of the time, I agree with you on this. I think a lot of people who do dubs and translations like to add unneccesary cursing just to "be cool" or something. That's not the case here. Look closely at WHO curses, and in what situations. The only character who curses constantly is Guy, and it's because he's the sort of character who would, if he had been an English speaker. So, he curses because he's being portrayed as a young and immature hothead (which he is). The other characters only curse the way a more mature adult might, which is to say only in situations of extreme emotional duress (ie. - Baster when Guy jets off at the beginning of stage 2, or when the Penta starts throwing Silverguns at them in stage 4, Tengai when Guy dies, Igarashi when he's about to die, and because it's amusing byplay). You might also notice that only Guy ever uses the F word, which is very much in keeping with his and everyone else's character.
It's true, Japanese doesn't really have taboo words, but English sure does! This is, after all, a translation from Japanese to English, is it not? Besides, I would argue that what Japanese lacks in colorful words, it more than makes up for in expressiveness. For instance, there are words and ways of delivery in Japanese that can imply the exact same thing as "Fuck you! I hope you die and go to Hell!" does in English, The "I can't believe he just said that!" feeling and everything. There are words and ways of delivery in Japanese that will produce the exact same reaction, the same discomfort and disgust from people, as if someone in New York City ran up and down a public street screaming "shit! shit! shit!" at the top of his lungs. Maybe even more so, because
Japanese people actually become disgusted and uncomfortable far more easily than most Americans do...which is maybe why our language needs stronger words to make up for it.
As for younger audience....you're not proposing that THIS translation will be viewed by a younger audience, are you? I'm fairly certain almost everyone who plays this translation will either be an adult or a more computer-savvy teen. A little cursing shouldn't bruise such people's ears too easily, unless they're megachristian or something, in which case they aren't likely to illegally download a full game which is illegally hacked to play on an illegally modified Saturn anyways.
I prefer the leaving in "be attitude for gains" too. I dont know why you would want to alter the ingame text anyway. The translations should be focused on the scenes.
It is. Really, the changing of the text is not a big deal. Besides, translation B won't have any text changed, so you can get that one if it really bugs you. Or you can feel free to mix n' match too - ISO with original text with translation A's CD audio, etc. You're on your own for compiling those disks though.
Im not too picky on an exact literal translation. I sure your going to have to play with the script anyway to get the length of the voice actors lines to sync to the visuals.
You got that right. Japanese is such a comparatively wordy language!
I asked the guy at the "silver translations" website about dubbing RS scenes in english a really long time ago and he was not optimistic about it at all. He was worried about finding good voice actors and the technical difficulty of rehashing the video. Is that a major hurdle here to reencode the video back?
Yeah, he was less than enthusiastic about it when I contacted him too. I'm sure he feels that it ought to be good enough for anyone to just play the game in Japanese while following the story on his website. Really, you can't fault the logic, and I actually halfway agree. Still, I'd like to try. As for rehashing the video, it's really not hard. You can edit a movie's audio stream separately from the video part quite easily, and use a program like VirtualDub to rejoin the new audio to the old video. For that matter, one of my actors dabbles in video editing, and he's gonna help me add subtitles for the text in them. I suppose I COULD have him add subs for the voice acting too, and leave 'em in Jap...but it doesn't seem kosher to have subbed movies, while the ingame dialogue is dubbed, and I'm pretty sure there isn't any way outside of some truly legendary hacking to add in-game subtitles.
I played snatchers on sega cd back in january and was blowed away by it. Really excellent game. I heard about policenauts and wondered why hasnt noone has translated that? If its half as good as snatchers then it really needs translating.
Sadly, I've played neither yet. I've had copies of Snatchers laying around for about 6 months (both the English version for Sega-CD, and the Japanese version for PC Engine), but I haven't gotten around to 'em yet. Policenauts, I imagine, would be a REALLY freaking tough dub. As I mentioned, I probably won't do any fandubs other than RS and Ys IV. Ys IV will be tough enough, with its over two hours of dialogue and 37 voice-acted characters. In fact, I plan on sacrificing two straight weeks to just the recording of it (not even the rehearsal)...two weeks of doing nothing BUT (asked time off from my various jobs and everything), not to mention it's gonna about kill me to come up with even token payments for my actors (the ones who aren't already doing it on the condition of payment, that is). I don't think something like Policenauts could be attempted without the time and financial resources of someone who does it for a living, unless they just REALLY wanna do it. I'm not terribly interested in doing an English dub for it, because I hear all the lines have text in addition to the voice acting, which means that it's possible to just translate the text, and still understand the game, even with the speech in Japanese. I've heard of
other interest is such a thing. If I do any other dubs, I'd rather stick to games that couldn't be presented in English any other way (outside of extreme hacking). For instance, something like Kaze no Densetsu Xanadu on PC Engine.
Update: The rehearsal yesterday went quite well. The person playing Guy is perfect for the role. Tengai'll need a little work, especially with the emotional scene at the end of stage 5, but I think we're getting there. His narration, as expected, is top notch. I've got a complete set of WAVs from the fellow from Texas I'm using to record Creator's lines. His voice is naturally QUITE high-pitched, but I suppose it won't even be recognizable after I mangle it. I think it'll turn out well. I've come up with about 1/3 of the SFX that play in the background of some of the speech files, so that's coming along too.
Also, I've recieved hesitant permission from Silver Translations to use their script (I will fix some of the more obvious grammatical errors, but other than that, it'll pretty much be verbatim). So I'll be using that script for a second translation to please those purists among you. The only other thing is to ask the actors if they don't mind. Thus far, they don't. The only guy I haven't asked yet is the one who's playing Creator, and I'm sure he won't mind too much. So it looks like translation B will happen too. That being said, I wouldn't know where to begin on trying to make these lines sound good spoken aloud, so I'm probably not going to try too hard to spend lots of extra directing time on this alternate script.
Yeah...I talk too much.
Reminds me of something I did like 3 years ago:
