TrekkiesUnite118
Established Member
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. The thought process was to see if it would be possible to extract the English script out of the PS1 version, and possibly use that as a base to translate the Saturn version. So far this is what I found:
So with all of that, I'd say this is what would need to be figured out to get the ball rolling on a translation:
Obviously this isn't anything trivial and I'm not trying to make it sound that way. However I figured posting this could give people who know more about this than me a place to focus their attention if they're interested.
- The File Structure between the two games is actually rather similar, unlike that of Lunar Silver Star Story.
- That said there are still some differences. Some files don't exist on the Saturn version and some don't exist on the PS1 version. However this seems to be more aimed at bin files and system specific formatted stuff like audio files, video files, fonts, etc.
- I believe I've found the script for the English version. In both versions there's a Field directory. In this directory there are numerous files with hex values for their file names. In the Saturn data these are .MDT files, in the PS1 version these are .MDP files. I'm pretty sure these contain the games script.
- The English PS1 script is completely uncompressed in the .MDP files. You can bring them up in a Hex Editor and read the ASCII encoded script.
- The Japanese Saturn and Japanese PS1 versions of these files aren't as easy to read. 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.
- 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. 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 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.
- I've not been able to really find where the menu text lives. In the PS1 version I've found a couple pieces here and there. For example in the Battle directory there's some pieces in it's DAT files, but these files appear to be one of the few areas where the Saturn and PS1 versions are structured differently. Basically some files the PS1 has don't exist on the Saturn and vice versa.
So with all of that, I'd say this is what would need to be figured out to get the ball rolling on a translation:
- Figure out how the Japanese versions of the game encode their script files.
- Figure out where the Menu text lives in both the English and Japanese versions, and how it's encoded.
Obviously this isn't anything trivial and I'm not trying to make it sound that way. However I figured posting this could give people who know more about this than me a place to focus their attention if they're interested.