Translating Grandia 1.1.1

[TrekkiesUnite118]

The game boots up fine and then as soon as I hit start at the menu screen it freezes immediately every time.

To be clear are you pressing start on New Game? If so it could be again related to a bad burn as it immediately tries to play an FMV when you start a new game. So far I have not been able to reproduce this behavior.

 

[TheGentleman]

Hi, thanks for your work in finally giving us what we should have got back in 1998. I've been testing the latest patch on a Japanese V-Saturn and made it to the end of Disc 1. The only issue I encountered was constant crashing at the start of battles in the Volcano area near to the end of Disc 1. I burned a second disc to make sure it wasn't just the burn and got the exact same issue. This is the only place in the entire game that it crashed so it would be interesting to hear if anyone else had the same problem. Looking forward to playing Disc 2!

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Hi, thanks for your work in finally giving us what we should have got back in 1998. I've been testing the latest patch on a Japanese V-Saturn and made it to the end of Disc 1. The only issue I encountered was constant crashing at the start of battles in the Volcano area near to the end of Disc 1. I burned a second disc to make sure it wasn't just the burn and got the exact same issue. This is the only place in the entire game that it crashed so it would be interesting to hear if anyone else had the same problem. Looking forward to playing Disc 2!

So I just tried that on both emualtors and real hardware and I couldn't reproduce it. Could you be a bit more specific on what was happening? Like was it only with a specific enemy or a particular part of the map?

 

[TheGentleman]

It happened to me with different enemies and different areas of the Volcano area. As soon as the battle map loads and you see the 'your initiative/ambushed' message on-screen the music would skip and the game would freeze, requiring a reset. It happened about 1 in every 5 times I hit an enemy. I only made it through that area with avoiding as many enemies as possible.

 

[Neuma7]

To be clear are you pressing start on New Game? If so it could be again related to a bad burn as it immediately tries to play an FMV when you start a new game. So far I have not been able to reproduce this behavior.

Correct, I press start on new game and then freezes right away. Most likely a bad rip. I ripped my copy of Policenauts with too high of a speed and had to do it again so that's most likely the problem.

 

[Leo-Tyrant]

Hold on. Is this out already?

Even if its just a beta, that's FANTASTIC news, amazingly quick progress!

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

It happened to me with different enemies and different areas of the Volcano area. As soon as the battle map loads and you see the 'your initiative/ambushed' message on-screen the music would skip and the game would freeze, requiring a reset. It happened about 1 in every 5 times I hit an enemy. I only made it through that area with avoiding as many enemies as possible.

So I've been playing most of the morning on my Saturn and out of about 30+ battles in the volcano area I was able to get this to happen once. When it did happen it sounded like the disc drive was having trouble finding data. So I'm inclined to put this in the category of Burn Quality and Aging Hardware.

I noticed even in Emulation the Volcano area has quite a bit going on with different sound effects loading in and out and it did sometimes result in a noticeable delay in battles starting up and what not. So I wouldn't be surprised if this area just has so much loading in an out that an aging Saturn or a bad burn could cause that behavior.

If others can get this to happen more consistently and we can find a more repeatable pattern though I'll dig into it more.

 

[themadhaxor]

I've had pretty major issues on my Saturn going in and out of Battles and the game engine (controllable part) loading after cut scenes.
Basically if you guys are going to Beta test...use an emulator...
The main problem here is related to 3 things
1) Good quality image from original media
2) Burning software / speed of burn / quality of media used
3) Age of Saturn and quality of CD laser
In an ideal situation you should have:
1) Dump the image from original media using Clone CD
2) Use clone CD to burn at 1x with known high quality media (I use Arita [Ritek dye] or even better Archive grade media)
3) Have a Saturn that is "new old stock" and unopened in box.
1 is easy to achieve, 2 would be easy to achieve - but we are converting to ISO/WAV/CUE instead of BIN/CCD/CUE (this means we are losing sub channel data) and 3 is VERY hard to achieve...just because of price...
Failing that you can save up and invest in an ODE like Phoebe or Rhea.
I'll be switching to an emulator soon - But I'm also going to invest in hardware that lets me transfer saves to/from my Saturn for when things get towards final beta (or if real hardware is needed for random bug tests)

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

While you certainly can rebuild it as a BIN/CUE and I've done that before in my own testing, the issue is the only tools out there that can build Saturn Compliant CD images all build as an ISO. There is VCDTools which should be able to build more advanced images, but it's quite archaic to work with and I haven't really had time to mess with it. Anything else out there like CD Mage requires the files to be the same size or smaller than the original files you are replacing. This is not an option as the English files are bigger than the Japanese files in many cases, plus we need to add new files.

The problem with this though is that even if I built it that way it would then be next to impossible to make a patch for that. Basically if you rip your Disc as BIN/CUE and I rip mine as BIN/CUE, your rip and my rip will be different. This is because basically every disc drive will read the audio offsets differently thus creating a different looking image.

However most of the problems that you've described can be avoided by following these three simple guidelines:

• Use ImgBurn to rip the disc at the slowest speed possible.
• After patching burn the disc using ImgBurn at the slowest possible speed.
• Use high quality CD-R Media. Something like these should be good enough.

 

[themadhaxor]

@TrekkiesUnite118 - I'm just going to follow your initial advice and use an emulator to help with beta testing, as making CDR backups with each beta will use too many discs.
Once there is a need to move to actual hardware - then we can all use CDR backups to test that properly, i.e. once both discs have been fully translated and play tested at least once.
[was pretty cool to see this in English on my actual Saturn - but patience brings great rewards...)
Like you said earlier - Grandia is a workout for the Saturn laser, at it always streams data...best to test with modern CD/DVD drives on a PC emulated Saturn environment till bugs have all been nailed 😎
Thank you again for all your hard work. 🙂

 

[Ardiloso]

Hi @TrekkiesUnite118 I have a question regards censorship. Would you replace the coffee word with sake? It's really dumb and offputting they talking about coffee every time someone is drunk/acting weird while they are clearly talking about sake. :-/
Sue's uncle hiding coffe from his wife is so bad.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Hi @TrekkiesUnite118 I have a question regards censorship. Would you replace the coffee word with sake? It's really dumb and offputting they talking about coffee every time someone is drunk/acting weird while they are clearly talking about sake. :-/
Sue's uncle hiding coffe from his wife is so bad.

That's something to do at a much later time. Plus not every Coffee reference is Sake. There's various different types of alcohol mentioned such as Beer, Whiskey, etc. If I did that I'd want to make sure it was actually accurate. Otherwise you'd end up with a Weaboo level translation.

 

[LG30]

Hi. I want to thank you for the work you do on this game. For now, I'm your progress and I posted on a French forum. I have also created English covers for this game. Waiting for the rest with the CD2. Thank you.

[SAT] Les Jeux Traduits - darius-saturn.com

darius-saturn.com

http://www.mediafire.com/file/w6jkhuh5y4b8097/Grandia_Patch_English_Covers_Pack.zip/file

 

[Ars]

Hi! Is there any unused dialogues found in the saturn version while you ported an english script?

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Hi! Is there any unused dialogues found in the saturn version while you ported an english script?

Not that I know of, but I didn't really go looking for any. Disc 1 the PS1 has additional map files added and the Saturn has some older development ones. Disc 2 though is where things get really interesting as the Saturn has a ton of files from Disc 1 on it and some alternate versions of other maps.

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

Awesome stuff, looking forward to this.

I realise it's not really in the purview of a translation, but any plans to change the requirements for Feena's Time Gate special?

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Awesome stuff, looking forward to this.

I realise it's not really in the purview of a translation, but any plans to change the requirements for Feena's Time Gate special?

If someone can point me to where the problem is I can take a look at it.

 

[samson7point1]

TrekkiesUnite118, this project is a dream come true for me. Grandia is my favorite game of all time. I taught myself Japanese in order to play through it when it first released and always felt cheated that we never got an English version on Saturn. Thank you so much for tackling this - I'd love to help in any way I can.

 

[Ardiloso]

If someone can point me to where the problem is I can take a look at it.

It's a magic you can only learn with level 99 on both water and wind elementals.
Probably he wants these requirements to be halved.

Edit: Wow I just learnt the requirements were supposed to be 35 water and 33 wind but due to a programing error you need 99 on both.

 

[ginoscope10]

Just wanted to come on here and register and say thanks for working on this translation. Last night I was able to get the game running on my Japanese launch Saturn with a Rhea installed. I just got to play the intro but so far I have not noticed any bugs. I will be glad to report any bugs that I find. I'm amazed how great it works thus far.

I'm using the latest patch from github (v0.59).