Topics

1

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Location of text in PSX discs

« on: 2007-04-15 14:07:50 »

Sorry if this is covered somewhere else, I had no idea what to search for.

As we've been discussing in thread 6537, I'm studying in Japan right now and thought it would be nice to play through FF7 in Japanese. Sadly there was never an FF7PC in Japanese, which limits me to the ugly, low-resolution PSX version. Boo.

kini had the idea to extract the text out of the PSX version and load it into the PC version. I could see a few potential issues of this, given the surely-double-byte and possibly proprietary encoding of Japanese text on a PlayStation, but I thought I'd ask. So, does anyone know how I might go about extracting the game script from the PlayStation game discs?

2

General Discussion / FF7PC Japanese

« on: 2007-03-14 04:46:23 »

Does anyone know if FF7PC was ever released in Japanese? I know FF7, of course, was originally Japanese and translated to English. As EIDOS published the PC version, however, I'm assuming they simply built the game off the American PSX version, which would mean that there was never a Japanese PC version. I've checked auction sites here in Japan but all I can find is Advent Children and PSX, so it seems like this is a reasonable assumption. Is it? If there was indeed Japanese version, does anyone have it?

3

Archive / PSX Movie Reencoding / Movie Crash Fix

« on: 2006-06-04 23:14:43 »

I wasn't sure whether it was more appropriate to resurrect one of the several topics about this, or start my own post...so I'll go with the latter.

I played through everything on my game fine until the top of Gaea's Cliff, at which point a corrupted greatpit.avi caused it to hang. Codec switches, as suggested on thread 4876, didn't work. I opened the offender with VirtualDub, re-encoded it to Indeo 5.1, and it worked fine...until I got through the Whirlwind Maze, at which point biglight.avi also caused a hang. My re-encoding of greatpit.avi looked really ugly, so instead of reencoding biglight as well, I decided to go fetch my PSX discs and have at it.

I used PSXVideo to extract the original (much higher-quality) videos from the PSX discs, then encoded them with highest-quality Indeo 5.10 for the video and 128kbps MP3 for the audio. They are much better looking than the original FF7PC versions and smaller file sizes to boot.

I believe both Indeo 5.1 and MP3 are pre-installed standard in Windows XP, so if anyone else needs these fixed videos, let me know, and I will get them to you.

On that note, I thought I might go ahead and encode all of the original PSX videos for use on FF7PC, which would decrease the size of the game installation, solve crashing problems, and look way better. I searched around the forum and saw several people suggest this conversion for various reasons, but am unaware of anyone who has actually done so. Opinions? Would anyone else be interested in having these re-encodes? Would there be any legality to deal with if I were to release a package of all of them?