Messages

1

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: Location of text in PSX discs

« on: 2007-04-17 15:58:08 »

Wow lots of interesting comments, thanks everyone. The FF7 Japanese discs arrived yesterday. Here's the contents of kernel.bin and window.bin. I was only able to find three tim files in window.bin, i can't figure out what the fourth 2kb file was. FFText was useless on the kernel.bin files because...well, they're not encoded in english. Anyway, here's a couple of zip files.

http://students.washington.edu/ckovatch/ff7/window.zip
http://students.washington.edu/ckovatch/ff7/kernel.zip

The contents of 2.tim and 3.tim are most interesting, but will be difficult to understand unless you're familiar with kanji. halkun, I'm hoping that your avatar guarantees me this assumption

2.tim has the standard Hiragana/Katakana/Romaji/weapon images/etc. stored on the odd-numbered CLUTs (the first CLUT being #1), but on the even-numbered CLUTs, there's an entirely different Kanji set stored on the upper half. Interestingly, the 11th row of Kanji is cut-off midway. This may be the fault of my TIM viewer more than the file itself.

3.tim is similar, with a Kanji/romaji split on the odd-numbered CLUTs, again with some evidence of overwritten Kanji present. Even-numbered CLUTs have a whole bunch of kanji.

I also checked window.bin from FF7PC, which has only three files, two of which are TIM. The Hiragana/Katakana (Japanese syllabry) is present, but the kanji is not. I'd be interested in looking at window.bin from the US PSX FF7, but my discs are in America 

What TIM viewer/converter do you guys use? None of the ones I've found seem to handle the Japanese TIM files properly.

2

General Discussion / Re: FF7PC Japanese

« on: 2007-04-15 14:42:13 »

Menu system, name input, save game: don't really care if it's in English, but it shouldn't be much different. There are some games in Japan which are completely Japanese except for the menu system.
Movies: I've been planning on re-encoding from the PSX discs for higher-quality anyway.
Bitmap graphics: Not sure exactly what graphics you are talking about, but again, it's the dialog I'm concerned about. Knowing the Japanese for "Left D-Pad Button" isn't going to be all that useful. (well, outside of most circles...heh)

If I have to, I will resort to running it emulated. However, that's not only super-ghetto, but prevents me from running the really cool projects that are going on around here, such as the NPC reconstruction project. The game is just that-much-more immersing when the models look like...real people. I don't think it's necessary to be so negative about this idea. I'm a reasonably accomplished programmer and, with help getting the structures worked out -- most of which are already done, from what I can tell -- it shouldn't be hard to automate most of it.

Additionally, if I do get this completed, it would sure be cool to provide to the Japanese gaming community, since they never had an FF7PC. I've shown several of my friends here FF7PC+highres+NPC+FF7Music, and they had their socks rocked. It'd be nice if they could share that.

3

General Discussion / Re: FF7PC Japanese

« on: 2007-04-15 14:13:28 »

I was thinking the same thing. The format will indeed be significantly different, as PSX discs don't have file structure. Sector addresses to access for data are encoded directly into the game. That said, text is text, and barring any compression or weirdness like that, is generally pretty easy to locate within files and extract into another format. I started a thread in technical to ask.

4

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?

5

General Discussion / Re: FF7PC Japanese

« on: 2007-04-15 03:14:08 »

Cromas, theres no real difference between PSX and PC version, except that PSX version is less modifiable. I say just emulate it with PSXE.

Well, except for the whole FF7PC can run in high-resolution with high-quality models thing. 

According to Wikipedia Japan, FF7 was released for Windows "in America," which would indicate to me that it didn't make it to Japan. So I ordered the PSX version from Amazon.co.jp yesterday.

6

Releases / Re: [Release] Slayersnext's Customized Models

« on: 2007-04-14 05:42:42 »

Hi! how are?
that night I explored Kimera program and last I have do some Yuffie-Cloud-Tifa customized models XD
TADAH!! jejeje

Do you like them?? (I new in that of the 3D)

Very nice work! I really like the hairstyles on all three characters. They remind me of the hairstyles I see in Japan these days =P

7

Troubleshooting / Re: So, uh, Vista?

« on: 2007-04-14 04:55:35 »

I was thinking of it as a way to bypass the problems generated (by? around?) the videos, not for trying to make them look better

I had several broken TrueMotion movies that were causing FF7 to crash when they would play. I was successful at using VirtualDub to both re-encode the PC movies and encode the original PSX moves into Indeo 5. So yes, this is a solution, but it probably depends on the codec you use. I used Indeo because it comes with Windows and is recent enough that it shouldn't drop quality, although if I remember correctly, DivX worked fine too.

Check the thread here for a deeper discussion about both of these topics:
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=5700

8

Releases / Re: NPC Reconstruction Project

« on: 2007-03-19 14:47:04 »

Well... we try to make the models the more similar in many ways to the original one ... but improvements imply changes too...

Storm, I think one thing that should definitely be done is re-lighting the main character models (Cloud, Barrett, etc.) I know they are dark because they were taken directly from the Battle models, etc., but they definitely clash with the NPC models which are lighted in a much more natural way. When one of the Square models is standing next to one of your fabulous NPC models, the lighting clashes and sort of spoils the effect.

Also, I still think Priscilla's boobs are too big. She's supposed to be a little girl.

Thank you and everyone on the team for all your hard work. You are breathing a lot of life into this classic, and adding a lot to the FF7 legacy.

9

General Discussion / Re: FF7PC Japanese

« on: 2007-03-19 14:04:01 »

Cromas, I assume you think that the Japanese version is better than the American? 

Rather, I'm currently studying abroad in Japan and would like to try playing through in Japanese =) Especially because, despite the fixed-up translation in the PC release of FF7, there are still some parts that are sort of vague.

10

General Discussion / Re: FF7PC Japanese

« on: 2007-03-18 01:21:21 »

Right, but those are both PSX versions, I'm asking about the PC.

11

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?

12

Releases / Re: NPC Reconstruction Project

« on: 2007-03-14 03:16:47 »

Is the latest version of NPCRP still 0.6? This thread is so messy and random now, it's hard to stay up to date.

13

Archive / Re: The Idiots Guide To FF7Music (JK xD)

« on: 2006-07-16 21:32:06 »

Would you be able to split minipsfs with Cool Edit Pro 2.0?

No, PSF is a format some guy invented when ripping audio directly out of the PSX data...Cool Edit works on digital audio files. PSFs are closer to midi than DA (more like modules, if you've heard of those).

14

Archive / Re: The Idiots Guide To FF7Music (JK xD)

« on: 2006-06-26 17:09:19 »

I don't use winamp.

Then go download it, get your files, and delete it. Sheesh.

15

Releases / Re: NPC Reconstruction Project

« on: 2006-06-21 19:06:04 »

Prisilla looks too tall to me here. She was short in the game because she is a child, but it looks like she's adult height here...

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Archive / Re: The Idiots Guide To FF7Music (JK xD)

« on: 2006-06-07 21:46:17 »

As for Mogu, that is the same song as Honey Bee Manor. the same song is used.

That's not correct. Mogu is a very simple version of the highwind melody/fanfare. It doesn't appear anywhere in the game except for the victory song of Mog's House, so it's not on the soundtrack.

You can listen to the midi version here, though you will need to use Winamp or something similar, Windows Media Player does not understand ff7's raw midi format.

17

Archive / Re: PSX Movie Reencoding / Movie Crash Fix

« on: 2006-06-07 21:42:55 »

I figured a properly resampled encode to 640 X 480 would look better than the FF7 engine stretching them.
kind of like resampling an image in photoshop compared to stretching it in mspaint.

I don't think the FF7 engine does any stretching, I'm pretty sure it's all handled by the video framework in Windows. The fact that you can make out the graniness is probably just because you/we're not used to watching 320x240 movies in full screen.

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Archive / Re: PSX Movie Reencoding / Movie Crash Fix

« on: 2006-06-05 19:15:24 »

IF the movies were resampled to 640 X 480 and encoded at that resolution (and FF7 would accept them and not stretch them) it would be worthwhile.

I disagree. I think the boogdown example proves there is a significant qualitative difference in (at least some) of the videos. Stretching to 640x480 would not only introduce resampling blurriness, but it would take approximately four times the space. I don't want a 4GB movie directory.

19

Archive / Re: PSX Movie Reencoding / Movie Crash Fix

« on: 2006-06-05 03:24:36 »

..yeah, i tried someting similair to this, but i noticed a slowdown in the movies, and mis-synching of video/audio.

I haven't had that problem. Perhaps due to the codecs you chose/speed of your system/etc etc.

i don't get how people believe the psx movies are that higher quality - i've dumped them all to avi and converted to mpeg and compared with the pc movies and they are identical.

Part of the reason your videos look identical is because of the way you went about it. That sounds like one, possibly two encodings where, depending on the codecs used, a significant amount of quality could have been lost.

Here's a comparison from boogdown, PSX and PC version. I pixel-scaled these x2.

PSX frame 1

PC frame 1


The PSX version is quite a bit clearer (look at the starfield), but the PC version actually has more image visible; look at the pink "cactus" in the bottom middle. There's also a clear color difference, the orbit lines are a much deeper red in the PC version, they are much more orange in the PSX. I would hypothesize that the PC version was not created from the PSX originals but from some other renderings, which would have probably been 320x240 in size. Those renders would then have been color-corrected, as television color is a bit different than PC color, and then resized to 320x224 for compatibility reasons. The interpolation involved would have introduced the blurriness.

Here is an animation that fades between the two frames. The difference is significant. This raises interesting concerns in replacing these videos -- if I simply drop the reencoded PSX videos in, they may not match the backgrounds of the PC version. I loaded up an old save and checked it -- the PSX videos actually line up better with the backgrounds, at least for the boogdown/up sequences. Interesting.

20

Archive / Re: PSX Movie Reencoding / Movie Crash Fix

« on: 2006-06-04 23:45:29 »

Unfortunately it would be impossible to do any sort of patch program for this, since the files have no binary relation, despite being the same actual movie. Similarly, the process itself will take many hours and several tools, so while I will probably write up a guide, it's far more amicable to be able to release something. Sigh.

21

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?

22

Archive / Re: The Idiots Guide To FF7Music (JK xD)

« on: 2006-05-31 22:23:58 »

I have the problem a problem with 1.51 and Direct Sound erroring out when it attempts to play anything which sucks because the ramps cause the entire Wave channel to ramp if I use the in_wave plugin.  I checked on the MSDN boards and read something about that error being caused by two programs attempting to use direct sound exclusively or something.  It seemed to work fine when FFMusic was patched into the FF7.exe but now that it's a seperate window in_ds doesn't like it.

Why not just use out_wave instead of out_ds?

23

Releases / Re: NPC Reconstruction Project

« on: 2006-05-28 22:58:48 »

cromas: You're right the lighing of the models made in the reunion patch was pretty dark.  Sometime I'll redo the lighing on all these models.

Thanks for your reply, Storm. Exactly what is involved with adjusting the lighting? I'd be willing to do this once finals are over (next week) if you guys don't have time for such tweaking.

24

Releases / Re: NPC Reconstruction Project

« on: 2006-05-28 11:40:42 »

Everyone who has been working on and contributing to this project --

THANK YOU

I can't tell you how much this adds to the experience of playing this game. One of the hardest parts for me as always been reconciling the child-like proportions and animations of the models with the (mostly) grown-up characters of the story. These models make it seem so much more immersive, and really help to cut down on the inconsistencies between sequences. THANK YOU!

I do have one question, however...the models are generally very dark for me. Is this common or is it something peculiar to my video card? Sometimes things look fine, but most of the time, they are significantly darker than the surroundings or the original models. I'm sure there's a reason for that someone already understands/has already been discussed, but is there a way to fix it?

25

Archive / Re: The Idiots Guide To FF7Music (JK xD)

« on: 2006-05-27 21:26:53 »

Here are some additions and corrections I've found.

Corrections

• cintro: is only the first 11 seconds of Those Chosen By The Planet. I don't know if this is important or not. Not in the PSF pack.
• comical: this is definitely not J-E-N-O-V-A. I'm not sure what it is (I can't recall ever hearing it before), possibly part of the honeybee sidequest? Not included on the OST nor the PSF pack.
• tb: this is actually only the second half of ta. On the tracks I ripped from my OST, it begins about 3:49 and goes until the end. It's the much more depressing part of the song, and would change the feel of your first World Map adventures.

Additions

• nointro: this is the complement to 'cintro', aka Those Chosen By The Planet without the introductory heartbeats. 904 in the PSF pack.

Missing Songs

• mogu: This is the song that plays in the Mog's House(?) minigame at the golden saucer when you succeed in teaching him to fly. It's the highwind melody, the one after you do the jet conversion. Not included in PSFs nor OST.