Found Surprise on Chrono Trigger CD on FF:Chronicles

[halkun]

There is a file called ROM.BIN If you copy that and rename it to rom.smc and play it with ZSNES, you get the Japanese version of Chrono Trigger. Just though I'd let you guys know that. I think that's pretty cool.

[Threesixty]

A true Easter Egg.

[eerrrr]

Oh yeah I heard that one before. I wonder why Square did it. I think people were saying stuff like Square just emulated the SNES game and converted it to english while it was played or something. I cant remember. I'm sure it was on a really old post in this forum, maybe before the split.

[Joey]

As usual.

[ficedula]

It could be that they read data (weapon stats, icons, etc.) out of the ROM, rather than bother converting all the data into other files.

Don't know, but it's one explanation.

[Aaron]

Someone who has it should try to replace the ROM with another SNES ROM and burn a new CD and see if anything interesting happens  

[sENGzAI]

what mean

[Sir Canealot]

Aaron means she will replace the japanse rom with an english one and see whats happens.

Or she meant that someone should do it. Now him simself do it....

Blarghth!

[Anonymous]

i think he means hed like to see if you could play snes games on the psx.

[Skillster/RedSarg99]

hmm
this was the case in the good old "bleem MB" days.
when the Jap rerelease of Chrono trigger came on the snes about 2 years ago, the same situation occured, Rom.bin was found to be a dump of the ROM found in the Jap version of Chrono Trigger cartridge for the Jap Snes.

as for reading it, i assume there are special flags that cause the emulating program to trigger FMV/anime cut scenes,
while Ficedula has a point about extracting data. but u gotta remember the PSX is slow and dumb (not dumb, jus kidding).
so any kinda mid game extraction/decompression is likley to cause pauses/slow down.
thats what i think anyway.
On the other hand if it was a full emulator,
id assume it would have been impossible to upload the entire ROM image to memory (as that is the case with EMUs) the PSX has about 2 mb memory, while the SNES rom of CT is about 3-4mg, right?

[Anonymous]

maybe thats why chrono trigger in ff:c is is damned slow.

[halkun]

From what I've been able to poke around and see, also from my reading on Japanses message boards, I have found why the CT rom is there and also how the other SNES<->PSX work as well. In true halkun posting style I must, of courese, write a novel about everything else before getting to my point. ^_^

From what I gather, once unpon a time in Squarsoft, word come down on high that the SNES games made by Square would be put togeather ino a compiliation pack. This was done for two reasons, first profit (They *are* a company you know) and second, to get the game's source code into a more portable format. (The original games were written in a mix of assembly and Nintendo's object code)

Now the SNES can only handle 32K at a time, so roms were commaonly broken up into "banks" to be swapped in and out. Sound was handled by a totaly different CPU with it's own memory too. This result is many "Parts" to a SNES game.

FF4 was ported by breaking up the ROM into parts and having the core engine rewritten. FF1 is only 1 Megabyte so they were load the while thing into memory in a PSX and have room to spare for the engine (That's why it runs the quickest out of all the ports) FF4 was broken into two parts. "Battle", and for all intensive purposes "Field". Sound was removed and replaced by something that just plays back the prerecorded music, As opposed to being done "on the fly" Sound effects are also done this wat too. The Save system was scrapped and replaced too.

With FF5 they ran into a problem, it was 2.5 Meg and won't all fit onto the PSX memory. Square had to resort the the same "banking" technique that they used in the SNES. So the broke that up too. The sound and the save system was removed an replaced by more portable code (Still played pre-recorded music ans SFX) and now there was a modules for battle, field, overworld, and menu. That's why it takes so long to pull up a menu, it has to load the whole thing from the CD-ROM which takes time.

FF6 weighs in at 3 Meg. Too big for the PSX. That was broken apart. Sound and Saves, same deal, but now it was broken into many files to make banking much less a load pain.

When CT was released it was decided to be a stand-alone in Japan. It was decided to actully intagrate the video into the game. The rom was broken up and the actual ROM.BIN *supposed* be be a dummy file. (The dummy files on the other SNES ports are the roms too, but they were zeroed out during the burn process) it's a left over from the devopment cycle. Replacing it won't really do anything as is is not used. The localazation team probably could't get the licence from Nintendo to put the english rom in there (Remeber, american releases are licenced through the big N) so it was the Japanese rom stuck.

Wow, I wrote alot again... Oh well, you guys get it.

[eerrrr]

Wow, thanks halkun. But what I want to know is if the ROM file isnt used during the game why is it there? Why didnt Square just delete it off the CD?

[halkun]

The rom was supposed to be. When you use Sony's Dev kit to make a commecial game, you commonly have a 640 meg partiton on you PC dev Hard drive that you can mirror to a blue dev PSX. (After the CD is burned, it's then ran on a green PSX to make sure you arn't violating silly things like caching or timing interrups.) It's much easier to screw with the the code and junk all in one partition. In the final stages of QA, important things like source code snippits, extra data, or notes get "dummined out" (Made all zeros before the CD burn) Things have been know to slip through, such as a southpark video on one CD and the entire source code of a popular dancing program on another. I think the rom was slated to be deleted, but was left in beacuse, well, no harm was being done and it made a neat bonus. I mean, after all, you just bought the CT game in Japan, you should have the right to play it on an emulator too. The US rom is tricky to get as Nintendo has it's fingers in it. Nintendo beleives that all emulators are illigal. Period. I'm sure having one of *thier* roms on a competiter's CD-ROM would of made the big N a bit upset. However an English rom would of been cool too. (Oh well, you could always patch I guess) Japanese roms are wholy owned by the software company. Notice no "Licenced by Nintendo" when you play the Japanese rom in an emulator same goes for all the FF. There is no "Nintendo seal of Quality" in Japan.

[This message has been edited by halkun (edited July 31, 2001).]

[chowderhead]

Very interesting, Halkun.  Never put much thought into the ins and outs of the Dev (having a "development" version saved to a hard drive-though i've worked in corporate intranet development, where we had a dev, staging and live version.  Musta been a brain fart.)  Being that I know next to nothing about game development, or Square's processes, what's the deal with the 'blue' and 'green' psx?

[halkun]

The blue PSX has 4 Meg, the green psx has 2 meg like the normal PSX but has "traps" set in the bios to catch silly errors. (In the blue PSX kseg1 and kseg2 are two diffrent banks of 2 meg. In a normal PSX kseg1 and kseg2 point to the same phyical memory, but kseg2 is cahced. You program on the blue PSX so you have more "breathing room" for your code. You the optimize and run on the green one for QA.

[Sir Canealot]

Blue/green ones? I thought there was only your normal grey one and the special black one?

[halkun]

Yaroze is the back one. It's a normal grey PSX painted back with the region lock lifted. It was a hobbie devopment PSX, but you didn't have access to the CD-ROM or memory cards when programming. You also had no access to the bios and had to do everything through a special static lib that got linked at compile-time. YOu could not use it to make commercial games as all programs made with the yaroze were property of Sony. Also the executible format is defferent (ECOFF, which used static libs as oppoased to ELF which allowed shared libs like .DLLs in windows or .so file in Linux) Because access to the CD rom was a no-no you had a max ot 2 meg availible *TOTAL* for devopment. You had to trasfer the program to the PSX via serial cable. It could take up to a half an hour to load a prgram to run it on the system. Sony plans to do the same thing with Linux for the PS2. Everything thriough a static lib, (You have to sign an NDA to use it) and CD-ROM, DVD-rom and mecards are a no-no. YOu also needs a "sync on green" moniter to hook it up to a moniter. the RGB out in intentialy broken in a PS2 (Defeats the macrovision for DVD playback)

[This message has been edited by halkun (edited July 31, 2001).]