- I play the Saturn version with PS1 version running at the same time and where there is dialogue I just look at my laptop and read the English text so it's no hassle. IMO Grandia is probably the best Saturn game I own and I'm still on Disc 1. Definitly with playing.
- Mar 26, 2018 - Grandia Saturn English Patch Average ratng: 4,9/5 8822reviews. There are translation documents to be found, but if I remember correctly they.
Contents. Story In a humble port town, Justin is playing games with his friends, while rumors are circulating that a new continent has been found.
Aug 23, 2010 Re: Grandia Saturn Translation Patch? By MrPopo Sun Mar 08, 2009 8:57 pm Changing text from Japanese to English is much harder than simply the translation work.
Meanwhile, the Garlyle forces, the main militia of the game's primary villains, are hunting for information regarding power sealed inside of the ancient ruins of past civilizations. Justin, along with his friend Sue, dream of going on the same adventures that Justin's late father undertook before him.
Managing to get an entry pass to the adventurer's society, he is eventually led on a tour of the ancient ruins near his hometown. Inside, he opens a door with the help of a spirit stone and discovers that the legends of these cities may be a reality. But when the Garlyle forces go after him, they learn of what he has found and from there the adventure begins.
Gameplay Grandia was distinct from many JRPGs of its time, in that players can see the enemies on the world map. Whether or not an enemy is caught from behind or vice versa, can trigger a first-strike surprise battle in a separate screen. The battle mode is also semi-tactical; players do not move through a grid but a series of several spots in terms of evasion or reaching enemies.
Attacks are performed as a meter goes up, and this is the same for enemies, meaning whoever is first in line will be next to attack. Certain skills require more time to be process and even recover after use. Players can level up individual weapons, for which each character is capable of using a different set.
Magic is also leveled up, like weapons, through use, though they must be obtained using mana eggs. The field also allows people to interact with objects, which either results in something as pointless as causing a tool to rattle, or triggering a door, bridge, and such for another player to travel.
History Legacy The original Saturn version was a hit at the time of its release and won a Japan Game of the Year award. It sold nearly a million copies, and alongside, is one of the system's best selling titles. It has since become one of the system's most beloved titles.
In 2015, Dengeki Online, a major video game publication in Japan, did an article recollecting the Saturn's history. In it, contributors were asked to name their 20 all-time favorite Saturn games, with Grandia receiving a nearly unanimous recommendation. The Saturn version never saw a release outside of Japan. However, the PlayStation port, released in 1999, was published in both US and PAL territories. In Japan, although the PlayStation port entered the greatest hits line, it did not perform as well in sales numbers as its Saturn counterpart. In the west, Grandia was looked at as a cult classic but did not become the phenomenal hit that many english publications were expecting. Many gamers in the west view Saturn's definitive JRPG as either,.
Neither of these became a major success in western territories, and are sought after because of their limited production. Saturn was being discontinued in the US when Grandia debuted in Japan, where it continued to be produced until 2001. During the 1997-1998 period, Saturn's main competitor for an RPG blockbuster was PlayStation's Final Fantasy VII by SquareSoft (now Square-Enix). Although Saturn could never rival the sales of Sony's console and it's highlights, the Japanese market's acceptance of Saturn helped usher the lighthearted Grandia into commercial success. In this region, it was viewed as the system's answer to Final Fantasy VII (as some US outlets even suggested) though the two are quite different in style. The PS version features some downgraded graphical effects, mostly due to 2D layering. For example, the Saturn version has a higher definition battle background.
Spanish To English Translation
The Saturn version also had an expansion disc called, which allowed players to use their save files from the original game with a variety of bonus dungeons and unlockables. Versions Fan Translations A fan translation in Korean exists for the Saturn version and is attributed to a South Korean ROM hacker known as CyZero. Most of the text is translated to Korean except the battle icons and the voices, which remain in Japanese as in the original. Magazine articles Main article:. Promotional material.
So a while back I made a topic here about translating Lunar Silver Star Story for the Saturn. I got stuck early on and wasn't able to make much progress. However recently members over at SegaXtreme such as Ms.
Tea have been able to make headway due to a somewhat recent iOS port that is based on the Saturn port. So since it's now at a point where there's not much for me to really help with at the moment with that project, I've been snooping around in Grandia's files for the Saturn and PS1. And it's actually proving to be quite a bit easier to figure out so far due to the following reasons:.
The PS1 version and the Saturn version's files are actually quite similar. The English PS1 version's script is completely uncompressed and in ASCII formatting. The Saturn version's script is also completely uncompressed, but uses a custom encoding format. The Saturn version was somewhat recently translated into Korean which has made it easy to isolate where the script is.
The Saturn version has 2 fonts stored in FDATA.BIN. There's an uncompressed 8x8 font that has a full English ASCII font for menus. The rest of the game uses a compressed 16x16 fixed width font. Luckily however members at SegaXtreme made tools to decompress and recompress it years ago. These can be used to replace the font and put it in an order to allow for ASCII formatted text. The English PS1 version uses a fixed width 8x16 font instead.
The games file structure also seems to be pretty straight forward. The FIELD directory has the following files of interest:. Numerous.MDT files - These contain the games script. In the PS1 version they're now.MDP files. ITGET.BIN - I'm guessing this is where the menu text lives. This is probably the equivalent of the ITEM.BIN file in the PS1 version.
CMDMN.BIN Again this looks like either Menu text, guessing command related based on what's in it and the name. CNFIG.BIN This again looks to be like menu text, guessing Config menu based on the name.
SHOP.BIN This is most likely Shop Menu text by the looks of things. SVLD.BIN Again looks to be Menu text, I'm guessing this is for the Save/Load screen based on whats in it and the name. AMAP#.ADD - I'm not sure what these are, but they were modified in the Korean translation. I'm guessing Map screens?. WDATA.DAT - I'm guessing this is Weapons Data. Most of these guesses were made by comparing the Korean, Japanese, and English versions. So with that out of the way, here's some of more fun stuff I've been able to figure out.
First of all, I was able to figure out how at least some of the text encoding works in the Saturn version. Basically the game uses the position in the font table + 31 as the code for the font characters in the.MDT files. And going further, the Japanese PS1 uses this same method. So let's say you want to display the letter A. This is the 11th character in the font table. So to display it, you use the hex value 2A. This is because 11 + 31 = 42, which is 2A in hex.
With this knowledge I was able to modify the file BA38.MDT and change some text in the intro cutscene: Next, using tools made by CyberWarriorX on SegaXtreme, I was able to extract the font for both the Japanese and Korean Saturn versions: And I was also able to get the English PS1 font: Using the tool TileMolester, I was able to stretch the English PS1 font to 16x16, and place it in the Saturn font file in ASCII order. This allowed me to use ASCII encoding to change the text to English: Currently, I've been working on two things. First I've been making a Kanji table based on the games Font File. Basically this should at the very least make viewing the script easier in hex editors as the Japanese characters will be displayed correctly. I'd imagine it will also make dumping the script easier. Next I've been figuring out the control codes for the text boxes.
So far I've been able to determine the following, which I hope is correct: x09 = Pause in writing the text. Seems to correspond to pauses in voiced sequences. 0FXX = These seem to correspond to various different things. XX I've seen range from 01 up to 0A. 0F03 = This seems to control the Left Character Portrait. 0F21 = This seems to control the Right Character Portrait.
0A0C 00XX = This seems to control which portrait is being displayed, and appears to be called when we change portraits as well. So for example if you see this: 0F03 0A0C 00XX It means change the Left Character Portrait to portrait XX. I was able to confirm this by changing the values of XX to arbitrary values which gave the following results: So the area I think I'm going to get stuck on is the issue of dealing with the font size. I'd imagine some kind of ASM Hack will be needed to change the game to use an 8x16 font so the English PS1 font can be used. That's an area that I really have no experience in and it's simply a skill set I just don't have. There's an old thread over at SegaXtreme that goes into some details on how the Font Compression works, which might also shed some light on how text is rendered: After that however, I think it's just a matter of figuring out the rest of the control codes for the games scripts as well as figuring out formatting of the menu text files.
Once that's figured out I think making tools to dump the script and inject new values shouldn't be too difficult to do. Obviously I don't think this will be a trivial matter, but I figured I'd share my findings none the less./list. Well that makes things easier to say the least: So really all that would need to be done here is find out the control codes as well as any pointers in the files that determine text position and length.
With that figured out putting in the English PS1 script would be rather simple I'd imagine. Though I do wonder if there's a way to just modify the game to default to the 8x16 font instead of the 16x16 one so you don't have to waste a byte for each line of text with the 03 control code.
-1.jpg "Saturn Grandia English Translation")
EDIT: So I think I might be figuring out how the script pointers work based on comparing the PS1 versions, and then spot checking with the Saturn version. So here is what I believe to be one complete text routine from the file BA38.MDT at x05B4: This highlighted portion I believe is a header of some kind. It seems to change from text sample to text sample, so there's probably optional values that are in some text boxes but not in others. Now this next highlighted portion is the important part.
This value I believe represents how many bytes until the end of this text box. In this example it's 5A: If we then move forward 5A that will bring us to the end of this block of data. The end of a block of text data seems to be tagged with this possible footer: After this the next text box starts.
I've been able to keep following this pattern and consistently keep finding what appears to be the correct number of bytes and the start of the next text box. I'm going to keep testing this but so far it's looking promising. Also, another interesting thing of note is that it seems that the English PS1 versions files seem to be close to if not the same size as the Japanese PS1 files.
It looks like Sony removed unnecessary padding to keep the files close to the same size from what I can tell. Ok, so I think I've cracked the code of the MDT/MDP file headers. This information seems to hold true for both the Saturn and PS1 files, the only difference being that in the PS1 files pointers are Little Endian where as in the Saturn files they're Big Endian.
The header is 512 Bytes in size. The header seems to consist of just a pointer table. Each entry is 8 bytes total in size. The first 4 bytes seem to be the place in the file where the data lives. The second 4 bytes seem to be the size of the data. The entry that tells us where the text lives and how big it is seems to be at x60 every time.
There's an entry at x58 that seems to point to a 24 byte piece of data right before the text. Perhaps this is a header or something?. Consistently I'm seeing in the English PS1 version that any addresses that come after the address defined at x60 have their values increased by the increase in size of the text data, and any values that come before it are untouched. I'm also seeing again padding being removed in the PS1 files of the exact amount added to the text. Another oddity I'm seeing is that the last entry in the table at x1F8 seems to also have it's size increased by the increase in text size. But I'm not sure what that value represents or what data was added. Some other oddities I'm seeing is that some entries don't seem to make sense as the addresses are beyond the size of the file, but they're still updated in the English PS1 version.
With this info I imagine I should be able to make a program that can do the following:. Parse the MDT files. Extract the script portions. Put the MDT file back together with a new script portion. Recalculate the pointer table. The hard part to automate in code I'd imagine would be to find a portion of padding in the file that can be removed to keep the file size the same. Well my thought was use the PS1 script as a quick and dirty v0.1 kind of release.
Just as a proof of concept that it can be done and works. Then if there's people fluent in Japanese who want to step forward and actually do a good translation once there's mature enough tools they can have at it. I did think about using the old Project Alent translation for some spots, but if memory serves correctly that was never 100% complete.
But I'd imagine for at least a v1.0 release using the PS1 Script I could go through and correct some errors and redo things like the coffee lines and what not. Though to be honest I'd probably need some help there as well to identify and correct them. It would be possible, but probably a bit tricky to figure out. The Saturn audio is ADX encoded, and it's all in one big file called GM1.STZ The PS1 seems to have this same set up too, but I'm not sure if it uses ADX encoding. My guess would be no though since at the time that was more of a Sega Console specific format until post Dreamcast days.
So this file would need to be broken down into it's original individual audio files first. Next would be re-encoding the PS1 samples into ADX and putting the.STZ file back together correctly. That I see being tricky.
I have an ADX Encoder/Decoder from years ago when I did music/voice modifications for Phantasy Star Universe, but I have no idea if it will be compatible with Grandia.