Final Fantasy Origins

Thanks to the amazing power of getting money I never expected, I now have this set of games. As per usual, it's a Square (well, it's Square-Enix now isn't it?) package with a remake of a game I already own and a remake of a game I don't own. So far, I'm rather enjoying myself. The graphics are boosted just like what I read about. The music, that's incredible! It's Chrono Cross quality!

The gameplay for FF1 has been altered... They removed the individual limited equipment and used the later FF's pooled unlimited equipment. You can have pretty much whatever you want whenever you want, and everyone can use everything during battles! Nuts... I liked that kind of difficulty in the original. Oh well, I still HAVE the original. I really wish they kept the original gameplay. Some of the things they changed they DO allow you to change back in the options menu, but not everything.

Oh well, I'm off to continue the fantasy! FF2 I've only just started. That too seems amazing, especially with it being a game I have yet to play, it being never released in the US before. Now all we need is FF3 for GBA and all the unreleased games will be here!

Well, I reached Elfheim (Elfland), and it seems there is a gravestone with something interesting printed on it.

May Link rest in peace.

Funny thing is in the NES version, it says "Here lies Erdrich" or something similar. That fellow being the main character of Dragon Warrior 1. Another point of notice is that was actually a change from the Japanese version, and it turns out that the Japanese version of the original Famicom game has Link on there too. Seems they went one way here in America to kinda mess with Enix, then later then went back for the PS1 version since Square and Enix are fused together as one.

I thought the gravestone was cute.

How are the load times?

How 'bout, nonexistant? They really did a good job optimizing things here. When you use fast loading on the PS2, what little there is vanishes. Remember, this game is a remake, not just a port (well, it's a port of a remake, but they added more stuff to this so it's actually a slight remake of a remake...), so they actually did more than just simple emulating. It's all pretty much seamless.

That's good. Because from what I heard about Final Fantasy Chronicles, poor ol' Chrono Trigger took quite a while to load. Of course, PS2 is much better at loading than its predecessor. I've never played FFC, but I've downloaded a few anime cutscenes from CT on KaZaA. Talk about suh-weet! :D I have the original SNES cartridge of CT though, and I already beat a ROM of FF4 I used to have, so I may not ever get FFC. But I would like to get my hands on FF Origins, as well as Anthology. (I beat an FF6 ROM, but it was so awesome, I just have to own the game! Just in case my computer has to be reformatted a third time this year. @.o)

There are good reasons to get all three collections. FFV here in the US is only on PS1, so that's why you need Anthology. FFIV's original unaltered version with all the cool moves (well, the enemies have new moves too...) and a DECENT translation make Chronicles worth it (I never played FFIV when it was on SNES anyway). Origins has the unreleased in America FFII, plus the amazing graphical and sound updates and some various tweaks to make various activities easier (like being able to buy multiple items in one go at a store instead of having to buy 99 potions individually...).

You are right though, Chrono Trigger has TERRIBLE load times! It's very weird. In Japan, Final Fantasy IV had the horrendous load times while Chrono Trigger had seamless loadtimes. However, when they translated it, they somehow screwed up Chrono Trigger enough to give it HORRIBLE load times (can't even stand it on a PS1, it's only playable on a PS2 with fast load times activated). On the other hand, the translators fixed Final Fantasy IV and gave it completely seamless loadtimes (the whole game save music is dumped into RAM from the start).

I've been hearing lots of conflicting reports on FF3. Some places that are decently reliable say that the Wonderswan Color port is still on (which begs the questions, why so long to release, and why not update the sound and release it for the Wonderswan Crystal?), while others are saying that it's been cancelled for Bandai's handheld and is either being ported to GBA or being ported to PS1. I hope at least one of the latter is true (hopefully the one that will make the game portable :D), but now I'm very confused, whereas just yesterday I thought I knew that it was certainly going to GBA. I WANT THE ONION KIDS!

Haha, I just tried something out of curiosity and wow. There's this file called "ROM.BIN" on the Chrono Trigger CD in the Chronicles collection for PS1 when you put the PS1 disk in your computer's drive. It was roughly the size of the actual SNES game, so I figured I'd try something. I loaded up an SNES emulator, went to the disk, and loaded the file straight off the disk. BOOM! Chrono Trigger's ROM is actually stored directly on the disk. It happens to be in Japanese, and none of the changes are there, but still, it's quite hilarious. I think this may explain why the US version is so slow in load times compaired to the Japanese version. The US version has to apply language changes constantly, while the Japanese version just uses the default ROM's langauge features during emulation! Loading all these, even for just loading battle text, likely takes time.

In other words, the people who ported Chrono Trigger here were lazy because they didn't just put the US ROM on the disk and translate the added menus. That actually could have saved them time in the long run :D. Sad really...

That sucks. I didn't have any patience for the PS1 port of Chrono Trigger. The load times are annoying as hell.

Yeah, like I said I can only bare the loading when I turn on the PS2's quick load feature for PS1 games. Well, I only got it for FF4 anyway, so no biggy (the FMVs and various extra game data are nice though).

Another thing they have to reapply during each load is the stupid control change Square USA has been applying to ALL their RPGs since FF8. I mean, the original control style the Japanese versions have is FINE, why must they constantly switch the X and O functionality for the US versions?! Seriously, if the disk didn't have to constantly read from the edited text and edited button assignment files every single time something loaded, the load times would be as instantaneous as the Japanese version! Had they MERELY put the English ROM on the disk and did some minor translating of the "external" (outside the ROM) menus (and left the button assignment alone), the load times would be exactly the same as the Japanese game! That is to say, none except for the "external" menus (like the added save menu and the PS1 specific menus for other stuff) and the FMV starting, which were the things that took the least amount of time to load anyway. Lazy people... They actually made more work for themselves and in the end made a worse product than if they just thought for a moment... And it's not that they are lazy, no, they are just selectively lazy! The translated copy of FF4 is flawless loading. I mean, it's like they only cared about FF4 (except the memory card access is still very slow) and didn't really even try on Chrono Trigger.

Originally posted by Dark Jaguar
Haha, I just tried something out of curiosity and wow. There's this file called "ROM.BIN" on the Chrono Trigger CD in the Chronicles collection for PS1 when you put the PS1 disk in your computer's drive. It was roughly the size of the actual SNES game, so I figured I'd try something. I loaded up an SNES emulator, went to the disk, and loaded the file straight off the disk. BOOM! Chrono Trigger's ROM is actually stored directly on the disk. It happens to be in Japanese, and none of the changes are there, but still, it's quite hilarious. I think this may explain why the US version is so slow in load times compaired to the Japanese version. The US version has to apply language changes constantly, while the Japanese version just uses the default ROM's langauge features during emulation! Loading all these, even for just loading battle text, likely takes time.

In other words, the people who ported Chrono Trigger here were lazy because they didn't just put the US ROM on the disk and translate the added menus. That actually could have saved them time in the long run :D. Sad really...

I got a "backup" version of the game (so that I can alter the disc) and want to try to replace the Japanese ROM with the English SNES ROM, but I'm not sure what else I should do. I assume that I'll have to remove the English translation patch, right?

The best solution would probably be to find out what files are stored on the Japanese disk and use those. It would be a lot easier than having to figure out how the patching works and how to disable it. Of course that'll mean all the extra menus will be in Japanese, but the main game will be in English like you want and I think the extra menus will be easy enough to navigate, in theory... Well, it might be annoying to have all those monster data things in Japanese, I dunno...

In any case, give it a try. If this works, it'll mean English CT on PS1 with the Japanese instant load times (ala US FFIV and FFOrigins). From there we can try seeing if we can get just the right files to translate the extra menus.

OB1... I found a site with the game like one minuite (actually, it was less than a minuite...) after you quit MSN. :)

This is a subsite of a decent rom site that is marred by everpresent broken links... but the ones on this site work.

Its just got the Chrono series. Yup, that's it... but it has all of them. :)

http://chronotrigger.emuparadise.org/

Nice, thanks.

DJ, I don't have the Japanese disc so I don't know where the translation patch is. Guess I'll just have to try it a bunch of times. :S

Hmm, well that was the easiest way.

The thing is, the patch is almost certainly not just a file you can remove. It could be that the files are different all around. It could be that they added a translation file, but would of course also have to tell the main file that runs the emulation to access said file and how to incorporate it. Being a PS1 game that expects everthing to be exactly as it needs to be, it would likely crash if that file was missing.

The other way they did it could have been that the Japanese could have made the game with the translation in mind, and it could have just looked for the English patch file, and if it's not found, just run the game in Japanese. This seems VERY unlikely...

The thing is, I'm fairly certain the only real way to do this would just be to get a copy of the Japanese version and use that as the basis. I know that'd be hard though... Sucks that Square USA would be so incredibly lazy... I mean, I knock them on laziness because I KNOW they have the skill! They ported FF4 excellently, with no load times at all except for saving and loading (being a 2 block memory file, it's ridiculous how long it takes to do that), but just kinda slapped a patch on CT, not even trying to keep it up to the Japanese version's speed, and left it at that. I still think if they had just put the English rom on the game and translated the menus it not only could have been easier but it would have been just as speedy as the Japanese version. I do believe I may be missing something about that though... something they as the actual programmers know that I obviously don't.

In any case, good luck on this project. Maybe if you do get the Japanese version you can test this out and fix it after all, thus prooving WE should be doing the translating jobs (well, if we knew ANY Japanese at all that is :D).

Ok I tried simply replacing the Japanese ROM with the English ROM, but it would not start in my PS1. Perhaps it's because it was named differently, or maybe because the Engish ROM is a .spc file while the Japanese one is a .bin file?

Um, duh? :D It's looking for a specific file name, plus I'm not sure if the extension means the file is stored differently, but it does need to be binary, that is straight data not processed in any way from the cart.

Well thanks for telling me that before. :bang:

What do I do now?

Yeah sorry, I just assumed you knew that.

Anyway, now then... Try looking online for some sort of ROM type converter. Not sure if any exist, but it's worth a try. If that doesn't work, try just finding the binary version of the ROM image.

No luck so far. Would you mind helping me out here?

It would help if you would tell us what you've done so far.

I can't find a .bin CT ROM or a spc-to-bin converter. That's all I need.

I wouldn't even know where to start looking for those things... Perhaps someone else could aid in this.

...

Well crapola.

I've never even heard of SNES bin files... Genesis, sure, but not SNES... you could try looking around Zophar's Domain's utility section, I guess.

I suppose bin is what most ROM files are actually stored as by the companies that actually MADE them.

Or maybe its just a special format they are using in this game. :)

http://www.zophar.net ... by far the best site for any emulation programs (but not roms)...

Indeed, I thought of that too. I'm just VERY used to .bin on pretty much ANY file meaning it's a binary dump of data into a file in the order it's read from whatever source. I would be surprised if they did anything further than just a binary copy. If they did, then I'm surprised the file runs perfectly in the SNES emulator I have.

So... I'm stuck, right?

Stuck until someone comes up with a viable solution...

The big question is this. The .smc extension for "normal" SNES roms, is that totally binary? If it's just a straight copy with a weird extension and NO extra data added or modified, then I would assume then that the file could be renamed into a .bin file. I would think that it would be like that, unless they DO add some data to it or modify it for whatever purpose, like maybe adding specific data for certain emulators or something...

Ok I just tried that and it did not work. There goes another CD-R. :S