Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

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How should the main characters be named in Generation:2 ?

Poll ended at Fri Oct 19, 2012 1:51 am

Use the full Japanese names
28
38%
Use the English Sega Genesis names
40
55%
It doesn't matter
5
7%
 
Total votes : 73

Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby TheSegaDude » Thu Nov 19, 2015 1:34 am

mziab wrote:Well, this pretty much confirms it. With the modified binary I get consistent crashes after battle. Out of four battles I had three crashed. One probably had a formation with no item drops.


Did you experience this on your PS2? Is your PS2 chip modded? Or was your test done with emulation?
Do we still need someone to test on actual PS2 hardware?
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby mziab » Thu Nov 19, 2015 11:13 am

My setup is a PS2 slim soft-modded with FMCB, running the game through OPL (SMB mode).
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby TheSegaDude » Thu Nov 19, 2015 12:46 pm

mziab wrote:My setup is a PS2 slim soft-modded with FMCB, running the game through OPL (SMB mode).


Thanks so much for taking the time to test! I'd like to test as well but I wont have a chance until next week.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Tryphon » Thu Nov 19, 2015 1:06 pm

Thanks mziab. The fix should be easy. I'll code it ASAP.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby mziab » Thu Nov 19, 2015 1:40 pm

Please make a debug version with both the fix and the hacked item drops and I'll verify it right away.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Klon » Thu Nov 19, 2015 2:52 pm

Tryphon wrote:I think I've found some things about items drops.

1) It seems that only some battle formations can drop items, and when they do, it's always the same item.

2) I tweaked the game so that when a battle formation can give an item, it always does. I also tweaked the game so that every ennemy miss their attacks, and so that the damages you make are huge.

3) There's a bug in the routine displaying battle stats : it doesn't compute well the position of the item dropped, so you can't see the item name. On the picture below, the item name should be in the red box :

Image

Here's a patched SLPM file with the tweaks described in 2. Replace yours in the ISO with this one (make a copy before). If the crashes are related to items drops, this ISO should crash much more frequently. If this is the case, I've good reasons to think that fixing 3 would fix the crashes.

Link to the patched zipped SLPM file : http://we.tl/RrLP11mXbN

Please report your crahes


Loooks like my suspision about No item drop was right.
With replaced SLPM file I've got freeze at the end of most battles (5/7 - but maybe 2 enemy formations have no item drop at all? Or maybe drop linked to other things... I dunno).
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Tryphon » Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:01 pm

Now try this one : http://we.tl/SYdPiZCkEG

It should fix the item drop bug, but there may be others bugs related to event occuring rarely.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby mziab » Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:47 pm

I can confirm item drops work. The item name is displayed properly and there is no crash :D
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Tryphon » Thu Nov 19, 2015 6:04 pm

Please continue testing to ensure we didn't miss any other crashing bugs :)

Pheeeew...
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Klon » Thu Nov 19, 2015 7:35 pm

Tryphon wrote:Please continue testing to ensure we didn't miss any other crashing bugs

Pheeeew...


So the game crushed on console because of wrong items name display? :think:
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby mziab » Thu Nov 19, 2015 9:26 pm

Probably a memory address alignment issue. That or a memory corruption. Just an educated guess, though.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Tryphon » Thu Nov 19, 2015 10:04 pm

An alignment error yes.

The game uses a routine that counts the number of half-words (= 2 bytes) to compute both memory occupation and pixel width of a text. It's legit because the text encoding was a subset of S-JIS and used 2 bytes to encode a char, and each char was 20 pixels wide. It requires the data to be aligned on even address (note that PCSX2 won't care).

But I changed encoding to use one byte per char (sometimes 2) so the routine can't work. Moreover, char width is now variable, do I wrote another routine that computes both number of bytes and pixel width.

I just missed the call by the routine that display the dropped item name (it uses it because name is right-justified so it subtracts the width to the right edge (at 480) to get the left position.

The thing is, since the word didn't appeat at all, we didn't notice it when testing on PCSX2, and it occurs so rarely that I think Hiei- didn't make long enough sessions on real hardware to get the crash (and that's why I rejected it at first, I apologize).
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Tryphon » Thu Nov 19, 2015 11:39 pm

Here is a new SLPM file : http://we.tl/FCNtO0cS3J

Use your favourite ISO editor (ultraiso should work fine, even the evaluation version) and replace the SLPM_xxx_xx file by this one.


It has the following features :

1) I changed the code of the routine described above ; it should fix the item drop bug, and maybe unnoticed others (there were still some calls to this routine that I didn't hack ; I don't know what they do or if they are used though). OTOH, it may have produced new bugs :)

2) the game is still tweaked :
* ennemies miss you all the time,
* if they can drop an item, they will
* you do huge damages with regular weapons

Be careful : I may have disabled the test that checks if you can carry another item. So, if your inventory is full and still got an item, I don't know what'll happen.

3) I fixed a bug nobody noticed (which surprises me : was the bug in the beta version ?) : the area name 'West bridge' (between Biosystems and Zema) wasn't displayed.

Report crashing issues with this one. If none is left, it'll be time to rebuild the game with typos fixed (and the bug with the VAN LEADER ennemy).
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Blaw- » Fri Nov 20, 2015 10:43 am

Tryphon wrote:The thing is, since the word didn't appeat at all, we didn't notice it when testing on PCSX2, and it occurs so rarely that I think Hiei- didn't make long enough sessions on real hardware to get the crash (and that's why I rejected it at first, I apologize).


I did, I beat the game at least twice on the real hardware (so ~10h of play) and in my second playthrough of the french version, I nearly did it in one session ).

But as I said before, I escaped/avoided as much battle as I can (already had my characters at lvl 99) so of course, if the crash is related to the battles, I probably avoided all the crashs, as probaby only did something like ~10% of the battles.

We'll also have to do an update to the french version if all the crashs are fixed (I had some texts to correct and we still haven't put the icons before the spells so it might be the right time to do so).
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

Postby Tryphon » Fri Nov 20, 2015 11:01 am

We really had bad luck with this one. I'm intensively relieved we found it. Thanks to everyone who helped :)

And yes, I was thinking about rebuilding French version too :)
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