SandyLandale wrote:Wait, hang on--you're saying that even in the unpatched Japanese version, overworld characters turn into Tyrone's ass and stuff because of the CD format?
Parts of Tyrone's ass, Myau's head, and other mis-coloured sprite pieces from event scenes. Yes, the unpatched Japanese version behaves
exactly the same as the patched version when you try to play it from your hard drive/USB memory on a softmodded PS2. It's not so much the game being on CD that's the issue, but rather it's a bug in the way the software used to load games from HDD/USB is reading the image file; it's pulling sprites from the wrong place in the disc/image. So it's not an issue with the translation at all; the OPL2 and HDDloader programs themselves have a minor incompatibility with all versions of PS: Generation 1.
When you use ESR and run the game from disc, the PS2 is reading everything natively using its own DVD drive to do the seeks/reads, and the issue goes away. All ESR does is bypass the copy protection and boot the (patched) disc; the PS2 itself does the rest.
The whole CD/DVD conversion thing is just a workaround to get the disc to load through ESR as it can only boot games from DVD.
And you for sure tested it out with v2.10 where the font is slimmer and the characters are Alisa, Tyrone, Lutz, and Myau, right?
Absolutely correct. It's version 2.10, with the Japanese names (no Odin or Noah, no abbreviations) downloaded from this very website.