Okay, so I'm a low-life cheating dog. Or Chuji... Anyway, I decided that since I couldn't test the late-game text and I'm getting my brains beaten in, I'd try a little fiddling around with the memory card. A full compliment of level 48 stats later, and I'm breezing throught the castle (sealed) dungeon. I found some other entertaining things. Take a look at the last screenshot in the slideshow for an idea. I'm thinking about at least publishing as much of the save game layout that I can learn, but may try to make a memory card editor for it.
With alot of help from Galuf and Dan Nguyen the alternate patch is available for download. Links to both are below. Remember to check your ISO size before applying the patch. On the upside, PPF-o-Matic complains if the ISO size isn't correct for the patch you're using, so just get the other one.
No longer must I hang my head in shame! I just hope there is no "3rd" version... :-)
Still haven't gotten a working burn, but hey, I'm trying. It does run on ePSXe.
| Project Started: | 10/1/2002 |
| Status: | 11/4/2002 - 1.00Beta patch is available. A list of known issues is below. There will be changes made, but frankly, I need help to find them. There are some places where the text will be too big for the box. I'm working on identifying them, but unless I see it in the game, they haven't been caught. Please report any that you find to . |
| Known Issues: |
|
| You will need... | |
| Patch v1.00B - Use if your ISO size is 669,555,600 bytes - PPF 3.0 or Patch v1.00B (alt version) - Use if your ISO size is 669,541,488 bytes - PPF 3.0 | 31 KB |
| PPF-O-Matic 3.0 | Paradogs |
| CDRWin | Goldenhawk |
| Tobal 2 | Original PSX game |
To install
Need playing help? Check out GameFAQs
In case you're wondering, yes, this did take less than a month to translate. There really isn't all that much text in the game. I've got a hunch that Dream Factory was expecting to release an English version and built in some support to make their (or the translators :-) life easier. It turns out that English can be DIRECTLY inserted into the appropriate places instead of SJIS (or the subset that is used in the resource file).
This is a good thing since I never have found the font. If you look closely, the highlighted option in the menus is multi-colored, leading me to believe that they're probably stored as 4bpp graphics, but I never could locate them. The font is also curious in that if you zoom in on the screenshots, you'll see that it's not a bitmap font. The trademark "blockiness" isn't there. When you see kanji with a higher stroke count, they're sometimes almost solid white and illegible. My guess is that these may be some sort of True Type font, possibly stored as a graphic, maybe not. It doesn't matter because I was able to just use the Romaji characters straightaway.
Another strange thing was that a large portion of the resource file contains stuff from the first game that is not used. If you've played that, you may remember in the practice area there were signs on the walls that taught you the controls. Now the monsters in the Practice Dungeon take care of that. Why the old images are in there, I can't say.
Another oddity with the graphics is that all of the old stuff was stored in the tried and true TIM format. For whatever reason, Tobal 2's were stored in a sort of TIM offshoot that cut off the header, probably to group a bunch of sprites with the same CLUT together. Finding those and creating a routine to put a fake BMP header on the top was a few days work, but once I got that, I was able to locate the traing mode and status screen graphics.
That pretty much wraps up what I've learned from this game. Hopefully I'll be able to apply some of it to finding that last font in Pixy Garden and get it back underway. My wife is dying to be the new voice for Neredy, the guide. :-)