Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Undub Request

[k1ra 6]

Hello,

I don't think there're any Saga series undub?

Could anyone take a look at Minstrel Song if it's possible to undub it?

Thank you in advance.

Edited October 21, 2020 by k1ra

[swosho 1,675]

Nice suggestion! I took a quick peek at the game and it is actually pretty straightforward to undub, if only the devs wouldn't have appended the actual game data at the end of the ISO just to obfuscate the files, with a lengthy ghost TOC for those hidden within the executable, albeit with a lot of repeating entries I haven't figured out.

I'm not smart enough to automate the process of extraction and recalculating the TOC, so I'll try asking around a bit later or simply brutforce the entire thing if possible. In case anyone's interested in taking a look at the game on their own: the TOC starts at 0x1B23E0 (0x3A63E0 from within the ISO) and the pointers there are all LBA / sector positions, i.e. normal offsets but divided by 2048.

[swosho 1,675]

All right, tried to map-out the ISO to some extent (parsing ~48K obfuscated files is no joke...) and do some changes manually on my own, before bothering anyone with requests to make a dumping script. Surprisingly, it worked just as expected on the first try and I got seemingly all of the lines undubbed properly in one go. What's left to do is to check out the suspicious sound banks I spotted and hardsub some FMVs.

Edit 1: There are still lots of audio pieces sprinkled all around the ISO and some of them are English voice clips, so this might take a while longer. If blindly working on this will start taking a toll on my sanity, I'll drop a beta release here and later a full one in a separate topic. 

Edit 2: Found all of the remaining voice clips, albeit they're included as a files in sub-archives but there's only 23 of them and they're reasonably easy to work with. I only hope it would be possible to append the modified archives at the end of the ISO to avoid recalculating the TOC over and over.

Edit 3: Fully mapped the ISO and found even more voice clips — the game is now 100% undubbed with zero English leftovers or technical issues, all of the voice clips made it into the undub and the Japanese-excusive voice clips were restored (aside for 4 minor voice clips). Fixed a crapton of crashes and also resolved a strange misalignment in the main voice clips' chunk of the ISO. Only left to sub the videos.

[swosho 1,675]

And there you have it: 

Had to jump though some hoops to get the videos done. The game seemed simple enough to work with at first but hoo boy that well went deeper down than expected, glad to finally have it completed.

Btw, Unlimited SaGa is set up in exactly the same way, so eventually I might undub that one as well.

[k1ra 6]

Thank you so much for your hard work😃