Legend of Xanadu on Wikipedia

[elmer]

I was just looking at Falcom's page on Wikipedia ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon_Falcom

and noticed that of all of the Dragon Slayer series of games have their own page except for our PCE's Legend of Xanadu I & II.

That seems a bit sad ... particularly since they were the first console games that Falcom made themselves instead of licensing them out, and that IIRC they were Falcom's first CD games.

Is there anybody here willing to rectify that? 

SamIAm let me know that there was actually a port of the Legend of Xanadu games to Windows that was included as a bonus in the Deluxe Pack edition of Xanadu Next.

Has anyone here tried it?

http://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/x423211065

[Black Tiger]

I thought that Falcom was still directly selling the LoX games for Windows?

[elmer]

I thought that Falcom was still directly selling the LoX games for Windows?

I just took a look at their Japanese website, and I think that they're both still listed on the Wii "Virtual Console", but the only mention of Windows versions that I can see is in the "Falcom Special BOX 2004" which isn't available anymore.

That's about the right time period for them to be bundled up into that "Xanadu Next" deluxe package.

Are you seeing them somewhere else?

[dshadoff]

I have the Xanadu Next box set with the Windows versions of Xanadu/Xanadu 2.

It has a copyright date of 2005 on the box set; the DVD case which holds the two CDs states two copyright dates, which are reflected (individually) on the Compact Discs themselves:
Legend of Xanadu:  (c) 1993-2003
Legend of Xanadu II: (c) 1995-2005

Based on this, I take it that they were planned as 10-year anniversary releases, though that isn't explicitly mentioned on any of the packaging that I have.

The games state system requirements as: DirectX7.0a, Windows 98/Me, or Windows 2000/XP (lots more details, but these are the key software limitations).

Since Falcom seemed to have a bunch of problems on some other games when the world went from XP to later OS's - in particular Windows 7 - I guess they figured that re-certifying would cost more than they could gain.  Several other games also faced this fate, and some were deleted from their webpages (probably just as a cleanup exercise though).

-Dave

[elmer]

How interesting! 

I think that SamIAm mentioned that they were just running the old PCE games in an emulator with no improvements in resolution.

Does that sound right?

Have you actually run the Windows ports?

If so, how do they look?

I'm curious if they're just pixel-doubled or something to fit onto a 640x480 PC screen, or if they are running with HQX2 (or higher) scaling/smoothing?

[dshadoff]

I haven't tried running them since I bought them.

The *look* was virtually identical, but I didn't think that they were simply running them in an emulator - too many hardware oddities going on (especially CD-ROM timing and so on).

It is more likely that they are emulating portions of the code (ie. anything at the assembler level), but replacing big pieces of hardware functionality (and system card code) with PC-based software routines.

For example, why deal with CDROM overlays for code if you can afford to load all the code into memory at the same time ?  The audio tracks are almost certainly WAV files, and the ADPCM might as well be re-encoded in a more PC-friendly format.  Surely there is a better format for backup memory than the PC Engine... (and so on)

Looking at the filesystem on the disc (Xanadu 1) to validate this speculation, I see:

There's some install stuff in the root directory and a subdirectory called "KAZEDEN".

In "KAZEDEN":
- a subdirectory called "FULLWAV" contains about 545MB of WAV files, names after the original audio tracks.  "DATA001" plays the CD warning in Japanese, so these are direct rips.
- a subdirectory called "MINIWAV" conatins 24MB of the same files, but in very low quality (8-bit ?)
- a subdirectory called "MANUAL" contains a PDF of a manual for the Windows version (including install instructions), formatted roughly for a DVD case.  It's 60 pages and borrows from the original manual and it looks like additional places (for example, there are floor layouts from B1F to 31F of a tower of some sort).

The KAZEDEN directory itself contains just 5 files:
- CORE.DLL (200KB),
- DATA002.REC (28MB) -> this has no CDROM header, so it's not a direct rip, but could be a stripped or re-arranged version of the original data track.  The first 0xdcb0 bytes appear to be a jump table in 32-bit format.
- GAME.DAT (11MB) -> this looks like a stripped CDROM header, with "44 41 54 41 0B 01 00 80 00" as the first 16 bytes (the entry addresses and where to load sectors of code), followed by other code bits.
- KAZEDEN.EXE (372KB)
- MAIN.EXE (168KB)

Checking on DATA002.REC, the actual size is 28,030,695 bytes.  My Track02 rip from the PCE disc is 28,919,808 (but that includes a lot of empty zeroes at the end...)

So yeah, interesting conundrum.  Mostly emulated, but not entirely.

-Dave

[elmer]

So yeah, interesting conundrum.  Mostly emulated, but not entirely.

Thanks! 

That's an interesting mix ... and it's pretty-much how I'd handle it myself if I wanted to do a PlayStation Store version of the game.

With the advances in modern graphics technology, it'd probably make sense to run it all through HQX2 or HQX4 and then a scanline-simulator.