Xanadu II Translation Development Blog

[elmer]

Here's an interesting glitch in the Xanadu 2 opening cutscene.

Perhaps it's just the ISO image that I'm using for development, but I can also see how it could have slipped through Falcom's testing.

If you look at these 2 frames of the animation from Areios's introduction, then you can see a couple of stray black pixels on the right hand edge of the screen.





These are probably cut off by the overscan at the edge of the screen on a normal TV and may not have been visible to Falcom's testers.

Or perhaps they were ... I'm developing in Mednafen, and not on a real PCE, so it's not too easy for me to check it out on a real system.

Someone with a Sony PVM or BVM could toggle the underscan mode on the monitor and see the entire frame to check if these show up on the shipped Xanadu 2 CD.

Anyway ... it annoyed me enough that I've tracked down where those frames are located in the cutscene data, and I'm now clearing the bad data during script-insertion so that the stray pixels are gone. 


If someone has really good eyes, they may also be able to see a 1/60th second glitch on screen when the cutscene transitions to display the Dragon Slayer sword scrolling across the screen, but only on the 2nd and 3rd time it is displayed during the cutscene, and not the 1st time.



This one would be a huge pain to track down and fix because it's a timing problem, and not a data problem.

I think that this is one glitch may just have to stay the way that Falcom left it when they shipped the game.

[esteban]

Elmer: Sadly, this glitch may have beaten us all. Even the best of us.

[elmer]

Elmer: Sadly, this glitch may have beaten us all. Even the best of us.

Hahaha ... you're not going to "psych" me into working on it that easily! 

*************

After months of specifically avoiding the horrors of the Save Slot screen, the extra familiarity with the code from so many months of working with it, actually made it not-too-bad to tackle this time around ...



But it shows that this is another one of those screens that actually cries-out for some modification to the background graphics in order to put a drop-shadow on the other text-in-graphic elements on the screen. 

[Necromancer]

Lookin' sexy as hell!

His armor looks different.  Is it even better than the mighty earth armor? 

[NightWolve]

Lovely, yeah, that's the thing I always loved about the system and its games, these colorful portraits.

Anyway ... it annoyed me enough that I've tracked down where those frames are located in the cutscene data, and I'm now clearing the bad data during script-insertion so that the stray pixels are gone. 

Awesome that you're actually able and willing to fix such issues! We finally have our own Neill Corlett (among too-numerous-to-count talented SNES hackers) in elmer for our PCE platform!!

[elmer]

Elmer: Sadly, this glitch may have beaten us all. Even the best of us.

While tongue-in-cheek humor may not always work (although it is always appreciated) ...

Awesome that you're actually able and willing to fix such issues! We finally have our own Neill Corlett (among too-numerous-to-count talented SNES hackers) in elmer for our PCE platform!!

Sometimes outright flattery does the trick! 

Well, either that, of it's been a stupidly hot here today, much too hot to do new stuff, but just hot-enough to niggle my guilt for not fixing an annoying problem.

Anyway ... the 1/60th second screen-glitch during the transition from Daimos and Landis to the scrolling sword is now fixed. 

Falcom were doing things in the wrong order, leading to a small window where the screen could display tile data as if it were BAT data.

Or to put it another way ... they changed the screen size from 32x32 to 64x32 and THEN turned the screen off, rather than doing it the other way around.

This could be an issue with Mednafen's emulation ... but I believe that Rypheca has got the VDC processing right here (in terms of which registers can be modified during the frame, and which are only read once-per-frame during the vblank).

I'm sure that Bonknuts knows the answer.

Since I've not said it for a few weeks now ... it's time to repeat that this whole translation wouldn't have been done (by me) without the existence, and sheer superb quality and usefulness of Mednafen.

[Arjak]

Outstanding work, Elmer! Those character portraits look great! The one thing that bothers me is that on the title card, the part that says "The Legend of" doesn't quite match the part that says "Xanadu II." There's a bit of an art style clash. I think it's because of one having a black outline and the other not having one. That's just a minor nitpick, though.

Lookin' sexy as hell!

His armor looks different.  Is it even better than the mighty earth armor? 

Pfft, Water Armor for life!

[elmer]

The one thing that bothers me is that on the title card, the part that says "The Legend of" doesn't quite match the part that says "Xanadu II." There's a bit of an art style clash. I think it's because of one having a black outline and the other not having one. That's just a minor nitpick, though.

You are, of course, entirely right ... ... ... but. 

To misquote Ralph Waldo Emerson ... "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds".

The correct quote is actually closer to the truth here ... “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

In this case, we've got a problem that's in the "foolish consistency" category, and is actually caused by the limits of the logo's implementation in the game (i.e. you're right, but there's a good reason it's that way).

We've only got 7 colors (+ transparency) to draw the entire logo.

We're already using the 1 free color that we had in order to anti-alias the outside of "Xanadu" so that it looks nice.

The text that says "The Legend Of" is only 1 pixel wide.

That means that it needs to either have a drop-shadow, or an outline, in order to stop it from merging into the background too much and becoming difficult to read.

A drop-shadow on that text would look very strange when the main "Xanadu" doesn't have one ... and even then, there would still be spots like the overlap between the "T" and the "X" that would still look strange.

Another alternative would be to drop the anti-aliasing on the "Xanadu" and use a drop-shadow on both lines of text.

It's certainly an option, but to me, the anti-aliasing on the edge of the Xanadu does such a lovely job of smoothing out the stair-stepping of the edges of the "X" that I'd really hate to lose it.

By using an outline on "The Legend Of", together with the anti-aliasing on the "Xanadu", we've placed both lines of text on the background layer of the image, rather than raising either of them above it.

Now, none of this was actually discussed when Phase drew the logo ... but I think that he was right, and I can use the argument above to explain/justify his choices.

I could be entirely full-of-shit, but I still think that given the limitations that we've got, there's nothing about "The Legend Of" having an outline that offends me ... and I'm a very picky so-and-so. 

<EDIT>

Arjak: After a night's sleep I realized that it's possible to see the "small minds" part of the Emerson's quote as an insult aimed at you ... please know that it wasn't meant that way.

The quote is there to give me an opportunity to comment upon when it's OK to throw "consistency" out of the window.

[Arjak]

No worries; I understood what you were saying. It was a nitpick, and fixing the issue would likely be more trouble than it's worth.

[elmer]

Cleanup continues, and this time I've been looking at the Pause Menu.

I've been trying to figure out how to edit the graphics on the screen to add drop-shadows to the text so that it's consistent with the drop-shadow on the main text (and so is easier to read).

There are lots of small changes, and so I thought that it would be interesting to show the same screen in its different versions.

All the screengrabs are from one of my savestates before I fight the last boss in the game, so I've got pretty-much-everything maxed-out, and have just-enough Elixirs to keep me safe! 


Here's how the screen looks when loaded with Falcom's original ISO ...




And here's how it looked a coupple of days ago, with the high-contrast palette and the VFW for the descriptions, but with none of the graphics actually edited ...




And here's how it looks now, with bunch of small cleanups ...

[SamIAm]

Nice work! I can't wait to give this the old CRT test. 

[elmer]

Nice work! I can't wait to give this the old CRT test. 

It took a while to send to you ... but I look forward to hearing what you think. 

***********************

I've now applied the high-contrast palette and the same kind of graphic cleanup to the Save Slot selection menu that you see when you start the game.

There's not much still left to do, now (graphically speaking)! 

[elmer]

Hmmm ... I haven't mentioned this before ... so it's probably time to tell everyone that the visual cutscenes in both Xanadu 1 and Xanadu 2 have been investigated/deconstructed/poked/prodded and generally abused to the point that I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to modify the lip-sync and transition timings so that everything matches (within reason) the English dub, when it's done. 

It also opens up the faint possibility that we could add subtitles to a SuperGrafx CD-ROM version of the translation! 

But realistically ... there are so few of us SuperGrafx & SuperCDROM owners still out there, that I can't see it being worth the time-and-effort, since most people would prefer a dub anyway.

[Vimtoman]

Would the SuperGrafx version work on mednafen?

[elmer]

At the moment, Mednafen appears to be disabling the emulated SuperGrafx hardware when you run an ISO image ... so "no".

That makes perfect sense, since there never was a SuperGrafx/SCD game released.

But I imagine that it wouldn't be hard to re-enable the emulated SuperGrafx hardware.

I'll build a custom version of Mednafen, and see what happens.