Tales of phantasia ps1 help!

tenkai · May 26, 2018

Here is my dilemma:

I started using the Phantasian Productions patch for the beginning of the game and decided to switch to Absolute Zero's patch after some time. I transferred the save from Phantasian Productions to Absolute Zero and this caused some minor problems with names being all garbled. This was an easy fix for the most part since you can rename the playable characters. However I recently ran into a snag.

I just got up to the part where I got Rhea Scarlet who is a NPC character who joins you and her name is also messed up. The problem is I can't change her name unlike the other characters since she is considered a NPC (She is referred to as Rgd Scarlet). It's bugging me and driving me crazy. Is there anyway that I could fix this? Any gameshark codes that might fix this problem?

Glyptofane · May 26, 2018

I can't help you, but damn, you really got me wanting to play ToP again.

What exactly makes AZ's translation the better choice if you don't mind me asking?

tenkai · May 26, 2018

Glyptofane said:
I can't help you, but damn, you really got me wanting to play ToP again.

What exactly makes AZ's translation the better choice if you don't mind me asking?

Yeah Tales of Phantasia is amazing and one of my favorite tales of games. AZ's translation is more direct and literal, while PP's translation is more of a localized translation. Honestly you can't go wrong with either since both are good, it just depends on your preference.

Uiaad · May 26, 2018

@tenkai are you playing on actual hardware or emulated ?

tenkai · May 27, 2018

uiaad said:
@tenkai are you playing on actual hardware or emulated ?

I'm using a emulator. Mednafen to be exact.

Uiaad · May 27, 2018

Any Chance you could throw your save up for download then i'll have a bit of a play with it see if i can sort it out

Sakitoshi · May 27, 2018

I don't think that is has a simple solution.
Most probably the game initializes all the names when you start a new game, but as you started it on a specific translation patch and switched to another the names inside the save file are still written to match the previous translation patch.
maybe hex editing could help, but I don't know if it has a checksum or something that would impede editing it.

tenkai · May 27, 2018

uiaad said:
Any Chance you could throw your save up for download then i'll have a bit of a play with it see if i can sort it out

Yeah I don't mind sending you my save but it won't let me upload the file here. Any ideas?

Sakitoshi said:
I don't think that is has a simple solution.
Most probably the game initializes all the names when you start a new game, but as you started it on a specific translation patch and switched to another the names inside the save file are still written to match the previous translation patch.
maybe hex editing could help, but I don't know if it has a checksum or something that would impede editing it.

Hmm... I was thinking hex editing could work but then again I don't really know how to go about doing that.

Uiaad · May 27, 2018

Dropbox, google drive, throw it on a thumb drive and mail it to me haha

Sakitoshi · May 27, 2018

tenkai said:
Yeah I don't mind sending you my save but it won't let me upload the file here. Any ideas?

use the "upload a file" button that is at the right of the "post reply" one.
I can try and see if I can make it work with some hex editing.

EDIT: it doesn't work, I just tried editing a save and the game uses a checksum to verify the data
on the bright side, save state editing works, so if you send me a save state I could be able to edit it and correct the corrupted names.

tenkai · May 27, 2018

Sakitoshi said:
use the "upload a file" button that is at the right of the "post reply" one.
I can try and see if I can make it work with some hex editing.

EDIT: it doesn't work, I just tried editing a save and the game uses a checksum to verify the data
on the bright side, save state editing works, so if you send me a save state I could be able to edit it and correct the corrupted names.

Yeah I tried to upload the file through this site but it didn't work. I just uploaded to dropbox instead. Here is the link to the save state: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nu4sgo9w31mc1kn/Tales of Phantasia (Japan) [En by Gemini+Throughhim413 v1.0].fb0973b2587ffc3dd5a6aaf7c199246a.mc0?dl=0

uiaad said:
Dropbox, google drive, throw it on a thumb drive and mail it to me haha

^^^ The savestate is uploaded on dropbox.

Sakitoshi · May 27, 2018

tenkai said:
Yeah I tried to upload the file through this site but it didn't work. I just uploaded to dropbox instead. Here is the link to the save state: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nu4sgo9w31mc1kn/Tales of Phantasia (Japan) [En by Gemini+Throughhim413 v1.0].fb0973b2587ffc3dd5a6aaf7c199246a.mc0?dl=0

^^^ The savestate is uploaded on dropbox.

Here, I fixed the names for all the save files in the memory card.
have fun

tenkai · May 27, 2018

Sakitoshi said:
Here, I fixed the names for all the save files in the memory card.
have fun

Yes it worked!!!!! Thank you so much, you are a saint!!! I'm curious how did you go about fixing the problem?

Sakitoshi · May 27, 2018

tenkai said:
Yes it worked!!!!! Thank you so much, you are a saint!!! I'm curious how did you go about fixing the problem?

I tried to edit the memory card first to no avail as I pointed out some post above, I found that the game saves all the character names inside it, regardless if they are in your party or not (initializes all the characters names) though. with that information I created a save state and searched for the same string of text inside of it and...

bingo, I found the same inside the save state, so I went ahead and changed one character on Cless name to see if I could edit it that way and it worked.

One thing that I didn't accounted for was that standalone mednafen (not the retroarch one, which is what you are using) compresses its save states so I could not work with that, so I set up standalone mednafen, loaded your save state and saved regularly to a memory card (mednafen save states also include the full memory card so all the saves were there too) and loaded that memory card into another emulator (retroarch pcsxr, which I used to test save state editing), created save states for each memory card save and made the modifications.

tenkai · May 27, 2018

Sakitoshi said:
I tried to edit the memory card first to no avail as I pointed out some post above, I found that the game saves all the character names inside it, regardless if they are in your party or not (initializes all the characters names) though. with that information I created a save state and searched for the same string of text inside of it and...
View attachment 125448
bingo, I found the same inside the save state, so I went ahead and changed one character on Cless name to see if I could edit it that way and it worked.

One thing that I didn't accounted for was that standalone mednafen (not the retroarch one, which is what you are using) compresses its save states so I could not work with that, so I set up standalone mednafen, loaded your save state and saved regularly to a memory card (mednafen save states also include the full memory card so all the saves were there too) and loaded that memory card into another emulator (retroarch pcsxr, which I used to test save state editing), created save states for each memory card save and made the modifications.

So HxD is what you used to make the modifications correct? I remember using that when I was working on my super mario world hacks. How did you know where the characters (Cless, Mint, Arche, etc) were located at though? I'm guessing you compared my saves to the ones you created, which allowed you to spot the inconsistencies?

Sakitoshi · May 27, 2018

tenkai said:
So HxD is what you used to make the modifications correct?

correct.

tenkai said:
How did you know where the characters (Cless, Mint, Arche, etc) were located at though? I'm guessing you compared my saves to the ones you created, which allowed you to spot the inconsistencies?

I just took a wild guess with Cless name (having two identical characters together it was easier to spot) while looking at the memory card. memory card blocks are small (8kb each) so it's easy to look for something and in the case of this game, the names are at the beginning of the save. I assumed that 0x345C556363 was his name and so I looked for it in the save state I created to test.
After my test was successful I just needed to create a save state of your save and edit at the same location, since games almost always use fixed memory locations for variables I didn't needed to search again.
I could say that it was lucky that it was incredibly easy.

tenkai · May 27, 2018

Sakitoshi said:
correct.

I just took a wild guess with Cless name (having two identical characters together it was easier to spot) while looking at the memory card. memory card blocks are small (8kb each) so it's easy to look for something and in the case of this game, the names are at the beginning of the save. I assumed that 0x345C556363 was his name and so I looked for it in the save state I created to test.
After my test was successful I just needed to create a save state of your save and edit at the same location, since games almost always use fixed memory locations for variables I didn't needed to search again.
I could say that it was lucky that it was incredibly easy.

Ah gotcha! Again thank you so much for all the help and information that you provided me! It was seriously helpful!

Tales of phantasia ps1 help!

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