The forgotten few

So I got an everdrive or whatever and have been playing through some of the Jrpgs on the snes that were never released NA. What is the final factor in deciding wither to release a game over seas or not? Is it just time and money or does Japan find some of there games to sacred? Any of you anons play these things?

no dice

OP can't inb4 and I hope you're using a CRT TV, the hardware for which these games were originally designed!

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I don't think there's any hard and fast rules as to what gets shipped over seas. How well the game sold in Japan, the amount of "objectionable" content, and probably a number of other factors all play into the likelihood of it getting localized, but there's always a few games that slip through those cracks. I'm still surprised that we got Snatcher and the Lufia games at all.

I've played Rudras and a little bit of Romancing SaGa 3. They're both pretty good, but Rudras is better in my opinion. It's in the same vein as FF6.

bump cause the catalog sucks ass right now

Probably a mixture of the following:
And lets not get started on the ever frequent-issue where games that get cleared for NA never get cleared for PAL regions (or come over for the first time years and years later, like Chrono Trigger after fourteen years). Also, in particular with JRPGs, while the NES, SNES, Master System, Genesis, and other older systems did see some of the ones for them brought overseas (various Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles, Quintet's works, Lufia I and II, etc), it seemed like it took until the PS1 and PS2 era for eastern publishers to start clearing more to come west, and/or western publishers to start picking up more potentially risky ones. Granted, that's just my own thoughts on it.

I'm sure some have, but in general, when it comes to fan-translated games (ignoring anons that can natively into moon for the moment), aside from a handful that have a degree of popularity, you might be hard-pressed to find that much discussion of them. Especially if it's for a game that only received a translation patch recently. Usually a lot more people that have played what did actually come west compared to what got left in Japan, even when the latter sometimes see fanmade patches to try to rectify that they were denied a western release.

Speaking of which, as a heads up on the off chance you weren't aware, Glory of Heracles IV now has a translation patch (v1.0), though apparently it's got a bugfixed version in the works (which will be v1.1) if you might want to wait some. Xak: The Art of the Visual Stage also got translated recently, and its own bugfix patch is also finished and released (as v1.10).

Admittedly might be hearsay, but I remember reading something about how, at the time that it was first getting interest from fan-translators, western-based moonspeakers who had played the game were quick to hamper fan translation attempts by insisting the game was terrible and not worth the effort to bring into English. These days (years after it did finally see a finished patch), it seems to have a fairly good reputation. Makes me wonder if it was just a case of moonspeakers wanting it to be their" game and only their game. Namely since I've seen that sort of mindset some years back on halfchan (Namco had recently cleared Tales of Xillia 2 for western release at the time, and moonruners there, or at least on half/vg/, flew into a rage that "EoPs" would be getting access to it and that "westerners don't deserve a game like this", prompting spoiler campaigns to drive down desire for people to play it; they did the same with Tales of Hearts R as well from what I recall).


Got to agree. Unfortunately, the games I've been playing lately and would like to discuss don't really warrant making threads specifically for at this point (between age of the games and their series being dead), so I'm stuck waiting for the right sort of thread to tangentially bring them up in, rather than make an admittedly ontopic thread and just have it rot in the catalog for days on end. Admittedly Holla Forums angles much more towards threads on current games, systems, the industry (and justifiably shitting on anything that warrants it), and off-topic bullshit, but still.

Fuck, we don't even get Ghost Trick threads anymore. I miss those.

Back in the day they thought JRPGs were 'too complicated' for Westerners. That was their excuse.

There isn't.

this

Dude, awesome read. I am still trying to find a small enough CRT to fit at my computer desk. All I have right now is a snes with an everdriver. I might get an original nes with a power pak, but there really isn't anything on it that I haven't already played that I would want to again. Does the Ps1 have a similar setup for a everdrive like thing? Where I can play every game without having all the disc?

To my knowledge, no. Probably for a number of reasons, the foremost being differences in average memory required per game. With older cartridge-based systems, game file sizes were small; REALLY small by modern standards (looking at the SNES/SFC, the largest games I know of were Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean, both of which are 6.3MB in my folder). As such, even something like a 2GB SD card can store a lot of games from older systems on it at once, despite 2 GB being fuckall these days, and a bigger SD card, if usable, can store even more. With discs though, due to the jump in format allowing for better audio and graphical capabilities (at the cost of loading times increasing), the average size of game generally winds up being MUCH bigger than the cartridge based systems at or before that time. PS1 games seem to fall between a few hundred MBs to well over 1 GB, depending on how many discs were involved, and how much of the space per disc was used (PS2 games could get even larger; I’ve seen ISOs that ranged past 7GB, but that was on the high end, as 2-4GB seems more common). That essentially places much more of a limit on how many games can feasibly be placed on a storage device at once, varying depending on what devices you’d have access to (an everdrive system I’d imagine would use SD cards; not sure what the largest stable size for those is).

????

Might also add that with that post I specifically meant a lack of an "everdrive-ish" solution. From the look of things, there's a way to use a homebrew loading program to load PS1 games via a PS2, and the PSP itself has native PS1 capabilities and is notoriously easy to set up with CFW.

Well some guy actually got a Saturn to run games off of a portable hard drive he plugged into the thing. I could see something similar happening with the PS1 eventually if there is ever any demand for it. Original PS2s actually do have a way to run games off a hard drive since they have a hard drive bay in them already.


That doesn't really provide an everdrive like solution since both the PS2 and PSP especially are emulating the PS1. On the PSP there are actually some games that are just incompatible with it's emulator, I think there may even be one or two on the PS2 as well. Though both do have some weird issues that can crop up from it.

see the second pic in

Try too buggy and incomplete
There is no shortage of JRPGs on the SNES which don't function as intended.
Some even hard crash.

Can you name some? so I don't start playing them.

Can you name some so I can force them to do hilarious shit?

SD3 has stats which straight up don't work, Chaos Seed can hard crash if you do things in an order the game doesn't expect(running away from a plot fight and then going back), Star Ocean is literally unfinished, every final fantasy game has a list of documented bugs and unfinished features.

Yeah, I know, I have one that does that. Haven't tried playing PS1 games via loader though, but there's some video of people playing them via OPL, the way you would for loading PS2 games. Still, given how loaders for PS2 games themselves have mixed compatibility, it wouldn't surprise me if trying to load PS1 games also gives mixed results.

I'm not sure if it's outright emulation allowing for backwards compatibility, at least with the PS2. Wikipedia, for what's it's worth, says the the PS2 included the PS1's CPU within its own architecture.
Likewise, with the PS3, the very early models (the NA 20 and 60gb), had native PS2's "Emotion Engine" to allow for backwards compatibility (which was swapped to software emulation with partial compatibility by the release of the NA 80GB, with physical PS2 backwards compatibility being culled entirely from later models), though wikipedia does note that PS1 backwards compatibility by that point was apparently software emulation based.

I suppose that could be wrong though; I'm just going off of what I can find. If you know better, I don't mind learning.

It's not just a handful of PS1 games that the PS2 could have issues playing at times. There's even apparently some PS2 games that wouldn't run right with particular models of PS2 either.


Well, I've heard Maka Maka, a JP only release, was released unfinished and unpolished, resulting in it being stupidly broken and killing the company that published it. Supposedly its spiritual successor ("Idea no Hi", by the same devs) is better, but by how, much, I don't know. It never came out here either, and apparently there has been zero interest from the fan translation community in making an English patch.

The problem with loading PS1 games via HDD on PS2 is that you can only do it through fan-made emulation. No one has cracked a way to get in to the PS1 chip and HDD load as far as I'm aware.

I suggest if you want to "everdrive" a PS1 then just get a modchipped system and burn discs for it, that's the route I went and I just burn anything anytime I want to play it and add it to my growing pirate library. The only bitch is the space and getting good discs (but even good cds are cheap these days). You can also use the swap disc method but I prefer the chip for ease of use; it's nice just tossing in a fake disc and having the system accept it.

If it's too complicated for dumb americans it won't ever leave japan.

I see. Looking a bit deeper, it would seem that most of the tutorials for using OPL for PS1 games on youtube do mention the Popstarter emulator in combination with the loader. Has there just been more reason to look into cracking the PS2's chip to allow for native loading than the PS1 chip for backwards compatible loading, or is the latter just better protected for whatever reason?

Honestly I have no idea, but if I had to wager a guess I'd say it has something to do with how games launch from the HDD, when it boots in to OPL it seems to enter a different mode and maybe that mode doesn't have access to the PS1 chip? Or maybe it's the other way around, in that booting the system as a PS1 game would cause the HDD to become non-functional. I know for sure that when the PS2 boots a game it decides between a PS1 and a PS2 mode. Anyway, can't be sure, just an educated guess from what I've observed from fucking around with the system.