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Post subject: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 5:01 am 
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First of all, fantastic job on this game. Everything was 100% flawless...

..until, literally, the very last part of the game

When the hero is alone and just about to enter the room where the last boss is. Literally just before he enters through the door and the text appears, the game froze...Three or four times in a row.

Luckily I had a save state not too much before this so I could go back, fight a battle or two and get back to this scene. I do not use save states often so I really was in luck. But I was starting to lose hope but finally after a few tries, things worked out. Thank goodness. I would have hated to throw away 20 hours on this game, which, minus translation was kind of sub par I admit. But I like to finish what I start and that would have been torture to be hung up there.

But just as an FYI, maybe there is an issue at the end.


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 2:17 pm 
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DoubleDvideogames wrote:
First of all, fantastic job on this game. Everything was 100% flawless...

..until, literally, the very last part of the game

When the hero is alone and just about to enter the room where the last boss is. Literally just before he enters through the door and the text appears, the game froze...Three or four times in a row.

Luckily I had a save state not too much before this so I could go back, fight a battle or two and get back to this scene. I do not use save states often so I really was in luck. But I was starting to lose hope but finally after a few tries, things worked out. Thank goodness. I would have hated to throw away 20 hours on this game, which, minus translation was kind of sub par I admit. But I like to finish what I start and that would have been torture to be hung up there.

But just as an FYI, maybe there is an issue at the end.
This is the first report I've heard of a freezing glitch in Villgust. If we decide to expand the ROM and re-write a more fleshed out story, that may help obscure some of those clunky game mechanics. And when navigating through any recoded game, I suppose save-states are always good insurance against the previously undetected random bug - even if you play the game honestly otherwise.

The Villgust anime I viewed recently illustrates that we can make the characters in this game much more interesting!


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 2:01 am 
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DoubleDvideogames, if you can spare the time try playing on a different emulator (load your SRAM file and play from there) to see if the freeze happens then as well, it would help us greatly in better understanding the nature of the problem, thanks.

In case its no possible for you to do so, feel free to send me a PM with your save ram attached and I'll run a few tests myself.


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 6:59 am 
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Hmm, that's pretty strange. I played Villgust with Zsnes and I never had the game freeze at any points. It sounds like an emulator problem. Which one are you using?
Wildbill wrote:
Widbill wrote:
The Villgust anime I viewed recently illustrates that we can make the characters in this game much more interesting!

Agreed. Though the anime was such a tease. Why only two episodes, it really had potential! They should have made an actual series...

Edit: Fixed a typo.


"Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind."
- Edward D. Morrison (Tales of Phantasia)


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 10:38 pm 
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Hello,

First and most of all, thank you for the translations. Villgust was good. I still need to play many of the games you have translated, especially Chaos Seed and Slayers.

I wanted to mention that I got this bug with Snes9x1.53.
Then I loaded my savegame in Snes9x1.39a fr and it worked.

I don't know many things about emulators but if you want me to send you some savegame file, config file, or anyting, just ask.


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 3:48 pm 
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I've just played through and beaten Villgust, and am both grateful and impressed by the quality of the localization, all the more so for such an early fan-translation.

However I can confirm that I too was bitten by the crash shortly before the final boss. In my case I beat the henchman Gazus, then continued forward, had a random encounter, ran away from it, and the game immediately locked to a black screen. This was using an old version of BSNES, so obviously I can't confirm that this would happen in the most recent builds, but my point is that it looks like this can happen regardless of one's emulator.

I also noticed a (very) few typos and spelling errors in the dialogue:

  • Jim's dialogue in Minv has a spelling error -- "He tought me many things" -- and a capitalization error: "Be Careful"
  • Missing apostrophe in Marie's comment: "Were doomed"
  • And one from Baros: "foolheardy"

There were also two occasions where a character told me something was "east of here", when in reality the location was to the west of where I was. Is that a translation error, or a deliberate attempt on the game's part to mislead players à la Castlevania II? Doesn't seem like its style, though.

Getting back to glitches, I observed a few more things that could be attributable to the game, the emulator, the ROM dump, or the patch -- I don't know which:

  • Checking treasure chests is buggy and finicky -- I sometimes needed to try 5-6 times to get a chest to open, for no reason that I could discern. Changing positions helped, but I'm quite sure that at least once I checked multiple times from the same position and had the chest open on my second or third try.
  • I noticed single-pixel graphical glitches at the lower corners of a few enemy sprites when they cast spells, i.e. when the Klarken casts Quake. These were isolated pixels floating in the air, detached from the character sprite. Things like these are sometimes seen in bad ROM dumps, but I have no idea what the cause is.
  • As far as I saw, every bartender in every town just says "Yes", with no punctuation. Is this the same in the original game?
  • Finally, a really weird one: at least in my case, if you have full party death and then continue from a saved game without resetting, the game runs quite a bit faster. In particular, text boxes go by with very little delay, making them hard (but not impossible) to read in time. It's actually kind of nice since it saves a significant amount of time, but either my emulator is wonky (unlikely with BSNES, even older versions) or something's up. Any ideas?

These issues aside: many, many thanks for all your good work on Villgust. I can't say I'm enraptured by the game itself, but I'm grateful to have had the chance to experience it!


Last edited by goldenband on Sun Jun 25, 2017 4:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 3:51 pm 
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Oh, meant to say: my workaround for the crash was to beat Gazus, then immediately use an Exit, save the game to a new slot, and reset. Then I restarted from the saved game and had no issues on my second attempt.


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Fri Jun 23, 2017 9:39 pm 
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This sounds like an issue with a bad rom dump. There were quite a few of them out there unfortunately. It has been so long since we've done Villgust, I can't even run the tools to change it without installing a 16 bit emulator these days, if I even have the directory for it anymore, which I'm not sure I do after this much time. Unfortunately the fixes just might not happen, but I'm glad you guys enjoyed it. That was the first game I completed, and one of the first ones for Wildbill as well. And while I know it is a fairly mediocre RPG in all honesty, it was a lot of fun to do. And did have some interesting ideas I would have liked to have seen other RPG's imitate in future generations.


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Sun Jun 25, 2017 3:15 am 
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taskforce wrote:
This sounds like an issue with a bad rom dump. There were quite a few of them out there unfortunately.

That could well be the case, but -- just to be clear -- are you talking about a bad dump being used as the basis for the original translation patch, or a bad dump being used by the people reporting a crash bug at the end?

I'm pretty sure I did everything right on the user end. The ROM I used was from No-Intro (CRC32: 2A6F930E), whose dumps are usually flawless, and I applied the XDelta patch found here, version 1.01. Full disclosure, I did have to append a 512-byte blank header to the beginning of the ROM and then remove it after patching, but that's standard practice when dealing with old patches that expect a header.

The release notes from 1998 warn of a crashing bug at the end of the game, so this has been a known issue for 20 years now:

Code:
Use SNES9X without GUI for best results.  ZSNES will Emulate this game very well,
right up to the point where the game freezes irretrievably at the very threshold
of the big battles with the final bosses.  You have been warned!!
[...]
WARNING: CERTAIN VERSIONS OF ZSNES WILL LOCK UP AT THE END OF THE GAME.  NOTHING CAN BE
         DONE TO FIX IT (NOT EVEN LOADING YOUR SAVE IN SNES9X AFTER USING ZSNES WILL SOLVE
         THE PROBLEM.)  IF YOU DO USE ZSNES AND THIS HAPPENS, YOU MUST START OVER FROM
         SCRATCH WITH A NEW GAME IN ANOTHER VERSION, OR BETTER YET, SNES9X.  TO KEEP THIS
         FROM HAPPENING, I SUGGEST SNES9X AS THE EMULATOR TO USE WITH THIS GAME.

The release notes seem to think that ZSNES is the problem, but since I experienced the same bug (or a similar one) in the highly accurate BSNES, I suspect that if people were getting away with using SNES9X, it was actually a case of inaccurate emulation from SNES9X. After all, we've discovered in recent years that many older SNES translation patches crash on real hardware and more accurate emulators. CryptRat notes that he got the bug in SNES9X 1.53, but SNES9X 1.39a didn't, and I'm pretty sure 1.53 is more accurate than 1.39a.

I think if crashes have been seen in three different emulators, and I'm applying the patch to a clean No-Intro ROM using a validated method (XDelta) and getting the same issue, it's probably a flaw in the game code -- whether induced in the localization process or original to the game itself, I can't say. :(

By the way, the Villgust project page only has the 1.0 patch for some reason (the link says 1.01, but it's the 1.0 patch). What's the difference between the 1.0 and 1.01 patches, anyway?


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Post subject: Re: One glitch to speak of
PostPosted: Sun Jun 25, 2017 4:01 pm 
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This was almost 20 yeas ago, so my recollection of events will be hazy at best. However, if there is a note in the readme, then that means that we did find the bug during playtesting and it was most likely found in both the original Japanese rom and English versions of the game, making it a bad dump of the original game not the patches fault. (I can be pretty sure of this because anytime I find an issue, I test the original Japanese rom for the same issue as a matter of course, and if I don't find the issue, I try to solve it not let it be. If I do find the issue, I know there is no point in trying to solve it.) Which means it very likely wasn't something we created with our code. Also, keep in mind not all dumps declared good truly are perfect dumps. It could still be a bad dump or just lousy code at that point in the game that was never found originally. It could even be our code that caused it but is pretty unlikely.

As for the differences between version 1.00 and 1.01. It has been too long. I know there was a change on the opening graphic to Magic Translations if I remember right. And a few text fixes in the game as well. As for our patch being the 1.00 version, Red Soul redid our patches a while ago and I assumed he used 1.01, but it is very possible he had the 1.00 patch and mistakenly used it. I'll get it changed to the 1.01 patch soon. Thanks for telling me about it.

Because game production itself was at least 19 years ago since release, and production itself probably ranges back another year or two beyond that. Between that and the games we've worked on since muddying the waters, it is hard to come up with answers these days beyond what the game was originally about and any generalized hacking info related to the game. Specifics were probably buried in my memory long ago.


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