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Topics - Reld

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I recently bought some Chrono-related stuff online and the seller threw in a few bonus "posters". One of these "posters" was a magazine foldout that, after some research, I figured out is from the October 31st 1994 issue of Weekly Shonen Jump. It was apparently a semi-regular feature about video games called "V.Net Dash Paper ROM Magazine". I'm only mentioning how I got it because I'm mildly amused by the fact that I essentially stumbled across it by accident.

Here are the scanned pages:
Page 1
Page 2

Anyway, the main reason I decided to scan these is the images at the bottom on both pages that appear to show Robo and an empty Jetbike on the track where you race Johnny. I don't recall ever seeing this before. I did a quick scroll through the alpha screenshot page and didn't notice anything, so I think this is totally new (to us at least).

A few other interesting observations:
Blade-armed Zombor on Zenan bridge. I know I've seen blade-armed Zombor a few times, but I don't remember seeing a shot of him on Zenan bridge. I could be wrong about that. I didn't actually check for this one. The map itself is also different though. The bridge is narrower (like the super old "Omokage Bridge" screenshots) and there's a patch of grass on the right side that isn't in that spot in the final game.

An intermediate world map that has shown up in a few scans. I've seen it before, but this is the first time I've gotten a good enough look at it to notice that the town graphics used to feature a church steeple with a cross on top. It's on the upper edge of the bottom-right semi-circle of buildings, partially overlapping the trees.

A pretty decent shot of the four elemental stats in the menu.



Edit: I was just taking a closer look at that menu screenshot out of curiosity. Crono has equipped:
Father's Katana
Leather Hat (on his torso apparently)
Leather Clothes (on his head?)
Holy Ring

Also, I watched some video about CT speedrunning strats a while ago and somebody mentioned that the playable characters have some sort of hidden elemental affinity stat (apparently Ayla's is fire). Is that what these elemental icons are for, and the stat just wasn't always hidden?

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I tried creating an SNES version of another official-but-not-in-the-SNES-version song. "One Sunny Day When We Met" is my favorite of the four PSX/DS bonus tracks, so that's what I went with.

I can't say for 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure it was made to sound like an SNES track, but without strictly observing the SNES's eight channel limit. I know the PSF version uses more than eight channels (I think it was using around fourteen, but I'd have to double-check), but due to the way the channels are managed it's hard to say for sure if more than eight are ever playing at once. I would asssume so, because I think the way it works is that the channels are dynamically assigned as needed, so there wouldn't be more than eight used if they weren't all needed, but I really don't know much about the PSX sound hardware. At any rate, I had to do some channel juggling and corner cutting to get it all in there.

I didn't bother with an IPS patch this time, but I can make one if somebody wants it.

I don't know if I'll do more of these or not. If I do I'll probably rename this thread and keep them all in here so I don't spam the board up too much.

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Chrono Trigger Modification / Frog's Theme Intro Recreated
« on: January 04, 2021, 09:17:49 pm »
I've attempted to put the intro to Frog's Theme from the OST back into the game. There are some redundant commands for things like volume and panning in the track data that I'm pretty sure are leftovers from when the intro was present, but other than that I had to transcribe it by ear. I think it came out pretty well.

After the intro plays the main song just loops normally, meaning it doesn't loop back to the intro. I did this on purpose because I think the loop sounds kind of jarring when you loop the whole thing.

Attached is the SPC if you just want to hear it, and an IPS patch with the song inserted into the game. I put it in the free space at the end of all of the songs and just repointed it, so the original Frog's Theme track data is still in there.

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Chrono Trigger Modification / "Unused" BRR Instrument Sample
« on: July 19, 2020, 11:49:42 pm »
When Geiger was writing his offsets guide he seems to have mistakenly assumed that the BRR samples start with "(00) Silence". They actually start with "(01) Clap". As a result the labels for the samples in the offsets guide are all off by one. The last valid instrument is actually 3E, which seems to be a cuica.

I put "unused" in quotes because it actually does show up in the instrument table for the "song" "{4C} Lavos Breath", but that song is all crazy noise effects that I don't have a full understanding of. It never actually plays it as a straight instrument sample.

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Other Topics and the Prerelease / Omokage Bridge
« on: July 04, 2020, 08:39:55 pm »
I've developed a bit of an obsession lately with the "alpha" footage/screenshots that are out there. Hopefully my posts aren't coming across as spammy.

So, there's a point in the V Fes '94 Video where everyone's talking, and there's gameplay footage playing on the big monitors in the background. What appears to be Crono, Robo, and Ayla cross a bridge over a river that runs through the continent. At each end of the bridge a location label pops up.



The only place I've really seen this discussed is The Cutting Room Floor page, and they just show a really low-res capture and say that it's hard to read. I have a slightly better one I've been staring at for a while and I think I know what it says.



The text on the top and bottom is screencapped from the video (the only difference is the bottom is deinterlaced, which didn't make much difference). In the middle is my recreation of the same text using the final game's font. It's a little blurry because I stretched it horizontally to try and match the aspect ratio from the video.

I think it says おもかげ橋 or Omokagebashi/Omokage Bridge. The only part I'm really not sure about is the 橋 on the end. The kanji character in the video seems a little simpler/like it's lacking some bits. The overall shape seems right though, and 橋 is the same character for bridge used in the final game's label for Zenan Bridge.

There is apparently a real bridge in Japan called Omokage bridge as well, although it's written as 面影橋. I tried looking up the meaning of Omokage/面影. This site says it means "face; looks; vestiges; trace" and gives the following example sentences:
Quote
This town still retains something of the old days.

Hollywood isn't what it used to be.

At her age, she still preserved the appearance of a young girl.

The village is now different from what it used to be.
Seems like kind of a melancholy/nostalgic word.



Later I was looking at some screenshots from magazines and it occurred to me that this bridge that shows up a couple of times is probably Omokage Bridge as well.



I don't know whose tombstones those are, but their presence kind of fits the vibe of those Omokage example sentences above in my opinion. The larger of the two tombstones seems to be the unused tombstone sprite from the Prerelease ROM that Vehek posted about here, so that's kind of neat as well.

I guess that's it. I don't really have an "in conclusion" for this. It's just some odds and ends that have been floating around in my head. Hopefully it's not all stuff that's been discussed to death. If it has I couldn't find those discussions.



Oh, I didn't know where else to mention this, so here's a random tidbit: The bridge in the shots above with the tombstones is 16 pixels/two tiles (subtiles I guess in TF terms?) narrower (meaning vertically on screen) than Zenan Bridge.

Random tidbit #2: I think maybe a playable version of this (or possibly a video tape) may have been sent around at some point. I'm basing this entirely on the fact that we have two shots that seem to be from different moments in the same battle. If it was just a mockup I'd think there'd probably only be one. That's just wild speculation though.

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This probably isn't as interesting to anyone else as it is to me, but I figured I'd share anyway just in case.



It turns out most of the graphics in this "alpha" screenshot are present in the final game, although slightly modified in places, so I tried my best to recreate it. The leaves are used in a few places. I swiped them from Denadoro Mountain and altered the palette. The sky/distant mountains were taken from Denadoro as well, but I tweaked the palette a little and altered some of the mountain peaks to match the screenshot. The ground tiles are from Death Peak, and they use the same palette as Death Peak's ground tiles in the final.

The Heckran sprite in the screenshot is considerably different from the final, but I didn't want to mess with it so I just pasted in the final one. Same goes for the flames.

I did modify all three of the character sprites.

Chrono's sprite seems to be almost identical to the final, except that I had to move the blade of his sword a little.

Frog's sprite is a little different from the final. His feet don't stick out quite as much, and his tongue isn't as big.

Marle's sprite I had to cobble together from two different poses. That exact pose doesn't seem to exist in the finished game. I also changed her hand so that she has a finger extended.

The menu background is basically just the default from the final without the HDMA gradient and with a custom blue palette. I did add some highlighting on the right edge tiles though. Looking at it again now I think the right edge tiles might have just been mirrors of the left edge at this point in development, which would mean mine are slightly wrong.

A few of the Japanese text characters appeared different as well, so I modified them a little. Specifically ざ ン パ ル and ス.

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