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Game info:

Fantasy Soldier Valis: The Legend of A Fantasm Soldier
Year of Release: 1992
Developed by Riot
Published by Telenet Japan
For Super CD-ROM² System

The Valis series vas a huge hit in Japan when it came out in Japan. The series has 4 episodes (Valis 1,2,3 and 4), but every Valis game made is different for each console. What I mean with this is that, for example: Valis IV for PC Engine CD-ROM is a totally different game from Valis IV for Super Famicom and Valis II for X68000 is totally different from PCE CD's Valis II.

In the intro sequence, Yuko wakes up and realizes that she's going  late from school. (TAIHEN! ^^) After school, it starts to rain heavily and Yuko waits the rain to stop. Suddenly her friend, Reiko, comes to talk with her and talks "something about being a Valis soldier" and Yuko thinks she's acting weirdly.  After Reiko leaves, a huge monster rises from the earth and attacks Yuko. The monster misses and a beautiful voice says her to defend herself with the sword of Valis. Then a sword appears in Yuko's hand and shoots out a ray of light, which kills the monster. Then the game starts as Yuko starts to unravel the mystery of the sword and the land of Vecanty. ^^

Valis 1 is a platformer and a shooter. The game has pretty well-drawn backgrounds and the CD audio is brilliantly composed. The anime sequences are very long and well animated for a Super CD-ROM game. and this is the only PCE game I've seen which has PRECISE mouth movements when the characters speak. Very nice.The in-game sprites are well animated. (And every time you jump, slide or run, you can see Yuko's white panties maybe TOO clearly. :P Sukebe's will love this game... :P ) Anyways, if you're interested in a game, where a young girl runs from stage to stage while shooting missiles out of her sword, you'll love this game. ^^

Track info:

Track 1: The normal warning-speech
Track 2: Data, 2 second pregap needed
Tracks 3-29: CD-DA
Total: 29 tracks

Emulation info:

Hu-Go!: Hangs to the title screen.
Magic Engine: Windows version stalls after the Riot logo, Dos version works perfectly, but press tab after the Riot logo.
HuDX/Hu6280: Dumped ISO of track 2: Crashes after the Riot logo.
Real PCE / TG16: Since I don't own a real TG/PCE, I can't test a CDR copy... E-Mail me your results.

Data track info:

There is only one data track, and it holds all the game data, including animation, background gfx, sprite gfx. The only part of the game, which has text is in the beginning animation (developer's names in kanji), so a translation of this game is somewhat possible. Since the speech is in CD-DA, a translation using Hu-Go!'s HCD subtitling-option is the only possibility. I'm still trying to find the fonts in the data track with Naga though, but it seems that either Naga can't display the fonts, or the fonts are compressed. (Which doesn't seem very logical, because the amount of text in almost next to nothing....) UPDATE: Nope, NOTHING is compressed, actually this could be TOO easy to translate, since the game even has 2 english font sets. :)

CD-DA info:

After a small examination, the starting and ending positions of each track is written in the game code.

Current progress: 95% compeleted.

When I burned the game for the first time with 2 second pregaps and 0 second postgaps, the audio went totally off-sync. I noticed that the first game CD-DA track (track 3) started 3 seconds too early, the 4th track started 4 seconds too early, 5th track 5 seconds, 6th track 6 seconds, etc. The final track (which plays in the title screen) started from halfway of track 26. It seemed like a pattern, which could be repaired by toying with the pregaps... I changed the pregaps to 0 seconds (except the data track) and burned the game again, and the results were MUCH better. This time EVERY track started only a few seconds (1, 3 or 3 seconds) too early, but the game was perfectly playable now. After a few days of work, I figured out that I have to use postgaps with the pregaps. I burned the game with 0 second pregaps and 2 second postgaps for most of the tracks, (track 3 needed 2 sec pregap and 0 sec postgap and the last track needs 0.01 sec pregap) and what did I get..... PERFECT audio for tracks 3-18! :D Tracks 19-29 were almost perfect, now the didn't start at the end of last track, but they had 1 or 2 seconds of silence before the tracks started. So I tweaked the cue a little bit, and I got perfect audio for every track, except tracks 29 and 25 starts now 1 second too early, and they start from the previous' track's ends....
Now the only thing left to do is the final tweaks... then the game should be 100% playable with 100% perfect audio. ^___^

Downloads:

CUE file from the original WITHOUT PREGAPS. (Don't burn your copy with this, or you'll get a coaster!)