CHRONO CROSS Explored! Monolith Soft, Eminence Videos, New Doujin, Etc.

[ZeaLitY]

Chrono Cross has been explored on a double front thanks to the relentless efforts of the new Guru of Time, FaustWolf. The Chrono Cross Demo has been penetrated and several interesting graphics have been found. Specifically, Pierre's first design, dialogue icons for a Nu / Quadffid / Ketchop / strange Belthasar or male Direa, and other interesting differences have been discovered. You can even download an archive of the demo's dynamic textures, or view composite images of prototype character art / dialogue art. There's just too much to describe here; hit the Cross Demo Page and check it out!

On to the main game: FaustWolf is spearheading an effort to map Chrono Cross's file structure and eventually extract its individual assets (such as static textures and character models). The situation is very dynamic and constantly changing. We've already ripped all the dynamic TIM texture files and the basic STR cut scene files, and with Ramsus's help, FaustWolf is adding the offsets to a master spreadsheet listing Cross's data. New opportunities on the horizon include ripping character models (it HAS been done in the past; we're trying to contact the guy who did it), exploring Terminus Traduction's notes, finding the prerendered background textures, and ripping the high-resolution battle character textures. Relevant threads are here and here. Check out a taste of what success in this arena shall give us by clicking the image below. Also, don't forget to check out interesting dynamic textures I've found here. You can download the entire dynamic texture pack for Cross here; any help identifying the unknown ones is appreciated.



Monolith Soft plans to release a new game for the Nintendo DS in Japan in 2008 named Soma Bringer, with the music composed by Yasunori Mitsuda. What's also remarkable is that a character looks a lot like Crono (though, rest assured, this is not affiliated with the Crono franchise). There's also a Sephiroth clone in there. The press release is here, and here are the screenshots. Click the banner below. You can also check a translated version by Legacy of Crono here.



We're a little late with this, but here we go. Eminence (a VGM quintet) toured the US and Japan this summer, playing a couple gigs in each country. The Japan concert sold out at lightspeed, and the Otakon concert was a packed house. Yasunori Mitsuda and Hitoshi Sakimoto were at both. Thanks to enterprising guests, bootlegs of the Eminence recordings have been released on Youtube. To view results encompassing the whole shenanigan, click here. I'm ripping the .FLV videos from Youtube for preservation in our archives. They also released a professional recording made during their Passion! tour back in May; I've contacted them to see if any copies are available, since it sold out pretty quickly at fests.

PHOENIX Project, a group of Japanese VGM remixers and musicians, have put out a new Chrono Trigger doujin named Resolution Trigger. Find their project page here. I have not been able to find this at VGMC to add it to the Compendium music archive, so if you have this doujin, let me know.

As alluded to earlier, FaustWolf is now the Guru of Time as Leebot has been absent for a few months. His example has solved the issue of what to award the position of Guru of Time for. Previously, Life was awarded for creative / fan project activity, Reason for outstanding leadership, and Time for deep analysis. With the cool-down of analysis, Time's demesne became sort of extinct. Well, that's remedied now. As of this post, the position of Guru of Time is rewarded for aggressive, deep research into any subject in the Chrono series. FaustWolf is our new Guru of Time thanks to his beloved investigation of Chrono Cross's file structure and assets. This project will add much-needed luster to Cross fandom and expand the Chrono experience by indulgence in the game's workings and beautiful presentation.

RyanWMD2006 has officially opened his fan project, Chrono Distortion. He states, "This game is basically about the fate of the Original Chrono Trigger Team, and it takes place 5 years after the original game." Read more and view screenshots at this thread.

People's Remixing Competition #104 recently wrapped up; the song to be covered was "Robo Gang Johnny". This sort of thing doesn't attract the best quality, but it's worth a definite look. The results have been added (along with a Black Omen piece from PRC #19) to the encyclopedia. For the fast track: [ 1 Funky Johnny by Alex Smith - 2 Open Mic Night by TheoConfidor - 3 Arrogance my Chickenwarlord - 4 An Otherworld Awaits Robo Gang Johnny by Nario - WIP 'Robogang' by zircon - PRC19 Black Amen by LAOS ]

In speedrunning news, inichi's latest research has discovered a menu trick allowing him to skip the Guardian, Zombor, and Nizbel 2 boss battles and skip the Day of Lavos Video, Kino dialogue, and Melchior's workshop sequence for repairing the Masamune. In a couple months, he'll start his new speedrun, and he's sure to shave off many a minute with these new techniques. Follow his progress here.

I'll wrap things up with bits and pieces. First, fanart from Silver: [ Humanoid Lavos ] I also added valandro23's "When Crono Meets Serge" comic here. Second, I stumbled upon a Japanese imageboard where Temporal Flux and CT ROM hacking are being discussed. Course, we have no way of knowing what they're saying...anyway, it's here. Finally, stay tuned for the release of the Radical Dreamers: Thieves of Fate remix project, which is pretty much 99% done! Jeez, what a friggin' huge update. This really is taxing...but it's thrilling to see the community so vibrantly animated and alive.

[FaustWolf]

Congrats on getting this massive update through, Zeality! It's amazing how you can keep on top of all this stuff while piecing together VRAM dumps and answering my incessant "Do we have this Cross texture yet?" questions.

While I've got the floor here for a bit, I'd like to give a few shoutouts to Compendiumites who have been instrumental in shaping the direction of our Cross investigations thus far:

Luminaire85 and jono for their wisdom on all things model-related. If we can hand these folks the right data from the Chrono Cross CDs, they'll be able to figure out how the character models can be viewed. Other angles are possible; they might be able to modify an emulator to actually dump the model data for us. So far the only model we've succeeded in ripping is the PSX logo, which is stored in Chrono Cross as an umcompressed .TMD file. The others will not be nearly as easy to get at. It'll be a great boon to the community if we get in touch with Yartrebo, the mysterious figure who has already ripped a few Cross models.

Vehek and dankun, for fulfilling some information requests, and especially Ramsus for saving me hours of laborious Decimal -> Hexadecimal offset conversions with his technical sorcery.

There are numerous ways to help out with Cross exploration. The game plan is to "strike out on all fronts," so to speak. Figuring out the Cross file structure will be immensely helpful to Compendiumites who possess the skills necessary for figuring out model formats and writing decompression routines, because knowing which data doesn't pertain to models or pre-rendered backdrops narrows down the areas of the CD we need to examine further. If you pop Cross into your CD drive you'll quickly notice that it lacks a Table of Contents -- i.e., you can't see the file archives/wrappers Square stuffed all the data into. The most heavy-handed way of solving this problem is to actually map out where all the files we do have are located on the CD using Hexadecimal offsets. Once I get the .STR files mapped, I'll work with Zeality on finding the best way to make the datamap public and hopefully allow multiple Compendiumites to participate in mapping .TIM textures and other files we come across as time goes on.

As Zeality has mentioned above, one key task that I haven't gotten around to yet is thoroughly reading through all the notes Terminus Traductions made during their translation of Chrono Cross into French. They located the game text to do this obviously, but their notes and the various utilities they created will probably prove very useful in getting at other files. For example, I learned during my cursory search of their notes that they either created or discovered a Table of Contents for the Chrono Cross CD. If anyone knows or can discover how they did this, it would be a major coup. If you'd be interested in checking out Terminus Traductions' notes and figuring out how their various utilities work, you can find them on the Compendium: http://chronocompendium.com/Term/Modification.html

The next order of business for me personally, after getting the .STRs mapped, is to rip all sound data from Cross. Yes, I know the .PSF soundtrack has been available for years, but we need the music - and sound effects - in their native format(s) to be able to locate their hexadecimal offsets. Yazoo, formerly of Terminus Traductions, will have vast knowledge on this subject already since we owe the .PSF rip to him, so if anyone can reach Yazoo, that'd be totally sweet. My investigation into Playstation CD sound data is only just beginning, so if you have any knowledge on the subject whatsoever, please let me know here or by PM or in Kajar Labs.

If you're learning about what's going on for the first time and have questions, please feel free to contact me via PM or drop a line in one of the Cross threads in Kajar Labs. It's difficult to fully explain all the exciting developments that are occurring right now, so all Zeality and I can do is skim the surface for the time being.

[Chrono'99]

It's great to finally see Chrono Cross getting explored and hacked like Chrono Trigger. I'm totally at lost about all these technical discussions, but I wish you good luck. I've contacted Terminus Trad about the table of contents and I'm waiting for a reply.

[FaustWolf]

Thanks Chrono'99!

[V_Translanka]

Awesome, several weeks where we get big news updates!

Um, upon exploring all the neat Chrono Cross Demo stuff, I found a messed up link. Under the Demo Scenes section, the link to the "Sneaking in to Viper Manor" pic just links back to the Chrono Cross Demo page. The same thing happens with the "Near the S.S. Invincible" link. I didn't check them all though...

[ZeaLitY]

Thanks; fixed. Forgot to put .png on the end of the image names.

[saridon]

translating the character names because i feel like it

chrono look-alike on the left pic :  ? - e - ru - to
this ones kinda confusing as the first character looks like the character u but has a dakuten and there is no such character in the katakana alphabet...
but looking at the katakana table on wikipedia which has sounds that are added in to expand the sounds that can be represented if the second character is a little e then it comes out as
ve - ru - to

and on the right pic
pu - re - i - ya which sounds like player or at a stretch prayer player being far more likely...


next the sephiroth look alike
a - i - n - ze - small tsu -  shi
small tsu   makes you pronounce the next sound quicker and once again no idea on any phonetic translations so it would be close to einzshi but being only in the begginer level I may have gotten the sound the small tsu produces wrong, those things are a pain sometimes.

and member 2's name is i - de - a so something like edea i think...

the text underneath sephy in katakna reads sutandaado which probably means standard.
other than that the text to the right of chrono look alike means battles

i can do the weapon list to if you really want

[LegacyCrono]

WHOA, that's a bunch of news. Great work, guys.

Soma Bringer looks great (But I didn't get the name - the game's about Soma Cruz from Castlevania?? o.0)!
I'm translating this screenshot completely. It'll be quick, just wait and I'll upload the picture.

SEE YA!!!!!

[FaustWolf]

Folks who don't know yet, we've had a HUGE breakthrough in Cross exploration thanks to Ramsus. Pertinent posts start below:

http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,4729.msg83045.html#msg83045

Basically, we've got all the files separated, we just need ways to view the various files and decompress if necessary.

[LegacyCrono]

Phew, finished!

Here's the translated Soma Bringer screenshot! Well, it's not 100% translated. There are two thing I really couldn't translate, and the right screen title that I forgot what's the last two kanjis. Anyway, it's something about the party.
Oh yeah, where is written "Target enemy", it would be something like "Enemy is the priority". The same for "Help us first". It should be "Support is the priority" (Or similar xD). "Stay Behind" is "Stay away is the priority" or something like that...
That "Batras" thing... I really don't know what it means. But surely isn't "Battle", as saridon said. And "Edea" is something with similar spelling. "1H/2H" should be something like "Displaying both one-handed and two-handed". Heh, wouldn't fit there, right? ^^
Here's it:


SEE YA!!!!!

[FaustWolf]

Nice job on that translation, Legacy! You didn't do that in Paint, did you?

[LegacyCrono]

Nice job on that translation, Legacy! You didn't do that in Paint, did you?

Hehe, thanks, FaustWolf!
Actually, I really did that in Paint. ^^ Preety, isn't it?

SEE YA!!!!!

[FaustWolf]

Actually, I really did that in Paint. ^^ Preety, isn't it?

Now, that takes skill. I never go near Microsoft Paint myself, but you've proven that the little program really is up to snuff - kudos to you!

[saridon]

That "Batras" thing... I really don't know what it means. But surely isn't "Battle", as saridon said.

did i wright battle?, phonetically it sounds like battles, battle would drop the su and change the ra to ru.

[LegacyCrono]

Heh, would need to change two of four characters. Still, I believe it's related to something in the game. A city, or whatever. Would have to play the entire game to know. ^^

Oh yeah, there's more screenshots at RPGamer. I can translate them too, but those'll take a while, because I'm having a LOT of school work to do.

@FaustWolf:
Paint is great for small things like that. Actually I've just removed the japanese text and added the translation. Thank you again! xD

SEE YA!!!!!