Breakthrough CT Wii VC News

[Prince Valmont]

Hello, I'm Prince Valmont, and I'm a fellow fan of the Chrono Trigger game and a new member aboard Chrono Compendium.

I'm also an active member in the Wii Homebrew community, and I would like to share some breaking news that could give Chrono Trigger new life on the Wii.

Due to an exploit in a specific Wii game, people are now able to install any VC game that has been ripped. Because of this discovery along with some specific tools provided by homebrew development, we are now able to "inject" certain SNES, N64, NES, Genesis, TG16, etc roms into the VC Games.

Of course, being avid gamers, one of the first titles we tried was Chrono Trigger. It worked flawlessly.

Now, personally, I wanted to see Chrono Compendium's ReTranslation on the big screen. However, this is where we have a problem.  The romfile size is too large to inject into the highest sized SNES .wad (wad being VC's file format)(21MB). The original rom is 4 MB and will fit. The ReTranslation is 6 MB and is too large.

My question for the Compendium: Is there any way we can possibly shrink or compress the rom size? For the sole  purpose of bringing the ReTranslation to the Virtual Console.

Please contact me if you can help.

For more information, be sure to check out the following links:
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showforum=108.
http://wiibrew.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://wii.ds-scene.net/

[FaustWolf]

Welcome to the Compendium, and congratulations on your success! Hm, hm, hm, by hesitating to release Chrono Trigger on the Virtual Console, Square Enix has now lost huge profit opportunity -- an example of the inefficiencies of corporatism, perhaps. We are entering a new economic era in which intellectual property holders must MOVE on that property or risk profit annihilation by talented & starving fans. Are you guys worried about legal ramifications at all?

I remember Zakyrus originally split Chrono Trigger+ into two separate ROMs to handle SNES emulator size limitations. I wonder if something similar could be done here?

[ZeaLitY]

I suppose it would depend on whether the Expand ROM could be reversed. If that's the case, then it may be possible to break the Retranslation into two halves, with unneeded maps like certain dungeons blanked and made into the smallest possible size. I have no idea if that'd be enough to take it back under 4 MB, or whether the Expand could even be reversed. I hope the others will see this thread; if not, I'll move it to Kajar Labs.

[Prince Valmont]

Are you guys worried about legal ramifications at all?

There are ways around this.
For one, we can inject the CT Rom into a Virtual Console game we have already bought (but one that has been uploaded and customized for installation).

This way, all that could possibly be shown is that we've been playing a Virtual Console game that we have already bought, but rather with another game injected in it.

I consider this a movement on behalf of the gamers; A wake-up call to Square-Enix, Nintendo, and others who are withholding that the gamers want to play the gems we grew up with, and it would be a financial setback for them to withdraw and hold out. If the actual game were to be officially released, it's in my faith and good graces that we would all purchase it (myself included).

[Prince Valmont]

Any news?

[FaustWolf]

I wonder what pushed up the Retranslation size in the first place? I know there was an ending artwork added (but that was in the Japanese release in the first place); was it just the text strings that did it?

My first instinct would have been to go after the graphics packets for unneeded areas as ZeaLitY suggests, but it'd be best if we got some technical notes from the Retranslation team before embarking on such a hackfest. For one thing, many areas of the game can be revisited throughout, severely limiting the number of rooms that could be done away with. It might be better to eliminate unneeded text strings as opposed to unneeded areas after all.

[Vehek]

I probably used a lot of space for the title screen. (About $79FF bytes, not including the code).

At the time I inserted the title screen, the first free space was at 423DA3 in Zeality's rom.

[ZeaLitY]

The raw text did it.

[Prince Valmont]

Well, by using the same method of installing VC games on the wii, you can also install emulators. This case, being a version of Snes9x. It runs virtually every SNES game flawlessly and at full speed. Complete with save states.

So it's one way of playing Chrono Trigger Retranslation.

What sounds better to everyone here, though? Emulator or it's own specific channel?

[FaustWolf]

Wow, excellent work! I know SNES9x has some problems with Prophet's Guile, but I'm not familiar with any retranslation hangups using that emulator, is anyone else?

[ZeaLitY]

There might be an issue with Snes9x on the Blackbird. If you get a chance, play to that point and then try to complete the sequence. If you can make it out onto the wing of the Blackbird to fight Dalton, you've avoided the most common black screen point. Most people playing with emulators other than ZSNES or old versions will suffer a black screen after climbing that ladder.

[Prince Valmont]

I actually played through the entire game, passed the blackbird, to the end of the black dream and lavos. No hangups.
It was beautiful.

Now I'm attempting Prophet's Guile; I just started.

[Prince Valmont]

Ok, another update:

I've been learning more about injecting smc roms into the Virtual Console, and here are my findings.

Upon loading up Chrono Trigger ReTranslation (CTR), the game starts off without the opening message from Compendium (Not sure why), but the pendulum begins to swing back & forth and then the demo will proceed. After the demo plays all the way through once, the screen will turn black and freeze until you reset the VC.

If you start a new game, it will load up normally, but it will freeze to black once the screen is supposed to fade open to Crono's room with his mother opening the blinds.

I had the original version of Chrono Trigger already on my VC, so I was able to load up that save file and continue there. I didn't play much, as I tried starting a new game.

I figured this would be an issue to bring to the Compendium's attention. Is there any thing you could think of that may cause this to happen? I hope that the factors aren't too large to determine a reason.

[FaustWolf]

Any chance of injecting ZSNES as the emulator instead of SNES9x? ZSNES typically works much more smoothly with hacked ROMs in my experience, though there's absolutely no guarantee that an emulator switch would solve your problems.

[Vehek]

Are you trying to insert the CT re-translation into a Virtual Console file again? Can it handle a 48 megabit ROM?

It reminds me of what happens when you try to soft-patch the retranslation to an unexpanded CT ROM in ZSNES.