[evilhamwizard]

Someone over at TCRF posted about the Network Trial Edition for PSO. It's technically a prototype of PSO V1 for the Dreamcast, and already seems to have some nice musical differences. I think there were some people who were researching the formats used in games like PSO, so I decided that maybe reposting it here would generate some interest.

Quoting here just in case.

Quote

I was waiting for this to come around. This isn't my dump, I don't know who's dump initially made it to TOSEC but it's about time.

About a month and a half before the final Japanese retail version of PSO V1 went gold, Sega allowed a few players a chance to play a "Network Trial" before the game's release to test the server load (as well as I think the last few parts of the game). Pretty rare as far as I know, and I don't know if the players had to send their copies back to Sega after they were done. But nonetheless, a few copies were distributed and found their ways into people willing to dump it. The trial now exists under the TOSEC catalog as of February of this year.

To save you the trouble of hunting it down, you can download the trial here.

Unfortunately, this was supposed to be an online only trial, so it's not possible to play the single player campaign. However, I believe the Sylverant PSO Server software can let you connect to a private server. I'm not sure how playable the server is, but there is login/lobby support at least. You'll also need an emulator that supports the broadband adapter. I think there were a few that can let you do this.

When prompted, you need to provide a serial number and access key. These keys are from VasiliyRS' copy of the game:
Serial No.: 4572564555550673
Access Key: pNgwyMTrN3VfuksW

Here are some screenshots I took.




And now, time for some differences! Just a few notable ones so far:

General:
- There are logos for ADX in the opening
- No movie files
- The options screen will only let you change one thing. I don't know what it is though.
- The 'Homepage' only contains a page with a link to Dricas and Sonic Team's website. The official PSO web page isn't linked for some reason.
- Instead of playing the opening cinematic when you start a new game, a text scroll detailing the game's story plays instead (see screenshot above).
- After the text scroll, you can create a character. Everything seems to be here as far as I know.
- OFFLINE MODE is listed but disabled, obviously.
- When ONLINE MODE is selected, it'll give a disclaimer to agree on. I think it then does some kind of calendar or adapter check to see if it should allow you to enter the Serial/Access key info. I'm not entirely sure though.

Sound and Music (click the link to hear and download the music):
BASS.ACX - This is the level warp sound effect (when you're appearing in a new area). This is completely different in the NTE.
CITY32K.ADX - This is 'Pioneer2". File not present in the final. I thought this was just a 32khz version of the Ship music, but it's actually a different mix of the song. A lot more reverb in this version.
DARK2.ADX - This is 'Cry, for 'IDOLA' the holy'. Sounds slightly different in comparison to the final.
DELO.ADX - This is 'From seeing the rough wave', the Cave boss theme. Differently mixed, uses sampled/synthesized strings instead of real orchestral strings.
EPI2.ADX - This is 'After the story2'. Sounds like a demo version of the track, using synthesized strings instead of real orchestral strings, etc.
J_CLEAR.ADX - Just a mono version of the jingle that plays when you complete a quest. File doesn't exist in the Final.
VOL_OPT2.ADX - This is 'You have nowhere to go'. Sounds like a demo version of the track, using sampling instead of a real orchestra.

Misc:
DUMMY.BIN - Just a blank 704 KB file, nothing inside.
GSL_#.GSL - All the GSL files for the maps are here, some even have the English script.
There are a lot more MAP_ANCIENT##.REL files in the NTE. What are these?
PLYMOTIONDATA.REL - doesn't exist in the final

There are definitely some in game differences. As I said, the Sylverant PSO Server software can probably get you in game. BlueCrab (the author) posted some screenshots of what it looks like in the lobby which he took screenshots of (I don't feel comfortable rehosting them without permission, so I'll link to them instead). Note though, I don't know if these are indeed differences in the NTE or just something with the server:

Lobby differences:
- The NPCs at the counter are male instead of female.
- The Lobby warps are all normal Area warps.

That's it from me so far. There's a lot of stuff to go through file wise. I don't know much about the other file formats used in PSO, so it should be interesting to see what's in there. Hopefully someone with more technical know how about the games can take a look.

Cheers!

EDIT: Supposedly, the latest version of Demul is the only known emulator that can emulate the BBA well enough to connect to a server. I still can't get past this message after selecting Online mode though:

[sonicblur]

For what it's worth, since it's slightly related, I dug through the network trial edition of PSO Episode 3 a few months back and started a TCRF page for it:
http://tcrf.net/Prot...R.D._Revolution
There are a few similarities to what you described with the original PSO, such as early mixes of songs on the disc. Both the trial and the final also contained some leftovers from when the game was apparently intended for PC. I wanted to do a page for the Gamecube network trial of PSO1&2, which I'm guessing has similar leftovers and probably an early version of Seabed since that wasn't accessible in the trial but I never managed to track down a dump or physical copy of the disc. (I'm pretty sure it's floating around since the wiki for Dolphin has screenshots and compatibility pages for both trials) I never actually finished the GC PSO research I wanted to do though, because there are a ton of debug strings that I was going to trace and completely forgot to work on it for some reason. Some of that research is here:
http://tcrf.net/Phan..._Episode_I%26II

The DC trial you mention probably worked like the PSO1&2 and PSO3 trials, which they offered to some people who had pre-ordered the game. The DC trial disc was common enough that you could buy it used on Play-asia at some point. I got the PSO3 trial disc when I pre-ordered Episode 3 from them.

Pretty cool, I hope they find some additional interesting things.

[evilhamwizard]

I remember seeing the PSO 1 & 2 trials listed on redump, but that's not really an indicator that it's been shared around. I don't have connections to any kind of inclusive dumping communities anymore, so I'm not sure if it's floating around out there. I do know that a demo of PSO 1 & 2 was actually released on the Gamecube on a Multigame demo disc exclusively in Japan (not the NTE). It was in the September 2002 one, I think.

Here's a video of the disc:
https://www.youtube....h?v=78jQ_CqakN4

I don't know if the NTE for GC came before or after though. I think it'd be more interesting to find the NTE.

[sonicblur]

evilhamwizard, on 24 June 2014 - 07:21 PM, said:

I remember seeing the PSO 1 & 2 trials listed on redump, but that's not really an indicator that it's been shared around. I don't have connections to any kind of inclusive dumping communities anymore, so I'm not sure if it's floating around out there. I do know that a demo of PSO 1 & 2 was actually released on the Gamecube on a Multigame demo disc exclusively in Japan (not the NTE). It was in the September 2002 one, I think.

A few months ago I got in touch with someone who owned a copy and dumped it, and he sounded willing to share the dump for research purposes. Unfortunately he was busy when I contacted him initially and I never heard back from him again. I suppose I could reach out again, but I'm not ready to look into it again right now. I suspect that it's been passed around before though.

This post has been edited by sonicblur: 25 June 2014 - 06:12 PM

[evilhamwizard]

sonicblur, on 25 June 2014 - 06:12 PM, said:

evilhamwizard, on 24 June 2014 - 07:21 PM, said:

I remember seeing the PSO 1 & 2 trials listed on redump, but that's not really an indicator that it's been shared around. I don't have connections to any kind of inclusive dumping communities anymore, so I'm not sure if it's floating around out there. I do know that a demo of PSO 1 & 2 was actually released on the Gamecube on a Multigame demo disc exclusively in Japan (not the NTE). It was in the September 2002 one, I think.

A few months ago I got in touch with someone who owned a copy and dumped it, and he sounded willing to share the dump for research purposes. Unfortunately he was busy when I contacted him initially and I never heard back from him again. I suppose I could reach out again, but I'm not ready to look into it again right now. I suspect that it's been passed around before though.

Crap, I completely forgot to respond to your post. Apologies.

I actually have the NTE for PSO EP1&2. It only works if you have the modem adapter in your GC (since the BBA one came out later), but if you somehow manage to get past the screen that yells at you it actually can let you play offline...multiplayer mode only though. It has it's own fair share of differences as well, especially in the music department.

Do you still need it?

[sonicblur]

evilhamwizard, on 29 November 2014 - 12:05 PM, said:

Crap, I completely forgot to respond to your post. Apologies.

I actually have the NTE for PSO EP1&2. It only works if you have the modem adapter in your GC (since the BBA one came out later), but if you somehow manage to get past the screen that yells at you it actually can let you play offline...multiplayer mode only though. It has it's own fair share of differences as well, especially in the music department.

Do you still need it?

Yes please, I'd still love to look at the files someday. I never got around to disassembling the final, I had wanted to figure out how to trigger the debug stuff I documented. At some point I might look again.

More recently, (related to the DC stuff) I purchased a GDEMU board for my Dreamcast and started looking at that stuff again. Not really PSO related yet, but I did write a tool to build GD-ROM images. As it turns out there were some undocumented things about that, like the TOC format in IP.BIN and the fact that 1ST_READ.BIN must be in a specific sector on a GD-ROM or the disc won't boot. I posted an alpha of the GDI builder in a thread at assembler, going to clean it up and do a "proper" release next weekend. Should be useful for anyone looking to make file modifications to games, since by generating a GD-ROM you don't need to worry about any MIL-CD protection.

[evilhamwizard]

Sorry for the delay, but here's a download link to the EP1&2 NTE. I think someone was working on a dummy modem adapter for Dolphin long a go in the effort to bypass the screen at start up. It'd be nice if someone could figure out how to play the possible single player campaigns that might be still on the disc for both the V1 and EP1&2 NTEs...

That EP1&2 Gamecube demo disc trial might be interesting too...

This post has been edited by evilhamwizard: 13 December 2014 - 02:10 PM

[sonicblur]

Thanks a lot! Do you want / need the Episode 3 trial dump? It seems to be floating around, but to a limited extent like this one.

There might be an alternative to the modem problem, but I'm not sure if it would work. Devolution supports Modem emulation, so theoretically if it works in Dolphin you could use that to run it. Not sure if all of the steps are possible though. I'd have to create a virtual SD card in dolphin, put the iso on there, verify the disc, etc. When I have time over XMAS I'll dig through the ISO and see if there's anything good in there.