Hello

Over the last months I noticed some undubbed versions of PSX and PS2 games that contained the original Japanese voice actors and the English text translations, what for me was really awesome. Not that I always think that the English voice actors are bad, however in most cases the Japanese speakers are still somehow often better and I just just like hearing the original voices like I also prefer watching movies that are produced in a foreign language I can't understand with subtitles

However even though the results of the projects I spotted so far are really great it doesn't seem that many are following yet and most new projects are focused on new games and not on some classics I would like to see in an undub version.
So I decided to give it a try myself and without having any experience in any kind of romhacking myself yet I searched around the Internet for a few days looking for helpful posts and tutorials.

What I learned so far is that for some games it is indeed enough to replace the soundfiles in the English version of the game with the Japanese ones when you can see them on the disk (for exampla VOICE1_U.XA).
However the first tricky part for me came in copying such files from the disk to the computer and I learned that such *.XA or video files (*.STR) can't be just copied that simple on a computer.
After some more searching I found this helpful document where the author explains under point 6 how to copy such files and later how to recreate a new working PSX image file.

I have now all the necessary programs on my computer but still run into problems and wonder if anyone here could give me a few hints how to solve them or if there is maybe a better way to get these XA files from a PSX CD.
I used ISO Buster and wrote down all the sector numbers but when I extract them to my computer with CDRWin they are not about 15% larger like said in the document but in fact a little smaller. Also they don't work anymore, I have a little software calles XA Player 0.5 and I can play these files when they are located on the CD, but not after extracting them with CDRWin.

So if anyone here has some more experience with this and could give me some advice I really would appreciate it


Another thing I have been thinking about is writing subtitles for some videos, because I also would like to replace some of those STR videos when the characters are talking there, but of course there are normally no English subtitles, however I just could use the dialogs from the English versions of the videos and create subtitles from them without needing to understand the Japanese dialogs.
I also actually never did this but already searched a little bit for some information and found a video tutorial here on Youtube.
I read that there are old STR players and converter softwares out there, so is this theoretically possible and maybe did anyone here ever did this before? If so please share some experiences with me

Thanks for reading and greetings

largo77

er... why would replacing japanese voice acting with english voice acting not count as dubbing? and then if someone wanted to replace the official english voice acting with the original audio, wouldn't that then be undubbing?

largo, I'm not 100% sure if this works with PS1 games too, but I guess it will. To rebuild PS2 games one has to use Apache 2 (It's not the webserver but another program). It takes care of LBA changes. I'm not sure how it will work with xa files though. But it's worth a try. Here is a link to a tutorial on how to use it, all the links are broken unfortunately, so you'll have to do some digging.

http://my.afterdawn.com/3dluis/blog_entry.cfm/25

From Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that nearly anyone can edit, at any time.

Unlike this post [/modbait].

Indeed. When they say anyone, they mean anyone.

Known "Undub" list
http://ps2-project.org/ps2p/includes/wiki/index.php5?title=UNDUB_Known_List

thank OP for the link to that txt file.  I'm interested in starting work on Valkyrie Profile, if I can, but it seems it will prove difficult.

as for the "undub" thing, actually undub would be correct terminology.
a "dub" is the application of sound to a medium, in this case a video game.

1.   to furnish (a film or tape) with a new sound track, as one recorded in the language of the country of import.
2.   to add (music, speech, etc.) to a film or tape recording (often fol. by in).

the original japanese voices are the original dub.  the new language track in the english version is also a dub.  the second dubbing, if you will.  when you cut out the original sound all together, it is not called an "undub" it is said you "dub out" the sound.  dub out is the correct terminology for removing them entirely.  therefore, although "undub" technically isn't a word, since you are un-doing a language dub, without removing the voice sound track entirely, undub fits as a description very well.

it's also pretty awesome

Agh, I was considering picking it up used at Gamestop for like $5. Only $5. Then I remembered the voice acting and decided to keep the money.

Seriously, I’m not usually that picky, but it’s that bad.