'lo everyone, lurked around here for a while, and figured I'd ask this as I thought this might not be too tough of a hack.

Basically, I had a few questions about the viability of a Suikoden 2 NTSC fix patch or something.

I know in the US release of the game, several things were missing:

- In many strategy battles, the music would not play
- Annalee doesn't sing, just sits there silently.
- Hero's Name does not import correctly.
- Some text still in UNICODE format, thus unreadable

I hear there are many more, is there a list of them somewhere?

and others. I had heard that the PAL releases fixed these bugs. Is this true? Also, what is generally the difference between an English [NTSC] vs English [PAL] PSX title, would it be viable to say, make a new version that basically has the US executable along with the PAL data, hopefully fixing at least some of the problems?

In other words, is the reason that the US version is missing these songs a matter of them simply not being on the disc? Or is it something else? How complex a hack would this likely be?

PLaying on a PSP then should have no difference in output or anything like that? I know PAL runs at like 50Hz and at a higher res right? Would that effect the game at all?

Apparently in some PAL versions she does, or so I had read. Sucks that she doesn't in the english one.

The other main problem with the PAL version on PSP is that is has black borders, whering the NTSC version does not.

Probably should try to do things in steps I suppose. I'm currently experimenting with the ISO and mixing and matching the files of the NTSC and PAL ones to see what happens. Kinda pain, as there are a ton of differences between the two, minor though they all seem to be. I'm still trying to narrow down where the text is stored. I THINK it's in the SDD files, but am not sure yet.

I suppose the easiest, in theory anyway, start to a possible fix would be extracting the script and y'know, proofreading it, editing for consistency and all that stuff. Make the text consistent, that sort of thing. Looking at the differences in SII and S1's file structure, I doubt there'd be much overlap in the way text was stored in S2 vs the Suikogaiden games, but I may as well ask, where was the text in those?

On the bright side, I think I found an almost complete table for the text in the game, if I can find the line break and message break code, I might just be set. That is of course, assuming that everything goes according to plan.

I'd like to do as much as I can. I am a beginner, and definitely would need some help. Early stuff looks promising, I have a text table that more or less seems to be working in Hexpose, which is good. I Know I have the line break value correct, but the close dialog box, and new dialog box values are being kinda weird right now. I also can't quite nail down the value for inserting the Hero's name, I thought it was a 6666666 value, but it is different in different places. The joys of hacking. On the bright side, overall the script seems easy to access, at least when I load up a complete BIN file.

I *think* the game is storing the data based on the area, but can't be sure just yet.

What I'll probably do first is do a continuity/grammar/spell check edit of the text first. I HAVE been trying to see if changing the files in the ISO (Putting PAL data in the NTSC, for example) will fix anything, but that's likely overly optimistic.

Also, anyone have recommendations for a good Script extractor?

Thanks for the advice. Writing my own exporter is a bit out of my depth, I haven't done any programming in over a decade, I feel old now.

Anyhow, I was able to get some basic text editing done using WindHex, and its text dumper isn't awful. I figured out the call for the Hero's name is 0500, the text at least, seems easy to find.

Did a test changing Jowy to Joey and it seemed to work well thus far. Lost left to learn though, especially if I'm gonna be changing more text.