POLICENAUTS Readme

English v1.02
8/24/09
www.policenauts.net

Questions can be emailed to contact@policenauts.net, but please check the readme

first to see if they're answered here!

Table of Contents
=================

I. Release notes
II. Instructions
A. "How do I play Policenauts in English?"
B. "I've heard I can download Policenauts in Japanese from the PSN Store. Can I
play it on my PS3?"
C. "I want to play on a Playstation, PS2, or PSP! How?"
D. "I want to emulate Policenauts. How?"
E. "Why didn't you guys fix that stuff?"
III. Acknowledgments
IV. Revision History

I. Release notes (by Michael Sawyer)

====================================

This is version 1.00 of the PlayStation Policenauts English fan translation. What
follows is a list of changes made to the base game.

- Well, of course, all Japanese text is now in English. This includes gameplay
scenes, voiced-over regular cutscenes, full-motion video cutscenes, and mini-games.
There is not a single Japanese character left.

- The script was translated by Marc Laidlaw (not the Valve employee), who is a
professional video game translator who has worked on AAA videogames, but due to the
nature of non-disclosure agreements, I will just say that you will have to trust me
that the translation was in very good hands.

- Graphics were changed too, proprietary compression be damned. Some changes were
necessary: like the character indentifiers/captions (character introductions) are
now in English, as well as any graphical text meant to be read natively by the
player. When I said there is not one even one Japanese character left, I wasn't
kidding!

- Graphical glitches fixed. The PS version of Policenauts did ship with a few of
these - these glitches are no longer present.

- Graphical mistakes fixed. There were even out and out mistakes (i.e. icons
signifying the wrong items, name-tags given to the wrong character) that were
fixed. Though these were very few, they were fixed as well.

- Opening/ending credits in English.

- Inapporpriate options removed. Some of the game options related to the text
(whether to include furigana), and were removed where no longer appropriate for the
English translation.
- Character introductions (captions) can now be toggled! Yes, we even added a
feature for the lone beta tester or two who didn't like Metal Gear Solid-style
captions.

- Uncensored?! Yes, for whatever reason, there was a text choice locked (with no
method to unlock) in the original game that we have made available. There is no
code to enter; it is available from the get-go.

As you can see, this is a pretty thorough modification on the original game.

II. Instructions (by Michael Sawyer)

====================================

A. "How do I play Policenauts in English?"

------------------------------------------

These instructions are for Windows, because I don't know of any good Mac PS
emulators, although it shouldn't be hard to do the patch on Mac/Linux. If anyone
wants to write up a quick set of instructions for that, we will add them to a
future version of this file.

Step 1: Get a copy of Policenauts. The easiest thing to do is buy a hard copy of
Policenauts from a reseller.

Step 2: Rip your hard copy of Policenauts to the ISO format. I used CloneCD to rip
to a .ccd first, then Alcohol 120% to create an ISO using the "Play Station"
format. I don't think it's the most efficient way to do it (it can probably be done
in one step), I'm just saying that's how we got it to work. It's a two-disc game,
so do it for each disc, of course. For ease of use, name the ISOs:

Policenauts1.iso
Policenauts2.iso

(the capital P shouldn't matter; you can rename them after patching anyway)

Put the ISOs in the same directory as the patch.

Step 3: Install xdelta 3:

http://code.google.com/p/xdelta/

Copy the main exe (xdelta3.0u.x86-32.exe or similar) to the same directory as the
ripped ISOs and the patch.

Step 4: Double-click the handy-dandy patch.bat and it will patch the ISOs for you.
If you are getting "XD3_INVALID_INPUT (checksum) error" it is possible you have an
athlon CPU, please execute patch-athlon-cpu.bat instead, or execute the following
commands with -n before the -f -d -s.

Optional: If you want to do this from DOS, you can go Start->Run->cmd, navigate to
that directory and:

xdelta3.0u.x86-32.exe -f -d -s Policenauts1.iso policenauts_patch1.xdt

Policenauts_English1.iso
xdelta3.0u.x86-32.exe -f -d -s Policenauts2.iso policenauts_patch2.xdt
Policenauts_English2.iso
Step 5: Play Policenauts

The new Policenauts_English ISOs are the patched copies. Whether you want to
emulate or play in hardware is up to you.

B. "I've heard I can download Policenauts in Japanese from the PSN Store. Can I
play it on my PS3?"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------

The version from PSN is DRM protected and in an unknown format to us. Although the
game itself is probably identical, there is no known way of extracting a working
ISO from it and even worse, no way for you to run an ISO that is not authorized by
Sony in the PS3.

C. "I want to play on a PlayStation, PS2, or PSP! How?"

-------------------------------------------------------

PSP is the most pain-free way, but you'll need custom firmware. Use PopStation or a
similar program to convert the patched ISO to EBoot and you can play it off the
Memory Card.

When you go to identify it, use Policenauts [Disc1of3] and Policenauts [Disc2of3]
to identify it. "Disc 3" is not a game disc, so don't worry about it - the game is
all on the first 2 discs.

To play it on a PS1 or PS2, you'll need hardware capable of playing backups - games
burned to CD-R or CD-RW. I realize that gets into a kind of iffy area, so I'm going
to leave that where it is and ask you look elsewhere for resources on that.

At any rate, this is the issue you will run into: The opening cinema to Policenauts
is a special Playstation XA file. Nothing else in the game is like this. To that
end, you will need a CD-Burner capable of burning at 4X speed or lower. I've heard
you can use programs like ImgBurn to force burners to go slower than their minimum,
but I wasn't too successful with this.

Burning at 1X, 2X or 4X should work fine if your burner supports it. You need to do
this because PS1s and PS2s have cheap lasers and in order to make sure it can
correctly read XA data, the dye needs to be really dark, so it needs to take its
time doing the burn.

Burn your CD (I used Alcohol 120% and the "Play Station" format), insert and you
should be good. Here are some issues I ran into:

- "I didn't have a slow burner available, so I tried a higher speed. I got a black
screen and occasionally the Konami logo briefly flashes."

Press a bunch of buttons. The system is trying and failing to play the XA movie.
Getting a button press will tell it to stop and drop to the game's main menu. It's
incovenient as hell because it'll happen every time you power on the game, but like
I said absolutely nothing else in the game is like this, so once you get to the
main menu, you should be fine.

- "I got the intro movie but there's no sound."

This happened to me when I used ImgBurn to force my burner to 4X, even though its
lowest speed was 10X. Again, nothing else in the game is like this so everything
else will work fine.

- "Well, how can I get the game to run perfectly on a PS1 or PS2?"

Get or find a burner that really does support 4X speed. I used a friend's laptop to
burn it at one point and then it all worked for me.

D. "I want to emulate Policenauts. How?"

----------------------------------------

There are emulation issues with either of the two major emulators, but neither
should affect gameplay. I would like to emphatically state we confirmed these were
issues with the emulator that will happen with the original untouched version of
Policenauts and are absolutely not endemic to our work.

We officially support ePSXe 1.7 with either the P.E.Op.S. Soft Plugin 1.13 or the
e}i{ Video Plugin.

pSX cannot correctly play Policenauts. There is content you absolutely cannot reach
with any known version of pSX and I've verified this with the people behind pSX.

Here are the issues you will run into:

- "When prompted to switch to Disc 2, I switched ISOs and the game played a little
but crashed soon afterwards. What gives?"

This is a problem with the ePSXe emulator (pSX can do it, but more on that later).
You can save your game at the end of Disc 1, and load it at the start of Disc 2.
You will miss no content. But you cannot seamlessly go from Disc 1 to Disc 2 in
ePSXe. You can in pSX, but that has an even worse emulation issue.

- "Hey, my emulator hard crashed and memory dumped at the very end! What gives!"

Konami did something really, really weird with the staff roll (end credits) and
honestly, I'm still not entirely sure why, but pSX will always hard crash there. It
sucks because everything else emulates pretty much perfectly except for that. There
is one (in my opinion, completely unimportant) movie after the credits. It has no
bearing on the story or anything, but for completeness sake, I can't endorse
playing Policenauts (patched or unpatched) on pSX.

ePSXe will not have this problem.

- "Um, I hear music at the end, but there's nothing onscreen. It seems like the end
credits should show here, but they don't?"

This happens if you use ePSXe and a different video plugin than the ones I
recommended. The DirectX and OpenGL plugins didn't seem to display anything at all
when the end credits came on. If you don't care about the staff roll (which is now
in English, I might add) then just wait a few minutes and the final movie will
play.

- "I hear music and the credits are... scrolling kind of strangely. They're
legible, but they don't scroll as they should."

This is a problem with the P.E.Op.S. Soft GPU Plugin. The credits do scroll
correctly with the e}i{ Plugin, but I had some issues playing the game windowed on
Vista with it. At any rate, again, everything else will work as it should.
E. "Why didn't you guys fix that stuff?"
----------------------------------------

They're issues with the emulators, not our work. The CD-switching thing works on
pSX and hardware. If I'd messed around it to make it work in ePSXe, I risk breaking
it in pSX or hardware. And breaking it in hardware is the worst of all worlds.

The end credits thing - the only way around it I could reliably think of is to do
the end credits from scratch, but that's not an easy job. The credit graphics are
very large and eat up a ton of memory. Then I need to incorporate the music and
make sure it's animated pixel-perfect to the original. It would have been months of
work and the output is something I can't guarantee would have been exactly like the
original.

The other problem with emulator-specific workarounds is that I can't guarantee

they'll work if new emulators/new versions come out.

The best I can do is make the game correctly work on the real deal, and then it's
up to the emulator authors to make versions that get closer to 100% hardware
emulation. That's no easy task and the work done on pSX and ePSXe is extraordinary
as is, but it's honestly something I can't reliably do from the game's standpoint.

Again, I would like to state that this is not a problem with the patch at all -
these problems are also present in the original Japanese version of Policenauts as
well.

Phew.

After reading about this issues, you might be cocking an eyebrow at the quality of
the project. Well, one of our beta testers said this:

When I tell people about participating in the beta, I'm going to say my favorite
part was finding a bug that was present in the original game and having you fix it.
That kind of says it all for how well the project has succeeded. I believe people
will be blown away by how much effort and attention you've given this project. My
expectations a few months ago were (if the patch even was released at all) that it
would be a somewhat functioning, decent enough jerry-rigged hack job that would
suffice the get the plot through if the program decided to work that day. When I
got here and saw how functional the game was, and the mostly minor minutia you were
actually worrying about and having to fix, made me wonder why the hell this wasn't
released months ago. Fantastic work.

I know that sounds like I'm patting myself on the back, but people have been
waiting for a Policenauts English translation for a long time and I wanted you to
know that this wasn't a phone-in job. We fixed numerous graphical glitches, and
even one crash bug left in the original game.

So, I hope you enjoy it.

III. Acknowledgments
====================

(Marc Laidlaw)

I've never been one for long speeches, so I'll let the game speak for itself and
limit this to thank-yous.
First and foremost, thank you to Hideo Kojima, Digitalnauts, and Konami for an
excellent game that has stood the test of time.

Artemio for starting the project, building and maintaining the websites, and
countless other things over the years.

Mike for stepping up and working his ass off to get this thing done. I'm still
speechless.

Nick for resolving the graphics compression issue and all his other programming
work.

Alex for the website help and the flawless instruction manual scanlation work (to
be uploaded soon).

James for the life-saving character table work.

Meow, our original programmer who wishes to remain anonymous, for helping us
complete the text dump and begin reinsertion.

Theo Berkau for providing the original font file and DPK tools, some MOV
information, and the original 12x12.tbl file.

Takamichi Suzukawa for proofreading the original text dump attempts.

Marcela for the beautiful site.

Ruud for the incredible remix.

All the beta testers for their invaluable input.

Our forum members for the love.

Everyone out there who had faith in us and the project.

Lastly, thank you Project Itoh.

(Artemio Urbina)

It has been eight years since I got involved in this project and it came as a
surprise that this month and a few days ago was the 8th anniversary of Junker HQ.
One of the original goals of this site was the translation of this game, and it
could not have been achieved without the impeccable work of Marc Laidlaw and
Michael Sawyer. They are not the only ones that are responsible for this great work
as you have read in Marc's text, but they have been the key men. They really poured
part of their lives in this project, and their effort shines in the final product.

The only thing I can ask you to do is to enjoy this great game that we have all
been waiting to play for years. Click everywhere, investigate, enjoy the humor and
detail; there s a lot of that for old school Kojima game fans. Also, please visit
the glossary; I am sure you will find a lot of background information there that
will further enrich your experience with the game.

(Mike)

(Coming in future readme update.)

IV. Revision History
====================

v1.00 Initial release.

v1.01 Made section on uncensored game content more clear.

v1.02 Added Athlon Checsum error workaround and appropiate patch bat file.

POLICENAUTS is (c) 1994 1996 Konami Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd.

All original material is (c) 2007 2009 The Policenauts Translation Project