It's depressing reading all these success stories, lol. I was 14 in '99 when I first played Shenmue. 16 or 17 when I played the sequel on the Xbox. I am now 29, and will be hitting dirty thirty in less than a month. There's been a whole book of events and changes. I never finished college, though, and have been toiling away at crappy, dead-end jobs pretty much ever since I graduated high school. I met the love of my life in '08, and got dumped by the love of my life in '10. Had a few meaningless flings since then, but I'm thoroughly damaged goods. A has-been that never was. I rent a decent apartment I can barely afford. I sleep way too much. Yeah... life was a lot better when I was 14 - 17. I've been watching a lot of porn and contemplating suicide lately. But hey, Shenmue 3's coming out, so I got that going for me!

hey guys, so, my friend that is living in south korea found working 99min cd-r's and mailed me a set of shenmue 2 copies that he burned

the audio is deifnitely not full quality, but it's not horrible either. definitely playable. and seems to vary a lot?
seems like regular npc dialog often sounds better than cutscenes(whenever there's letterboxing)

here's a kinda crappy quality sample of how it sounds, filmed off my tv with my cellphone

https://www.facebook.com/kingmunch/videos/10100781983006896/?pnref=story

Thanks for posting that, man! This might be the sole video/audio sample of the 99min version on the net.

Anyway, I realize it's just a cellphone recording, but the speech quality sounds absolutely flawless to me on that thing. Night & Day coming off the 80 minute mod. Having just played through that version in its entirety, I imagine the speech quality probably matches the quality of Disc 4 of the 80 minute version. It's damn near flawless once you hit Disc 4. There is just an ever-so-slight hint of tin in Shenhua's voice, and that's it. Having suffered through Discs 2 & 3 of the 80 minute version, where the speech quality itself really becomes especially unpleasant and grating to the ears (women & children, especially), and subtitles are required anyway since half the voices are completely indecipherable, it may as well have been lossless audio when I finally got to Disc 4. I hate to say it, but the audio quality really does detract from the experience in the 80 min mod.

In short, I want that 99 min version! Disc 4 was such a tease!

here's a kinda crappy quality sample of how it sounds, filmed off my tv with my cellphone

https://www.facebook.com/kingmunch/videos/10100781983006896/?pnref=story

Listening to the video with headphones, I really hate to say it, but: The voices during the cutscene again sound raspy and distorted, incomparable to the loseless XBox Version. Also in this Version the sound compression ist simply to high.

I'll stick to the Japanese Version until perhaps there could be a >100min CD-R Version. Let's hope. [-o<
Yeah, well, I have the Xbox version. But I'd still much rather play it on my Dreamcast in English, with sound that doesn't hurt my ears and sound like it's coming out of an 8-bit Nintendo cartridge or something. So, I can look past a little compression.

Doof_Warrior, thanks again for all the info and those links to the discs, man. 99min CD's -- especially ones that work -- are very hard to come by. I ordered some of those up.

Erm. I just ordered it directly from the site that doof_warrior posted. There was only one shipping option for international, so I took the $37 hit. Didn't see any other choice, really.


So I have tried both the 80min and 99 min release of this and they are both pretty similar audio wise. The 99 min audio is better, but its still more degraded than even the 80min Shenmue undub. Is it just not possible to get the English audio on a 99min CD-R without downgrading the audio a ton? Even though I prefer the JP audio, I'd still love to have a custom English disc version of the game too.

I really don't know what you guys want. Did you actually play the 80 minute version through in its entirety? Because that link that doof_warrior posted was a cutscene from Disc 2, which Discs 2 & 3 have the absolute worst audio quality of the 80min set, and I remember distinctly just how horrible Xiuying in particular sounded. The audio in that link sounded nothing like it. The audio speech quality between the two versions is not similar or comparable at all. The only part of the 80 minute version that the audio in that clip is comparable to is Disc 4, which sounded great to my ears, especially coming off of two discs with damn 8bit NES cartridge speech quality. That's not even an exaggeration on Discs 2 & 3. Whatever slight compression is present on what I've heard of the 99min version (Disc 4 & doof's clip) is so negligible it doesn't even really deserve to be acknowledged; not when you have the 80 minute version to compare it to.