Shenmue 2 Full English Xbox Speech mod for Sega Dreamcast

[Gebirgskuchen]

Yep, unfortunately.

[StuntmanSnake]

It's amazing how this is still going after 5 years. Reading my old messages in this thread is like a blast from the past, half of this I don't even remember writing, haha. Just goes to show how passionate us Shenmue fans are.

Just want to say thanks for everything you've guys done. I know how grueling the process of modding can be sometimes.

It's funny re-reading some of this stuff, like when Anthony817 called me slow because I kept trying to verify whether or not the english dub quality was perfected.



Just playin'.

I even see that Hunk_4th was part of this thread too. Him and I are acquaintances over at the Biohazard Outbreak server revival forum "obsrv.org" which I frequent a lot. Never pegged him as a Shenmue fan, haha.

To this day I'm still on the hunt for the perfect Shenmue 2 english dub experience on my Dreamcast. Some day I hope I will be living that dream.

[Nico0020]

Yea I really wanna see a repack for the 99min disc with better audio. Ive actually never played through Shenmue 2 fully with English Audio. I have it on xbox, but of course I always preferred playing it on the DC.

[StuntmanSnake]

Does anyone have a list of all (or most) of the unused content for Shenmue II? Seems like it would be a good idea to make that information public, if it's not already, for Shenmue modders to take advantage of. To my knowledge, the 99 min version by Smith did not remove any? If we tackled this again and removed all the useless stuff like duplicate environments and unused models, we could probably improve the voice quality. Though I'm sure I'm probably preaching to the choir.

[Anthony817]

I had ordered the Banana disc's but they came in defective. This happened 2 times already now. I ordered some 100 min discs from the UK at the beginning of this month so I am just waiting on them to arrive in the US now. After I take care of the people I have on back order I will think about getting these hard to get discs to whoever I can, if this brand works out. These discs are white and printable this time so anybody can print off legit looking cd's. The only problem is these discs are more expensive than the ones from China and I have to pay for shipping.

I will reiterate. Stay away from the Deal Extreme Banana Media brand 99 min discs.

[Nico0020]

Anthony, let us know how the CDs from the UK do. I found some CDs on a Japanese site here that work just fine, but they only ship/accept payment within Japan. They are not too pricey, so perhaps I can hook you up if needed and you could distribute within the states.

[doof_warrior]

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/vide ... nref=story

[doof_warrior]

oh yeah and here's the type of 99 min cd-r in case anyone wants to try and find some



edit: i looked it up, and this looks like them. he bought them from a korean site though. http://www.smartplus.com/Computer-Acces ... iption.php

[Anthony817]

Thanks a lot for the info guys! Yeah the UK brand are unfortunately MediaRange and they do not work in my Dreamcast at all. They are the 100 min disc's.

I might try to work something out with you Nico0020 if there is no other way.

[Agent_Morgan]

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/vide ... nref=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!

[Anthony817]

Actually you are right. Disc 4 is really the same disc on the 80 and 99 min versions. I had to re-rip my discs for the 80 min version to upload the game as it was completely lost to the net. The only problem was that I had lost the 4th disc but I remembered that disc 4 on the 99 min didn't have to be put on a 99 min disc at all and would in fact fit on an 80 min disc, so I pulled the ISO from that version to add to disc 4 of the standard version of the mod so people could play it. That is why the audio on disc 4 is pretty much flawless.

[doof_warrior]

hey guys, so if anyone's looking for 99min cd-r's this is where my friend got his in korea
looks like they do international shipping

http://item2.gmarket.co.kr/English/deta ... =175250905

[Gebirgskuchen]

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

https://www.facebook.com/kingmunch/vide ... nref=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.

[Agent_Morgan]

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

https://www.facebook.com/kingmunch/vide ... nref=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.

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.

[Anthony817]

Yeah, I can't claim that it is 100% the same audio quality as the Xbox version anymore, but it is the best we can get on physical discs for the Dreamcast. Unless somebody can redo this for 100min cdr's and remove un-needed data and give us the best audio then we can't do much about it.

I am pretty surprised that nobody else other than Smith has even fucking attempted this! I mean there are definitely un-needed files on the discs that can be removed, and that would allow us to increase the audio quality. There are 100 min 900mb CDR's available which are superior to the 99min 870mb discs that we currently use so we have 30mb to play around with not counting the files that weren't removed, so we can get better quality. We just need to have somebody redo the release for us and we got to find the best 100min 900mb discs to use.