This is direct port or running on emulator?

[Rana]

Title. Cuz no way I'm buying an emulator port with fancy UI and QoL changes that can be patched by modders for free.

[Undertaker Grim]

This is a direct port. Everything is of the highest quality, including FMVs in original resolution we thought were lost to time. Graphics are rendered at a high resolution, too, though you won’t really notice it until some 3D stuff happens. Genuinely this will run better than any emulator on the market right now.

[the_randomizer1889]

M2 are mad geniuses when it comes to retro content.

[toughnails]

It is a source port, but possibly using an earlier build, because there are additional bugs and typos when compared to the original games running on an emulator.

[Desko]

They're native ports of the original games with the graphics side emulated. Best points of comparison would be the Switch ports of Super Mario Sunshine and Galaxy, or the fanmade PC ports of Nintendo's SNES games.

Originally posted by toughnails:

It is a source port, but possibly using an earlier build, because there are additional bugs and typos when compared to the original games running on an emulator.

I haven't seen anything pointing to these aside from Portrait of Ruin being earlier builds. All of the changes to the English translation in the three games seem to be newly done for this collection, since there's genuine fixes to mistranslations and even a couple of typos corrected compared to the original translations mixed in with the retranslated portions' typos, glaring inconsistencies (Mina's talisman not having its item name/description altered to account for the dialogue retranslations, Jonathan's catchphrase switching between the new "no problemo" and original "no problem") and broken English. They don't seem to be errors stemming from machine translation, either. The updated translations needed a lot more QA overall.

For Portrait of Ruin, it may be an earlier build; there's some bugs that can only be replicated in the North American release that got patched out of releases from other regions, though other bugs are patched like the Death softlock. I haven't seen reports of other bugs that can't be replicated on that version yet, though.

[toughnails]

Originally posted by Desko:

I haven't seen anything pointing to these aside from Portrait of Ruin being earlier builds.

Here's a thread about a new bug in Dawn of Sorrow.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2369900/discussions/0/4759829264964755112/

Originally posted by Desko:

All of the changes to the English translation in the three games seem to be newly done for this collection, since there's genuine fixes to mistranslations and even a couple of typos corrected compared to the original translations

Did they fix the glaring mistranslations like Cutall and Aguni? Should be Katar and Agni.

[Desko]

Originally posted by toughnails:

Originally posted by Desko:

I haven't seen anything pointing to these aside from Portrait of Ruin being earlier builds.

Here's a thread about a new bug in Dawn of Sorrow.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2369900/discussions/0/4759829264964755112/

Oh right, I forgot about the larva bug. Whoops, yeah saw that on JupiterClimb's initial playthrough :/ Yeah, aside from that I haven't seen much else for Dawn of Sorrow that can't be replicated in the original. Hope that gets fixed.
I'll try to keep an eye out for other issues. Haven't caught much else, no crashes on the Switch version so far. Been documenting the changes made to the English translation of Dawn of Sorrow as well, up to the shop conversations that you get after acquiring Mina's Talisman. Not sure if Steam'll let me post it, but I'll try to send it here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dPD3uprNachPnVFG-3pa1Z3rF7eMGUaCkOSMlV7x0y8/pub

Originally posted by toughnails:

Did they fix the glaring mistranslations like Cutall and Aguni? Should be Katar and Agni.

No, it seems like all of the translation changes were to dialogue. Item and enemy names/descriptions weren't fixed, sadly.

[toughnails]

Originally posted by Desko:

No, it seems like all of the translation changes were to dialogue. Item and enemy names/descriptions weren't fixed, sadly.

Very sad, the Hindu stuff got shafted hard in both Sorrow games. Aria also had Curly instead of Kali.

[Rana]

Originally posted by the_randomizer1889:

M2 are mad geniuses when it comes to retro content.

Yet their "genius" mind can't fathom the concept of key mapping for this collection or previous work.

Originally posted by Undertaker Grim:

This is a direct port. Everything is of the highest quality, including FMVs in original resolution we thought were lost to time. Graphics are rendered at a high resolution, too, though you won’t really notice it until some 3D stuff happens. Genuinely this will run better than any emulator on the market right now.

Sweet!

[Desko]

Originally posted by toughnails:

Originally posted by Desko:

No, it seems like all of the translation changes were to dialogue. Item and enemy names/descriptions weren't fixed, sadly.

Very sad, the Hindu stuff got shafted hard in both Sorrow games. Aria also had Curly instead of Kali.

Yeah. If anything, I would've rather seen the menu entries yet fixed than the dialogue. Those are still rife with mistranslations, from common ones like the short sword and dagger mixup to missed references like "Satan's Ring" (Dark Lord's Ring), "Valmanway" (Val Manwë) and "Garian Sword" (Galient Sword), and then butchered romanizations like the ones you mentioned and "Mjollnjr".

[Arthandas]

Originally posted by Undertaker Grim:

This is a direct port. Everything is of the highest quality, including FMVs in original resolution we thought were lost to time. Graphics are rendered at a high resolution, too, though you won’t really notice it until some 3D stuff happens. Genuinely this will run better than any emulator on the market right now.

100% completely fake, the roms are in alldata.bin, just like in the previous collections and the games are obviously being emulated. Not to mention one of the core .dlls is named "emu_integration.dll"...

[Desko]

Originally posted by Arthandas:

Originally posted by Undertaker Grim:

This is a direct port. Everything is of the highest quality, including FMVs in original resolution we thought were lost to time. Graphics are rendered at a high resolution, too, though you won’t really notice it until some 3D stuff happens. Genuinely this will run better than any emulator on the market right now.

100% completely fake, the roms are in alldata.bin, just like in the previous collections and the games are obviously being emulated. Not to mention one of the core .dlls is named "emu_integration.dll"...

This is incorrect. alldata.bin contains the games' assets (which don't all match the formats of the DS versions), but the actual code for the DS games are confirmed to be within the dra0X.dll files (dra0X.nro on Switch).

[Arthandas]

Originally posted by Desko:

Originally posted by Arthandas:

100% completely fake, the roms are in alldata.bin, just like in the previous collections and the games are obviously being emulated. Not to mention one of the core .dlls is named "emu_integration.dll"...

This is incorrect. alldata.bin contains the games' assets (which don't all match the formats of the DS versions), but the actual code for the DS games are confirmed to be within the dra0X.dll files (dra0X.nro on Switch).

Doesn't change the fact the games are emulated.

[Desko]

Originally posted by Arthandas:

Originally posted by Desko:

This is incorrect. alldata.bin contains the games' assets (which don't all match the formats of the DS versions), but the actual code for the DS games are confirmed to be within the dra0X.dll files (dra0X.nro on Switch).

Doesn't change the fact the games are emulated.

About as emulated as the ports I mentioned earlier in the thread. The code for all three games in this PC version was recompiled into native x86 machine code. There's no compiled code left in the data that could run on the DS's ARM CPUs.

[Arthandas]

Originally posted by Desko:

Originally posted by Arthandas:

Doesn't change the fact the games are emulated.

About as emulated as the ports I mentioned earlier in the thread. The code for all three games in this PC version was recompiled into native x86 machine code. There's no compiled code left in the data that could run on the DS's ARM CPUs.

Yeah, and emu_integration.dll is here just by a coincidence.

[Desko]

Originally posted by Arthandas:

Originally posted by Desko:

About as emulated as the ports I mentioned earlier in the thread. The code for all three games in this PC version was recompiled into native x86 machine code. There's no compiled code left in the data that could run on the DS's ARM CPUs.

Yeah, and emu_integration.dll is here just by a coincidence.

It's there primarily to pass commands over to the emulated graphics hardware. Again, the graphics side is still emulated. The main engines/gameplay logic are native.
Adding on as well, the collection also has the code for all regional variants contained in the same .dll/.nro - there are region checks to make sure that the correct fonts are loaded, the correct routines for drawing text are used, etc. This also includes the code for playing certain voice lines that were dummied out of the English release of Dawn of Sorrow, and work has already begun to re-enable this in Dominus. Not much has been done so far, but it's been proven to be possible (my footage):
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/935255337945157633/1279629015019425985/2024-08-31_22-26-28.mp4?ex=66d5cba3&is=66d47a23&hm=793de137e0cec161b50fff31f35a70c0405cfe94e7089f0f4e03f98e4ddd6a99&
This footage was done by switching the region value mid-game. The actual checks still have to be tracked down. Some have already been found on the Switch version, but not PC yet.