Why is the uncompressed ROM for Phantasy Star IV in Japanese?

[Lusrimin]

I wanted to play Phantasy Star IV with an external emulator, but the text is in Japanese. For reference, I first changed the file extension from .SGD to .bin so the emulator would recognize it, and ran it with the external emulator. It gives a checksum error, but the game still runs without trouble - the emulator did this for the other ROMs I changed to .bin as well, but those games were still in English, making me think the problem is the ROM itself, not the emulator.

Could someone verify wether the ROM is in Japanese or not? I want to find out for sure wether this is a problem with the uncompressed ROM or with the emulator I'm using.

Phantasy Star IV is in English in the Steam emulator. I looked around the discussion pages, and it looks like that's because the Steam emulator reads the compressed .pak ROMs. If someone has gone through the work of uncompressing the .pak files, which of the gXXXX.pak files is Phantasy Star IV? If it is a problem with the uncompressed ROM, I'd like to try using the compressed ROM, but I'd prefer not to go through the 58 .pak files to find one trouble file.

Edit: I unchecked all of the DLC save for Phantasy Star IV, leaving it as the only .pak file, g0053.pak. I followed the community FAQ to uncompress it, and it's in English. Now I can play the game on an external emulator, but my original question (the title) still stands.

[Panda o' Plenty]

Ha. I can confirm that uncompressed ROM of PS4 is indeed in Japanese. How silly of Sega.

[Sean]

Change the emulator region to NTSC-US. There's actually a few games in the collection that default to NTSC-J.

[Panda o' Plenty]

Nah man, PS4 JP ROM doesn't include English translation inside for when it detects US console. It would make no sense.

[Sean]

Fatal Labyrinth switches language by detected console, I thought PS4 was the same way but the file in the Uncompressed Roms folder is definitely just the Japanese version.

[Panda o' Plenty]

Well, you may expect that from action or short games that have very little text, but jRPGs...
I am not sure how much of text would fill ROM but it probably wasn't tiny at 16-bit era, including fonts. I mean, jRPGs in 16-bit era tend to use all Japanese symbols, the hieroglyphs, that would take some space while action games just used kanji.

That, and there was a reason why it would take such games around year to come out in the West after original release - gotta translate. Japanese companies sure wouldn't do that during development for something heavy like jRPGs, it was up to Western companies.

[Sean]

What's really funny is that the Japanese ROM is 4mb, while the English one is only 3mb.

[Panda o' Plenty]

Ha. Sega in the West probably was happy to save up manufraction money on that. I wonder how much of dummy space the JP one had.

They did delete a single monster tho. Female spirit. Nekkid.

[akrocknrolla76]

Originally posted by Lusrimin:

I wanted to play Phantasy Star IV with an external emulator, but the text is in Japanese. For reference, I first changed the file extension from .SGD to .bin so the emulator would recognize it, and ran it with the external emulator. It gives a checksum error, but the game still runs without trouble - the emulator did this for the other ROMs I changed to .bin as well, but those games were still in English, making me think the problem is the ROM itself, not the emulator.

Could someone verify wether the ROM is in Japanese or not? I want to find out for sure wether this is a problem with the uncompressed ROM or with the emulator I'm using.

Phantasy Star IV is in English in the Steam emulator. I looked around the discussion pages, and it looks like that's because the Steam emulator reads the compressed .pak ROMs. If someone has gone through the work of uncompressing the .pak files, which of the gXXXX.pak files is Phantasy Star IV? If it is a problem with the uncompressed ROM, I'd like to try using the compressed ROM, but I'd prefer not to go through the 58 .pak files to find one trouble file.

Edit: I unchecked all of the DLC save for Phantasy Star IV, leaving it as the only .pak file, g0053.pak. I followed the community FAQ to uncompress it, and it's in English. Now I can play the game on an external emulator, but my original question (the title) still stands.

Can you help me with this one? How do i decompress ? I am looking to use the rom to play on my wii, i was disappointed it was in Japanese.

[Lusrimin]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398334923
Follow section III of this guide. You want to decompress g0053.pak

[akrocknrolla76]

Originally posted by Lusrimin:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398334923
Follow section III of this guide. You want to decompress g0053.pak

i seem to doing something wrong. cant follow the steps clearly. i am a bit confused, maybe because i am not playing this on my pc-rather on my wii.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Sean:

Change the emulator region to NTSC-US. There's actually a few games in the collection that default to NTSC-J.

Does that mean the Genesis had a form of region coding in the consoles, indicating to the game program the region code?

[akrocknrolla76]

Originally posted by Lusrimin:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398334923
Follow section III of this guide. You want to decompress g0053.pak

after i extract the rom, i am left with a file g0053 without the extension. i dont understand the importing rom steps after that.

[akrocknrolla76]

Originally posted by Lusrimin:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398334923
Follow section III of this guide. You want to decompress g0053.pak

hey thanks i figured it out. Happy.

[Ikagura]

Originally posted by Foxysen:

They did delete a single monster tho. Female spirit. Nekkid.

And Shadmirage?

[Panda o' Plenty]

That's the one I meant. Or both. Depending on whether you count recolors as separate characters.