Grandia II [NTSC-U] - Split Release
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Dreamcast Resurrection - 2009 (since 2008)

Check snesorama.us forums for more releases
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Ripped: Nothing (read below).
Downsampled: Music and sounds monoized and videos of disc 1 downsampled.
Source used: Echelon's release files and GD dump.
Main features:
- Discs dummied for 700mb. Dummy size is very small, so it makes no difference.
- File order in CD was made the same of GD and then optimized a lot (videos moved to inner part of disc), what means faster loadings and less Dreamcast noise.
- Better quality in sound and videos compared with Echelon's release.

======= IMPORTANT =========
=== READ BEFORE PLAYING ===
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As most of you know, Dreamcast GDs can store about 1gb and CDs only 700mb, so games must be splitted or downsampled in order to fit a CD. This one is a split release. It means that the game was originally 1 disc, and files were separated in multiple discs (in this case 2 discs). This release was made using Echelon's release as base, so follow these instructions to know when to change discs (taken from their readme file):

"After defeating Valmar's Body, You take off in the Granasaber to St. Heim Holy City. You must visit the Inn in St. Heim Holy City, Save your game, and power off CD1. Then load up CD2, load up your saved game, and continue play."

If you don't swap discs as informed, game will freeze on some map not present on the wrong disc or in the first FMV sequence, so you must do it at the right time.

=== YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ ANYTHING BELOW THIS POINT ===

You only need to see the files of this game once to realize that you can't make a complete version in one single disc. If you make sounds mono and rip all the videos the game barely fits on a selfboot disc, and by the way, ripping videos would suck. Then I got the Echelon version and saw how they splitted the game.

Taking the GD dump files as base, I started working on sound. I extracted the sound files from the AFS pack and for my surprise all the files were encoded as 22khz. Too good it was stereo, so I could mono and since ADX have channels encoded separately I would cut size to half (that's what Echelon did). The process for downsampling sounds looks easy: you decode ADX to WAV, make the changes you want and encode it again. First step: decoding ADX. Easiest part right? Not really. There are some decoders avaliable in internet, but most of them produces bad results, mainly on not 44khz sounds. Some of them messed with volume, others made bass really strange. So after some search I finally found one that worked right with Grandia's 22khz. I monoized the sounds and it was time to encode them back. Fortunatly I found a very nice tool made by Darkfalz that helped calculating loop in ADX and batch encoding them. As most of you know, ADX can have loop data (and that's a reason why it's used in games), and when you decode and encode it back, this information must be used to encode it with correct loop. If you don't do this, music in Grandia II (for example, battle one) would end at 2 minutes and then things would be in silence, and normal behaviour (with loop) is keep playing forever. Anyway, the results after encode got very nice, if you don't compare with original sound you can't notice it was changed.

After that, I packed the songs back and compacted all AFS packs of the game with a Echelon tool that removes about 500kb of useless data in each pack.

Then I separated the map files as Echelon made, I used their selection of maps for each disc.

In Echelon's release, they made a video selection too, and instead of deleting the FMV that was not supposed to be used in that disc, they replaced them for something like "If you want to see this video use the other disc". I simple deleted them. It means that game will freeze if you use the wrong disc for certain FMV, that's why you need to respect the instructions above.

Final part was the videos. After demultiplexing them, I saw that sound on them were 22khz too, and for some reason the program I was using for decoding the sounds didn't work on them. Other ones, as I told, would made sound terrible. So I didn't changed the sound, and downsampled only video, and them multiplexed video back. Size was very well calculated, leaving only about 300kb not used on disc. That was only for disc 1. Disc 2 didn't need to have movies changed.

Then I optimized original GD file order (moved videos to inner part of disc, and then battle videos), dummied the game and burnt them. Fortunatly I found a hacked version of cdrecord that let me record first session until LBA 11700, and not 11702 as I'm used, so I didn't have to change the binary from Echelon.

After that here's the result. Have fun with this nice game.

=== FINAL NOTES ===

- "Extras" folder in package contains: files from CD part of GD (useless), warning track converted to WAV (useless) and 0GDTEX.PVR converted to BMP (guess... useless).
- Package includes manual and covers.