running WC3 PS1 on an AMD athlon XP 1,6 GHz

Confed

Commodore
Hello,
I've thinking of buying WC3 for Playstation for it's higher quality FMV's.
But can someone tell me if it's even possible to view the FMV's from the PS1 version without a playstation? :confused:
Thanks in advance for the help!
 
I think absolutley NOT. Not that i do not know why exactley...

Keep in mind Playstation is the product of a Japanese market place so games of the eastern hemisphere will most likely not work on machines that are encoded differently to read and execute batches of data that supposed to work on one system ONLY. (See PAL, NTSC, SECOM etc.)

Ive heard of such wild tests from people, but now that you mention it I may as well give it a go :D
 
google, but you need to arrange the roms yourselves. for valid playstation owners, instructions are included.

bleem could not run it about 5 years ago, don't know about the current release.
 
WC3 runs (almost) perfectly in XP on my althlon64 3400+ with 1GB ram and Radeon x800xt using the epsxe emulator. Legally speaking, you should own a PS1 to rightly have the BIOS needed to run the emulator. Then, there are multiple plugins for video and such to choose from that affect how the game will play and look. It took me a little bit of trial and error and testing and tweaking before it played right. (I'm using "Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.6" at 1024x768 and 32bit color depth) PLus customizing your controls is a must but It probably works best just to get a PSX style usb gamepad. This works great for me and looks good and plays smoothly. The only issue I've had to contend with is that at the moment it doesnt show which menu option is highlighted for some reason which makes saving and loading your game a pain in the ass.

I don't know of any way to just watch the WC3 PSX videos save for in the game itself. I've been researching the matter for a while and have extracted midis, pictures and audio but No luck with the video. It seems they used some kind of oddball encryption/compression on the video.
 
This may seem like a pointless question to anyone who's familiar with emulation, but have you guys had a look around at Zophar's Domain for things like movie rippers? (Note to anyone concerned: the site has no commercial ROMs or BIOS, everything on the site is legal) A few years back, I spent some time working on some music videos using Final Fantasy 9 and Chrono Cross footage and the site had pretty much everything I needed to rip movies or audio from those discs. If you do happen to find something, you should contact one of the mods/admins, that sort of tool seems a good candidate for the site. I wouldn't mind ripping the videos from my copy either.

Come to think of it... Doesn't WCNews already have some rips from WC3? News scenes or something. Lemme check on that.

Edit: There are indeed PSX ripped video files, they're just in nasty realmedia format

Edit again:

Don said:
I think absolutley NOT. Not that i do not know why exactley...

Keep in mind Playstation is the product of a Japanese market place so games of the eastern hemisphere will most likely not work on machines that are encoded differently to read and execute batches of data that supposed to work on one system ONLY. (See PAL, NTSC, SECOM etc.)

Ive heard of such wild tests from people, but now that you mention it I may as well give it a go :D

No offense, but what are you talking about? The PSX was indeed designed and marketed in Japan. If I'm not mistaken it sold better (compared to how well other systems at the time sold) in the US due to Nintendo/SEGA loyalty in Japan, but I could be completely wrong about that. Regardless of that, you mention that "games of the eastern hemisphere will most likely not work on machines that are encoded differently to work read and execute batches of data that supposed to work on one system ONLY" Assuming I understand what you're saying (which I'm not sure I do), you're saying that Wing Commander III PSX version is a "game of the eastern hemisphere." According to the GameFAQs listing for the game, it was released last in Japan.

You then mention PAL, NTSC etc. which I'm not sure have anything to do with anything in this situation. Modern computers with the correct software can play any format with little error or work. What you may be trying to say is that due to the obvious differences between the compilation of PC/Mac software and PSX format, the video should be similarly unusable. That's simply not the case. All digital video is composed of still images. Depending on whether it's packed with a lossless or lossy codec, there may be a more or less of these images. Lossy Codecs (what WC3 is probably packed in) rely on the system's hardware to interpolate images but allow for a smaller filesize. These images are packed into a container along with an audio file if there's sound. So when you open up an AVI or put a DVD in your player, the process is essentially the same. What this means is to get the videos off of a playstation disc you only need to be able to find the video files and find/make something to tranfer the video from whatever format its been compressed into something usable. (Note: it's been a while since I really thought about a lot of this stuff, so some of it may not be perfectly accurate)

Speaking of which, Confed, what are you planning on doing with the FMVs? If you're thinking about a movie or music video project, you ought to send me a PM, I could probably help you out with any other problems you run into or at least find you someone that would be able to.
 
meisdavidp said:
Come to think of it... Doesn't WCNews already have some rips from WC3? News scenes or something. Lemme check on that.

Edit: There are indeed PSX ripped video files, they're just in nasty realmedia format

Thing is, they *aren't* ripped. They are video captured. ( I used fraps and got a pretty good clip of hobbes that is here in the CIC I believe) There are movie extractors that work for some PSX games but they don't work with WC3 (yet).
 
No offense, but what are you talking about? The PSX was indeed designed and marketed in Japan. If I'm not mistaken it sold better (compared to how well other systems at the time sold) in the US due to Nintendo/SEGA loyalty in Japan, but I could be completely wrong about that. Regardless of that, you mention that "games of the eastern hemisphere will most likely not work on machines that are encoded differently to work read and execute batches of data that supposed to work on one system ONLY" Assuming I understand what you're saying (which I'm not sure I do), you're saying that Wing Commander III PSX version is a "game of the eastern hemisphere." According to the GameFAQs listing for the game, it was released last in Japan.

I admit my wording is kinda wrong there.

Im just saying that its most unlikely for a PSX disc to work on a PC because both are built for different specifics. Perhaps there are PSX emulators and maybe it can work with the current "Cracking" software/hardware (an import cable or even an XDVD device used to read PS2 games) of today. (but you can forget what i just said there)

I did not mean to say and examplify Wing 3 for the PSX as a game just for the Japanese Consoles but that it is of course the PC and PSX both use different image capturing methods to read data.

PAL is by definition: Phase Alternating Line. The television and video standard in use in most of Europe. Consists of 625 horizontal lines at a field rate of 50 fields per second. (Two fields equals one complete Frame). Only 576 of these lines are used for picture. The rest are used for sync or extra information such as VITC and Closed Captioning.

PSX of Wing 3 is under PAL encoding.

NTSC is by definition: National Television System Committee. The color analog television standard used in the United States, Japan, and a number of other countries. Adopted by United States in 1953.

Current encoding for data capturing that is used for the PS2 (and probably MP3 players and such) are different in Japan and in the US. Though it is quite pathetic of me to mention it because i completely forgot what they are called.
(I think Japans one goes by ARRD or something).

Speaking of which, Confed, what are you planning on doing with the FMVs? If you're thinking about a movie or music video project, you ought to send me a PM, I could probably help you out with any other problems you run into or at least find you someone that would be able to.

And anyway if Confed is trying to extract the data it would not be clever, since the MOVIES1.LIB file is under a programming tool or application used when a program is being built. (See Programming Library) You ought to seek advice from a programmer or/also anyone that knows about "Oddball Encryption/Compression" about this rather than deal with this sort of thing yourself. Your actions could lead to corrupting the data on the disc and hence - completely destroy it. But then again what would i know of such thing :p
 
Edit: There are indeed PSX ripped video files, they're just in nasty realmedia format

Some higher resolution versions of these are available here: https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/5691

... and here: https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/3190

As AD pointed out, they're not rips, though -- they're video captures (... and any of the ones I did, at least, are from the 3DO version rather than the PSX release.)

They're all DivX AVIs, I believe. I'm not sure why the RealMovies are still around -- they're left over from when the site started in 1999 (we used to have awful Real versions of Academy episodes, too.)

PSX of Wing 3 is under PAL encoding.

PSX releases are region specific - there's a PAL WC3 PSX in Europe and NTSC WC3 PSX in the US.
 
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Well, I guess the only big question left is: can you make those vid rips in HuffYUV format? As long as the emulation is running correctly and nothing in the hardware or software is corrupting or uglifying the FMV, you should be able to have perfectly workable (and enormous) HuffYUV that can be cleaned, sharpened, smoothed and if necessary, deinterlaced. Just a warning, though. HuffYUV seriously is enormous, I've done some work with it in my own videos and a 3-5 minute video comes to about 2-4 GBs of space. Anyhow, thanks for correcting me about the screencaptures and such.
 
Don said:
Im just saying that its most unlikely for a PSX disc to work on a PC because both are built for different specifics...

PSX of Wing 3 is under PAL encoding...

And anyway if Confed is trying to extract the data it would not be clever, since the MOVIES1.LIB file is under a programming tool or application used when a program is being built... Your actions could lead to corrupting the data on the disc and hence - completely destroy it. But then again what would i know of such thing :p

Fisrt, PSX disk are regular CDs that are painted black somehow. There is no fancy magic needed to read the disks in a CD-ROM. There's no way that you are going to break the disk by fidling with "read-only" files. If your are really worried about that it's fairly simple to make ISOs if the disks and play with that instead.

meisdavidp said:
Well, I guess the only big question left is: can you make those vid rips in HuffYUV format? As long as the emulation is running correctly and nothing in the hardware or software is corrupting or uglifying the FMV, you should be able to have perfectly workable (and enormous) HuffYUV that can be cleaned, sharpened, smoothed and if necessary, deinterlaced. Just a warning, though. HuffYUV seriously is enormous, I've done some work with it in my own videos and a 3-5 minute video comes to about 2-4 GBs of space. Anyhow, thanks for correcting me about the screencaptures and such.
Heres the capture I did with fraps a while back:http://download.wcnews.com/files/wing3/wc3psxhobbes.avi

Free version of Fraps saves as uncompressed AVI I think... So I DivXed it. I suppose you could make it whatever you wanted though.
 
Fisrt, PSX disk are regular CDs that are painted black somehow. There is no fancy magic needed to read the disks in a CD-ROM. There's no way that you are going to break the disk by fidling with "read-only" files. If your are really worried about that it's fairly simple to make ISOs if the disks and play with that instead.

I was just saying that fiddling with such files could cause a corruption of data.

Plus the Platinium discs are black for copy-right protection. I think. I ought to check it out.
 
Thanks to everyone above for your help.
I got the game today, and already got it working with ePSXe (thx AD!) I just need to fiddle with it a bit I guess, because the audio is a fraction behind the video.
But the Video quality already looks way better than the DOS version I already had. Best 8 € I spent this year, that's for sure!
meisdavidp said:
Speaking of which, Confed, what are you planning on doing with the FMVs? If you're thinking about a movie or music video project, you ought to send me a PM, I could probably help you out with any other problems you run into or at least find you someone that would be able to.
I was merely thinking that if the game was not playable on my PC, I could maybe watch the FMVs like with some sort of viewer like with the dos version.
I don't see myself making a movie or music video project. I've never done anything remotely like it & I don't really have enough free time to learn.
Now if I would win big in the lottery, I could retire and take up such a project. ;)
 
Confed said:
Thanks to everyone above for your help.
I got the game today, and already got it working with ePSXe (thx AD!) I just need to fiddle with it a bit I guess, because the audio is a fraction behind the video.
But the Video quality already looks way better than the DOS version I already had. Best 8 € I spent this year, that's for sure!


Your welcome. Glad to hear it. I had the same sort of audio lag/ skipping when I first ran the program but a little bit of experimenting with different video plugins and settings completely got rid of it. Be vigilant.
 
What sorts of controls setups are you guys using btw? I've been considering doing this myself but for that one little detail.
 
meisdavidp said:
What sorts of controls setups are you guys using btw? I've been considering doing this myself but for that one little detail.


The tricky part for this is the button combos. the best solution is really a usb psx style gamepad. The bonus here is that you can map the Dpad to the left analog stick for a more fluid control in wc3. I played it with maping the controler buttons to the standard keyboard/mouse PC FPS controls with some success but again that means remembering which combos go where... not really that intuitive with a keyboard. Maybe LOAF could fill us in on what the button positioning was like on the PSX joystick that WC3PSX was designed to make use of... That might help congure your regular joystick for use with the PSX emulator.
 
AD said:
Your welcome. Glad to hear it. I had the same sort of audio lag/ skipping when I first ran the program but a little bit of experimenting with different video plugins and settings completely got rid of it. Be vigilant.
Like you said, a little bit of trial and error did it, audio/video is in sync now. :)
Is it possible to configure a mouse with ePSXe? I think it might be hard completing the game with keyboard only.
Also, does anyone know of any cheatcodes for the PS version? (in case it does become too hard to win, I want to be able to watch all the FMV's)
I already did a google search, but I can't find any. :(
 
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