Blog/guest post!

PAL regions never got the Lunar games, except when available through repro companies. But now the first is again available, but this time with the fan patch 'Un-Working Design'! PAL Mega CD owners (Sega CD to US owners) missed out on some great games, including two of the must-own JRPGs: Lunar: The Silver Star, and it's sequel, Lunar: Eternal Blue! Some repro companies in the UK had already converted the US release of the game to run on PAL systems. One thing that needs to be noted is that due to PAL TV sets running at 50Hz instead of Japan and America's 60Hz meant that games in our region had to be made to sync properly. In other words if you did nothing than the cutscenes in the game would be playing quicker than the CD audio. I've tried the two most popular repro providers in the UK, one didn't alter the music and another did but my Mega CD struggled to play it and I tried it on my PC I found that most of the tracks were inaudible. The latter could be a result of potential scratching of the disk as there were some weird noises coming from my Mega CD, but disks I burned never had any issues being read.

While working on my PAL conversion project for Lunar: Eternal Blue I have had to play around with disassembling some of the BIN files contained on the disk. Here's how I achieved and would also work for Mega Drive/Genesis ROMs as well.

 Before delving into the pit of madness, I should give some background context. I really enjoy playing RPGs, they are one of my favourite genres of games (it's just a pity they take so long to complete). I’m mostly interested in playing retro ones, though I will dabble with some newer ones on occasion. Over the last couple of years, I have pulled out my old Mega Drive (Sega Genesis for my American/Canadian cousins). Thanks to a Christmas bonus almost two years ago, I bought a Mega CD (Sega CD). With my new CD-based add-on, I wanted to see what games were available -- so straight to YouTube I go, looking for top ten lists. Sadly, there are a bunch of games that were never released in the PAL territory (Europe and Australia). Through the wonders of being in the future, there are options for getting around this. One popular method is to mod the console to not only play imports, but also to run at 60Hz (retro NSTC/Japan games run at 60Hz, but PAL ran at 50Hz….it’s a long story). I would've needed to mod my Mega Drive as well as my Mega CD, and I didn’t have the heart to do that. Plan B! There are people who mod the games so they will run on PAL consoles instead! There is one game, though, that hasn’t been converted, and that is Lunar: Eternal Blue (which will be shortened to "Lunar" for the rest of this post).

 The game System Shock is about a rogue AI that has turned people into killer cyborgs and crazed mutants... so lets see if we can covert that to a Cyberpunk Red campaign! (Editor's note: Say hello to Xhojn, my Cyberpunk Red GM and good friend! --Astro)