Something interesting I just noticed. The graphics in the PS1 port of Pajama Sam 3 are slightly cropped in the NTSC release! Huh? Nice oversight from the British developers...
As if the lower quality sound in the NTSC release wasn't enough! Great to know we got the inferior product.
I wonder if this is an overscan thing? PAL has an internal resolution of 499x256 and NTSC is 499x224. I assume the PS1 just doesn't output the extra 32/16 lines of video? And on a CRT you'd expect those lines not to be visible anyway...
Oh good. Hardcoded strings.
US build date: Oct 29 2001
UK build date: Nov 5 2001
Huh, UK is a week newer.
I guess SAM.DAT is an archive of, graphics and script code? What if I switch that out.
I think some of that data might also be hardcoded into the exe. Fun.
Well here's the French build date: Nov 19 2001. Took them two more weeks!
Well, knowing this, I'm expecting that if I try to load French SAM.DAT in a US EXE, bad things will happen.
However, the audio files all seem to be cross compatible! I got UK audio files playing in the US version of the game. Yay?
Here's the German build date: Nov 26 2001. A week newer than French!
Möchtest du sie jetzt formatieren und deinen Spielstand speichern?
One of the strings in the exe is "Cheat Menu". Debug mode?
Putting in French files, audio is French but text is still English, even on graphics. Are all the graphics just in sam.dat and the exe chooses the right ones...?
Hearing the French dub in this quality is weird.
It appears yours truly did a walkthrough of the French PS1 version 8 years ago.
Fuck, I don't even remember doing that...
The French dub translated relish as sweet and sour sauce. What?
I put French EXE with all other German data files. Graphics and text are French!
So yes it seems they must have graphics for every language in the data, and the exe just determines which to load. It's all hardcoded...
I wonder how the game works out offsets though. Is it a feature of the STR format? It would be nice to mod different music into the game. (Other games' music to avoid a vod mute or the high quality version of the ost for example...)
No str file is larger than a few mb. Are the song files spread out?
@noiob I literally just found actually. They're in sam.dat along with the graphics! ...ARGH.