Close the world, Open the nExt.

After watching and enjoying the Serial Experiments Lain anime series, my interest was piqued by something I saw on the disc extras.

A Lain Playstation game.

And I had to own it.

With the help of my Japanese co-worker during my trip to Japan, I managed to acquire a copy all of my own.

Jen's site was accurate when it said there was very little info about the game. Following her lead, I wanted to change that. I wanted to decode the video for all to see. The audio could be ripped just fine, but the video refused to decode. Endless Googles later and I was still left wanting.

While toying with the game in an emulator, it dawned on me that if I couldn't decode the video off the disc, maybe I could let the game do it for me. I got the open source P.E.Op.S. GPU plug-in and went to work grabbing the video frames before anything was drawn over them. Soon I had nearly all the media from disc 1 sitting on my hard drive.

However, I ran into a snag. The decoded audio from the disc wasn't lining up with the video frames I had captured.

I had big plans, but was burning out and couldn't ever find a reason for this discrepancy. The project was abandoned for another day.

Two years later...

Finding myself still stumped over the audio/video mismatching, I veered a different direction. Could I possibly learn how to decode PSX videos myself?

Another endless bout of Googles later and I learned about JPEG and MPEG encoding. Soon I had my own I-frame decoder. It was the Q-gears source code that finally pushed the decoder into aligning with PSX data. It was done. I was seeing video frames from games I'd never seen before, and without ever touching someone else's decoder.

I could do what existing decoders could do, but what of Lain? What is with all this video data? It doesn't add up to anything sensible. Again I hit a snag. The only way to know what the data means is to see what the game is doing, and how could I do that?

I was just about ready to settle with my mis-matched audio and video frames, but I couldn't leave well enough alone. I ran across the pSX emulator that provides debugging capabilities. So over a three day weekend I swam through a sea of R3051 assembly code. By the end I knew how it is all done.

Outraged at the lack of information and source code about the PSX, I decided to take my little decoder to the big time and share everything I have learned over the last few months.

And thus is the jPSXdec.