Replicate

On a whim, I ran one of the unique identifiers in the Lain game through Google which led me to a couple interesting sites.

A very impressive Russian site is trying to recreate most of the game's content for browsing on the web. What impressed me even more is the creator managed to reverse-engineer some of the game's data types before I did. He kindly gave jPSXdec a shout out since it was used heavily to extract nearly everything on the site.

This very old Japanese site I've seen before, but did a good job of documenting the game's content as well.

Translation Hacking

There's been a bit of activity with the translation lately, so I've been working more on the translation tools. Here's real video of the proof-of-concept I posted previously.



I figured it would be a bit rough to use this approach. Unfortunately, anything more than this would multiply the amount of work many times.

I've also discovered there are 34 images on the game discs that don't seem to ever appear in the game. They're not particularly interesting, however.

Through the Digital Looking Glass

While exhaustively reverse-engineering the Serial Experiments Lain game, always in the back of my mind was an article I read years ago. It describes some curious connections between Lain, and another game called Alice In Cyber Land.
http://www.cjas.org/~leng/alice.htm

So naturally, once the Lain game hacking was thoroughly complete, my attention quickly turned to finding the secrets Alice held.

The work to discover the unique ways the game stored its videos really paid off. The Alice videos were all well animated, and suggested a game that could be a lot of fun. But for now I must be content with its raw Japanese clips, all of which can now be viewed on Youtube.

The Alice In Cyber Land franchise didn't stop with the game. It also included a soundtrack, and short OVA. It seems at least episode 1 was fansubbed by a group called "Boot To Da Head" back in 1997. The first episode is now watchable in very low quality, raw Japanese.

While the connections between Lain and Alice are intriguing, you might be interested to know that they don't end there. Tucked away in a corner of the internet is a little account by one of the game's creators that extends the connections to one more series: Digimon Tamers.
http://www.konaka.com/alice6/tamers/characters/juri-e.html

HATSUHINODE

Hope all had a pleasant new year. As we enter 2008, it is interesting to note that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the Serial Experiments Lain anime series, along with the Playstation game.

Now that holidays are over, I finally managed to release the latest compiled executable on the download page. No changes to the program interface (same wonderful command-line that you're used to ;), but it has all the latest internal goodness that I hope actually works--most notable is it now [edit] mostly supports FF8 (it would help to fully test it before making such calims :P).

"Huve Fun With Family Movie"

...with out warranty of any kid.

#lain

Through a lucky course of events, the folks over at a Lain IRC channel ran across my page. As farhan put it, "i suppose lain favours your blog". The people were friendly, and I met an excellent tester that helped with the jPSXdec development (thanks phm!).

If you love Lain, and know how to get around IRC (or can fake it, like I do ;), then feel free to join us at IRCnet (open.ircnet.net or maybe irc.ircnet.com) #lain.

nihongo

Since I began the task of decoding the Serial Experiments Lain Playstation movies years ago, I've hoped some friendly multi-lingual folks might someday translate all the audio and movies into English. I've always assumed the translated media would be downloadable, separate from the game itself, until I met a fellow who had the lofty desire to put the translated media back into the game.

I wondered what he was going to do about the 2 hours of audio. Dubbing seems the only option. But while finally playing through the whole game the other night, I found there are many sound-effects and characters in the audio portions. I would hate to lose all that to dubbing (not to mention my preference for sub-titles).

However, I also noticed the pictures shown in the background as you listen to audio, and I started thinking...


Not an actual screen-shot (you can tell by the pixels), but I have the ability to make it so. This isn't a perfect solution, but could be an alternative to dubbing (and it's probably easier too).

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.

teh h4x0rz

0xyyuu0038rrrr0000
yy = Luminance quantization scale
uu = Chrominance quantization scale
rrrr = number of run length codes in frame

v3 DC Coefficients style
11s                     (0, 1)
011s                    (0, 2)
0100 s                  (1, 1)
0101 s                  (0, 3)
0010 1s                 (0, 4)
0011 0s                 (2, 1)
0011 1s                 (0, 5)
0001 00s                (0, 6)
0001 01s                (3, 1)
0001 10s                (1, 2)
0001 11s                (0, 7)
0000 100s               (0, 8)
0000 101s               (4, 1)
0000 110s               (0, 9)
0000 111s               (5, 1)
0010 0000 s             (0, 10)
0010 0001 s             (0, 11)
0010 0010 s             (1, 3)
0010 0011 s             (6, 1)
0010 0100 s             (0, 12)
0010 0101 s             (0, 13)
0010 0110 s             (7, 1)
0010 0111 s             (0, 14)
0000 0010 00s           (0, 15)
0000 0010 01s           (2, 2)
0000 0010 10s           (8, 1)
0000 0010 11s           (1, 4)
0000 0011 00s           (0, 16)
0000 0011 01s           (0, 17)
0000 0011 10s           (9, 1)
0000 0011 11s           (0, 18)
0000 0001 0000 s        (0, 19)
0000 0001 0001 s        (1, 5)
0000 0001 0010 s        (0, 20)
0000 0001 0011 s        (10, 1)
0000 0001 0100 s        (0, 21)
0000 0001 0101 s        (3, 2)
0000 0001 0110 s        (12, 1)
0000 0001 0111 s        (0, 23)
0000 0001 1000 s        (0, 22)
0000 0001 1001 s        (11, 1)
0000 0001 1010 s        (0, 24)
0000 0001 1011 s        (0, 28)
0000 0001 1100 s        (0, 25)
0000 0001 1101 s        (1, 6)
0000 0001 1110 s        (2, 3)
0000 0001 1111 s        (0, 27)
0000 0000 1000 0s       (0, 26)
0000 0000 1000 1s       (13, 1)
0000 0000 1001 0s       (0, 29)
0000 0000 1001 1s       (1, 7)
0000 0000 1010 0s       (4, 2)
0000 0000 1010 1s       (0, 31)
0000 0000 1011 0s       (0, 30)
0000 0000 1011 1s       (14, 1)
0000 0000 1100 0s       (0, 32)
0000 0000 1100 1s       (0, 33)
0000 0000 1101 0s       (1, 8)
0000 0000 1101 1s       (0, 35)
0000 0000 1110 0s       (0, 34)
0000 0000 1110 1s       (5, 2)
0000 0000 1111 0s       (0, 36)
0000 0000 1111 1s       (0, 37)
0000 0000 0100 00s      (2, 4)
0000 0000 0100 01s      (1, 9)
0000 0000 0100 10s      (1, 24)
0000 0000 0100 11s      (0, 38)
0000 0000 0101 00s      (15, 1)
0000 0000 0101 01s      (0, 39)
0000 0000 0101 10s      (3, 3)
0000 0000 0101 11s      (7, 3)
0000 0000 0110 00s      (0, 40)
0000 0000 0110 01s      (0, 41)
0000 0000 0110 10s      (0, 42)
0000 0000 0110 11s      (0, 43)
0000 0000 0111 00s      (1, 10)
0000 0000 0111 01s      (0, 44)
0000 0000 0111 10s      (6, 2)
0000 0000 0111 11s      (0, 45)
0000 0000 0010 000s     (0, 47)
0000 0000 0010 001s     (0, 46)
0000 0000 0010 010s     (16, 1)
0000 0000 0010 011s     (2, 5)
0000 0000 0010 100s     (0, 48)
0000 0000 0010 101s     (1, 11)
0000 0000 0010 110s     (0, 49)
0000 0000 0010 111s     (0, 51)
0000 0000 0011 000s     (0, 50)
0000 0000 0011 001s     (7, 2)
0000 0000 0011 010s     (0, 52)
0000 0000 0011 011s     (4, 3)
0000 0000 0011 100s     (0, 53)
0000 0000 0011 101s     (17, 1)
0000 0000 0011 110s     (1, 12)
0000 0000 0011 111s     (0, 55)
0000 0000 0001 0000 s   (0, 54)
0000 0000 0001 0001 s   (0, 56)
0000 0000 0001 0010 s   (0, 57)
0000 0000 0001 0011 s   (21, 1)
0000 0000 0001 0100 s   (0, 58)
0000 0000 0001 0101 s   (3, 4)
0000 0000 0001 0110 s   (1, 13)
0000 0000 0001 0111 s   (23, 1)
0000 0000 0001 1000 s   (8, 2)
0000 0000 0001 1001 s   (0, 59)
0000 0000 0001 1010 s   (2, 6)
0000 0000 0001 1011 s   (19, 1)
0000 0000 0001 1100 s   (0, 60)
0000 0000 0001 1101 s   (9, 2)
0000 0000 0001 1110 s   (24, 1)
0000 0000 0001 1111 s   (18, 1)
0000 01                 MPEG1 escape style
10                      EOB