This patch remakes the entire font of Forbidden Siren 2, turning it into its proper Helvetica-style, variable-width font. The font is duplicated per language, so all languages have been properly recreated and updated.
Version 2.0 also corrects all the UI graphics for English, French, Italian, German and Spanish in order to make them slightly more legible.
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Improved fonts and graphics patch for Forbidden Siren 2 (PAL version)
Version 2.0 - July 9th, 2023 - Created by IlDucci
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WARNING: THIS PATCH DOES NOT COME WITH ANY WARRANTY WHATSOEVER. I AM NOT
RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES CAUSED TO YOUR CONSOLES OR DISCS.
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1 - Foreword
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This is a very minor, but visible patch I've made in a few days to the game
Forbidden Siren 2, on its European PAL release. The original game came with
a fixed-width font for unknown reasons (either laziness or a way to enforce
hard text limits per screen to avoid memory overflows), so I went the extra
mile and redid the entire graphic, changing the way the font looks instead
of simply redoing the code part.
For this 2023 release, I have also improved the UI graphics in every single
language by altering the palettes to do what is called "alpha bleeding".
In short, UI texts that were less readable or with a grayish outline (the
Archive button hints, movie's name and location image...) are now more
visible. This happened only to the Western release, probably because of
mishaps during the localization process, but it is now fixed.
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2 - Patch credits
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Graphics editing, hacking, scripting:
IlDucci
Tools used:
GNIE (XPERT), Sonix (Apache), Vash (TextER), Steve Monaco «Klarth» (Atlas),
RedComet (Cartographer), Kingcom and collaborators (armips).
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3 - Changelog
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v1.0 - First release:
- All the fonts have been redrawn and hacked to look like the
original, uncompressed Helvetica family used in the game.
- All alternate language texts found in those fonts (Archive headers,
Help screen details) have been redrawn.
- Edited some UI graphics in Spanish, so they do not display the
alpha bleeding mistake (causing texts to look off in some cases)
- Did a couple of very minor text changes in the Spanish texts.
v2.0 - Second release:
- All the UI updates have been ported to English, French, Italian and
German.
- New elements within the UI have been edited to improve readability.
- Translated a few of the Hint images that displayed menus or UI.
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4 - How to apply the patch
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You have to dump an image of your Forbidden Siren 2 game DVD (the European
PAL version, game code SCES-53851) to the .ISO format. In order to do that,
you will need a DVD/BluRay reader and a disc backup program (like ImgBurn or
Alcohol 120%). If you need help on this matter, please look for tutorials on
the Internet.
Make sure you have dumped your disc properly. These are the checksum numbers
for the ISO image (verified with my own disc and with ReDump's info):
CRC-32: 730e498f
MD5: 7806835609b22ce0e45c2bb5e5548504
SHA-1: 4c174c37d6b392157d4be5eaf7170908dfc7ab54
When you finally have your proper backup, you can use any XDelta patching
tool, like PhOEnIX's Delta Patcher tool (which can be found here:
https://github.com/marco-calautti/DeltaPatcher/releases/ ) to apply the
XDELTA patch to the ISO image.
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Requires the European PAL version.
Serial Number: SCES-53851
CRC-32: 730e498f
MD5: 7806835609b22ce0e45c2bb5e5548504
SHA-1: 4c174c37d6b392157d4be5eaf7170908dfc7ab54
