Yeah, that’s it. Tried changing the extension and it worked! So it was that easy…
@Voi the title of this thread is outdated FYI.
You got the JP bios, right? pretty sure the US bios won’t work with JP games.
I just use Duckstation, I find RetroArch almost unusable, as I wrote previously.
Yeah I have, which is why I found it strange… It worked better out of the box when it kept telling that there was no bios found than when I tried to give it to it.
But yeah, I got Duckstation set up and it works fine, … Also got the crt filter working with minimal work required.
I went ahead and updated it. Feel free to correct @Voi, but if you just put [ongoing], then you have a bit less work each week, already appreciating the work you do with the weekly threads! 
That works, thanks!
Week 4 is up! In a few days I’ll be posting a poll here regarding the club speed, which will run for about a week.
Poll Time!
We’re now four weeks into Xenogears! Before I start the polls, I wanted to get a bit into my logic in dividing the current schedule:
- Whole chapters to the maximum extent possible–no stopping mid-chapter (there’s sometimes fuzzyness at end of chapter/beginning of next that’s unavoidable due to save point placement)
- Target weekly character count is 10k
- Target weekly playtime for a native, non-blind player 60min - 75min per week
Given we are subject to the whims of chapter length and save point placement none of the above is perfectly even, but that was the general target.
When both playtime and characters targets were exceed, and a good split wasn’t obvious, most of the time I made those “double weeks”.
Here’s the next ~6mo of weeks, to review:
Now, time for POLL!
Targeted weekly character count
- 10,000 (current target)
- 15,000
- 20,000
- 25,000
- Other (specify in comment)
0
voters
Targeted weekly playtime (for a native, non-blind player)
- 75min (current target)
- 90min
- 105min
- 120min
- Doesn’t matter–character count target is the only priority
- Other (specify in comment)
0
voters
Finally, curious on peoples thoughts on the chapters with looooots of characters but little playtime (see Chapter 20 in the pictures for an example) and when to double week vs push through. If we decide playtime doesn’t matter, I’ll adjust our current double weeks using this criteria only.
Not-to-exceed characters/week
- 20,000
- 25,000
- 30,000
- 35,000
- 40,000
- Other (specify)
0
voters
All polls will close December 4th, so we have a week and change to decide.
I’m a little torn on how to vote because when it comes to feasibility I’d be fine to max things out. I’m not reading at native speed but I’m not THAT slow either; I sit down for an hour or two and knock out this club for the week.
But like I said before this game’s pace has been kind of… manic. If this is representative of the future I’m not sure we want even more events to talk about all at once. Then again, it’s gonna vary by the week I suppose, when you have some dominated by a ton of NPCs it seems. Maybe we’ll get lengthier dungeons sometime too? Dunno. I’m gonna err on the side of high numbers because I’m fine with those and much prefer the idea of not taking an entire year for this game, but ultimately I think how it always goes with clubs is it’s hard to justify I’d rather not stretch the game a long time as soon as there’s even a person or two at the level of I cannot make the time to speed up.
I think character targets become less and less relevant as you move away from beginner material because if it’s mostly light chitchat like we had in town I can go through a whole lot without too many issues but the dialogue with the 天帝 for instance was significantly harder despite being a small fraction of the week’s dialogue.
As such I find your play time approach probably more reasonable overall. If it’s a dense text week then just bring it, I say.
If a week turns out to be insanely hard we can always adjust live and decide to make it double once we see what we’re dealing with.
Overall my general pace opinion is that I would be fine with 1.5x what we’re currently doing, but I’m fine keeping the current pace too.
I think it’s hard to base on character count only. I can do 20.000 char of chatting with NPC about life, but 2.000 char about lore and politics is harder.
So far I’ve been able to complete the assignments in one or two sessions, usually on the same day, so for me plenty of room to go a bit faster.
No strong feeling either way though, I’m also OK to continue with how it’s planned 
My vague recollection from 20 years ago plus what I saw when building the schedule (albeit I was trying not to read dialog and spoil too much for myself) is that it doesn’t really let up? It just starts adding more scifi/philosophy/religious/psychology/politics stuff. Something to keep in mind.
I think this is a good approach! Sometimes these characters like to pontificate in the middle of the plot…
So far this seems to be the consensus, but we’ll see how the poll shakes out in a week after more have voted/played weeks 4 and 5.
Agreed. I think the weeks inflated by NPCs we can accommodate, while for the harder stuff I liked simias’ suggestion of throwing up the flag real time to extend the week to a double. I have the entire script in renshuu’s text analyzer so I might see if there’s a good way to estimate those difficulty spikes in advance…
Oh yeah it absolutely doesn’t. We are in the first curve of this rollercoaster, which will shoot into outer space on jet engines after we reach disc 2. Whatever limits we place here will likely have to be renegotiated there…
I am fine with current speed, as I can always switch games to the 軌跡 or FF series when I run out of game to play. Enjoying this slowly and methodically feels great to me, and if this more mellow pace lets more people enjoy this game with us I am more than happy to keep this pace. That said, I could comfortably double the speed, so if everyone who stays active is ready to bump the speed, we could do so.
Week 5 is up!
On a side note, the mis-match between the actual chapters vs the EN walkthrough + the fact that I had my ending notes as blank for this week (I was debating where to end the save) meant that when I copied it into my condensed version with the character count that I use to determine week divisions…all of my end point notes got translated up one. I’m currently working to fix that + make sure I didn’t put NPC dialog where it shouldn’t be. There doesn’t appear to be much changes to how the weeks are structured here in the short term (maybe a few changes to chara count), but I will need to rework a few weeks later near the end of Disc 1 that have to be grouped with subsequent chapters as they have no save point near the end of the chapter… 
I’ll wait to do that until the pace poll closes.
Aaarg, I take it back. There is a chapter that is extremely hard to find the end point because it varies depending on each players individual skill. So I’d deliberately combined it with the next chapter to get around that problem. With my endpoint mix up, I combined the wrong chapters…fixing it to my original plan makes that week 2 hours long (but only 8k words).
Edit:
Disregard, I’m going to combine the three chapters and make it a double at 135 min / 18.5k words. The third chapters is 10k words but only 10min (all dialog)
That sounds complicated 
thanks for doing the hard work for us!!
Weeks 6 & 7 is up! It’s our first double week. I’ll be looking at the poll results here shortly to see how/if we need to adjust the schedule going forward.
Poll results!
Target characters:
10k, 15k, and 20k tied, however there was at least one person who preferred not increase, so I’m keeping 10k as our target.
Target playtime:
75min and 90min tied. I’m going to increase the playtime target to 90min as it gives me a bit more flexibility.
Not-to-exceed:
40k won. The voter who wanted to stay at 10k also voted for it, so I feel more comfortable we’re not going at an unstainable pace.
I have one last POLL!! for everyone: NPC dialog
For example this week, ~5500 is main story dialog while 22.7k is NPC. When structuring the weeks, should the optional NPC dialog be considered or not? I know not everyone cares to talk to every NPC. This choice impacts most of the current double weeks.
- The 10k target should include all text
- The 10k target should be main story, but the 40k limit should include NPC
- NPC dialog should not be considered in the targets
0
voters
I’ll close it in about 48 hours.
I’ll be closing the poll in a out two hours. If you haven’t voted or want to change your vote do so now.
I’ll need a few days to scrub the schedule then I’ll post it here and in the OP.
Alright, first pass at revised schedule. Take a look and get any comments/suggestions to me before next weekend.
Some notes on logic
-
Current schedule goes from 56 weeks → 42 weeks
-
Color legend (which probably only makes sense to me):
Orange: 90min<time<105min; 10k<chara<15k
Red: time>=105min, chara>=15k, chara+NPC>40k
Mostly to get a qualitative gauge for week difficulty -
Character targets no longer include NPC. There was only one week where it exceed 40k with NPC, and I’m mostly confident that number is inflated, as the scripts are by location and we’re in that same location for a bit, so I think it evens out
-
Keeping Week 9 a double, partially because of the long playtime, but mostly because it’s right over christmas and new years and people may have already had plans. (me, i am people)
-
Debated on Week 15, but the next week is only 56 min and <10k, so I thought it would be alright. If people prefer I break it into two, let me know. However chapter 21 is only 45 min/2650 characters
-
Week 23, I was on the fence for splitting. It would be 42min+5840ch and 55min+11000ch if I did
-
Week 24 isn’t good to split—chapter 37 is only 11min+6500ch! Best I could do is a double, but I think we can manage it like it is.
-
Week 28 we can look at making a double if we need to when we get there—if that 15k is basic text I think we’d be fine. If its technobabble we probably want to split.
-
Same for Week 34, although I’m already leaning towards making it double as it’s the end of Disc 1
-
Same for Week 38—unfortunately I believe Chapter 58 may not have a save near its end (I have no stopping point notes on it for some reason…), so bundled with Ch59
-
Week 30 can’t be easily split, as Ch47 has no save point. Ch46 is only 41min+5600ch so it seems better to bundle and double
-
Same for Week 32–Ch49 has no save and is only 15min+2450ch
