GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Kerr Avon]

Up until now, I always thought that the only 64MB games (the largest on the N64) were Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil 2, and Pokemon Stadium 2. But as was pointed out on another forum, the European version of Paper Mario is also 64MB, whereas the American version is 40MB.

So does anyone know why this is, and what differences there are between the USA and the European versions? Is the European version larger simply because it contains different languages (English and German and French and Italian, etc) compared to the one (English) language in the USA verson?

[Sogun]

That was a big surprise for me as well.
It could be because of the text as you say, since it's an RPG and it has been translated to many languages. But a 24 MB difference is too much! That's like 3 Super Mario 64 or 2 GoldenEye cartridges! Even Perfect Dark that also was translated to multiple languages used the same size as the NTSC versions.

I have the game on virtual console for the Wii but I only got until the third chapeter, so I don't know if there's dubbed dialog for the final cutscene or something. That could explain the big difference, since audio needs a lot of space compared to text.
Some Pokemon games were dubbed to multiple European languages and you have a version for each country instead of all languages in the same cartridge.

Another possibility is that 40MB were just enough for the NTSC version and PAL needed slighty more memory because of the text, but the next cartridge size after 40MB has to be 64MB and not something like 48 MB.
I think there can be up to 4 memory chips in a cartridge, but I'm not sure. So this possibility doesn't make sense because you can have almost every size combining 4 chips.

[zoinkity]

I'll take a look at the size and location of the sound. It's the most likely situation. Text is cheap, even uncompressed. Even four different image samples for all buttons wouldn't account for that large a difference.
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[Wreck]

It's hard to say without poking around in the ROMs. Your text file idea for the other languages sounds like a good possibility. Perfect Dark already had an entry for each "language" in the NTSC version, though they were all in English. The space wouldn't have been much different with the other translated files for the PAL release. Maybe they set it up this way so it would require less work to update each ROM, keeping them as similar as possible within the main file library.

I can imagine an RPG could use up a ton of text. I don't like turn-based RPG games, so I don't play them much at all. But if the NTSC version only had one set of text, and PAL ended up with four or more, that could have an impact on the overall size. Enough to force them to go from 40MB to 64MB? Maybe if the NTSC version was already barely fitting in. Certainly be more interesting if something else was at play, though.

Could it be possible that the ROM you got your hands on was an overrun? I've seen some of GoldenEye that are bigger than they should be, too.
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[Sogun]

My rom is called Paper Mario (E) (M4) [!].z64 so it isn't an overrun.

The four languages are English, German, French and Spanish.

Now that I think of it. Super Smash BROS 64 has German and French dubbing in it and the PAL rom is 32 MB instead of the 16 MB the NTSC versions are.
It seems a lot of difference too considering Smash has so little voice acting that can be dubbed.

[zoinkity]

Well, the PAL version has some weirdness going on.

They're padding all files after the soundbank with 0xFF so the next falls on an 0x10000 boundry. Now, it isn't like they aren't padding the "E" version. Files are padded to an 0x1000 boundry, but because they probably didn't bother to define what the fill was they'll recycle chunks of other files that happen to be in memory.
For whatever reason, PAL also pads over 4MB just before the soundbank. I'd guess there were NULL files that, despite not being copied, wound up adding padding anyway. They could just be bonkers. For those keeping track, that's basically one chip size.

For comparison, the sound banks and many other files are identical between versions. Comparing the offsets they appear, you get:

Code:

E address   P address   E endpoint   P endpoint ---------   ---------   0xE9ECD0   0xF0B5C0 0xF00000   0x13A0000   0x1942C40   0x1DE2C40   SBN 0x1943000   0x1DF0000   0x1B8220C   0x202F20C 0x1B83000   0x2030000

So it's larger because of an absurd amount of padding in addition to what E used. The language files are fairly large, but the padding accounts for a whole chip size. Interestingly, they revised the English script a bit too.

It's not like they were concerned about space though. The game's basically uncompressed.
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