A lot of gamers were disappointed by the awful PC port of Tales of Symphonia. The game was locked at 30fps and 720p. The latter was fixed by Durante via his GeDoSaTo mod, and we are happy to report that a 60fps mod may arrive really, really soon.
Steam’s member ‘Kaldaien’ (the one who brought us the 60fps mod for Tales of Zestiria) has been working on a 60fps mod for Tales of Symphonia.
As Kaldaien wrote:
“So, VMProtect is a major pain in the ***, we all know that, but… I just made a major breakthrough using Cheat Engine as a debugger.
Some extraordinarily familiar machine code is right out in the open. Two integer values, both defaulting to 0x02 and both written at the beginning of a frame. Both impossible to directly modify with Cheat Engine without disabling a certain line of code.
Bingo!
ToS uses not only the same broken framerate limiter, all of its timing is handled the same way as ToZ as well. TickScale and all that fun stuff from TZFix, it will apply here too and I can start bringing over code from TZFix it looks like.
Despite VMProtect, a 60 FPS mod is possible and if we are lucky, the polish that went into TZFix will make getting it running smoothly here a lot simpler.
So, um, in case you missed it … 60 FPS possible and soon.”
Kaldaien concluded that an experimental version of his 60fps mod will be somewhat hacky, and that it will be released soon.
“Expect initial versions of the 60 FPS mod for Tales of Symphonia to be somewhat hacky. Think hotkeys for framerate limits like Zestira had (still does). The problem with this mod is going to be testing, there are some dedicated individuals and I really appreciate that, but most people are scared witless of this port I think”
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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This is one example where I feel the port devs/publisher deserves nothing, pirate this POS, or better yet get Dolphin emulator and run it in 60FPS.
As always, piracy is a service problem: no reason a paid product from 2016 should deliver an inferior experience to emulating the 2004 original.
Well, technically it doesn’t.
The original GameCube version lacks the extra content and gameplay improvements of the rereleases. So by default, the GameCube version loses out, since content (and a more balanced game,) is more important than slightly better performance.
The PC version might have been a mess (which can be excused to a degree since it was only Namco’s second Tales PC romp.)
Though, it is very questionable that the PC version ran worse than the PS3 release, which only came out a couple years ago. If the PS3 version managed to run without stuttering despite the 30fps cap, why couldn’t the PC release?
Though, I will say; people who resort to piracy are those I have no respect for, especially when their argument is “it doesn’t run at 60fps like the original, so stealing from the developer is okay,” when people are like that; you have to wonder if Namco should have just stayed off of PC in general because of how some people can be, (and don’t get me started on those people who are like “30fps=Unplayable”)
60 over 30fps in an action game like Symphonia isn’t a case if “slightly better performance”, it’s a night and day difference in how well the game plays.
By default, the Gamecube version is superior because the content it’s missing out on is absolutely mimimal (unlike latter ports in the series, which added more significant story content). That framerate difference is there for the entirety of the game, as opposed to optional costumes and an expanded sidequest that are only there at the endgame. Can’t use the Tech-Glitch anymore either to make sure everyone learns as many level 3 skills as possible either.
Donkey Kong Country Returns technically has more content on 3DS too, but that doesn’t still prevent it from being a failure of a game on a technical level for being a 30fps platformer. On the other hand, the Wii version ties important moves to waggle controls… which to most people leaves Dolphin as the obvious way play the game, as there they can rebind those waggle motions to simple button presses and play the game as they always desired it.
With both DKCR on Wii/3DS and ToS on PS3/PC, there’s a base game there that people honestly do want to like… but there’s no satisfactory product in which it’s made available. Why pay full price for a flawed product, when there’s a superior free alternative available as well?
I’m not arguing in favor of pirating games for the sake of it; that kind of scum has always existed on every platform since the dawn of gaming. But at the end of the day, the rest of us gamers are in this hobby for ourselves, not to mindlessly support every single release from whatever corporation.
even the original ran at 60fps