Re: Information needed urgently...

Chi Ming Hung (cmhung@insti.physics.sunysb.edu)
Mon, 29 Jun 1998 00:31:25 -0400 

On Jun 28, 10:37pm, Backlash wrote:
> Subject: Information needed urgently...
> To anyone,
>
> 	I have recently purchased 2 VCD boxsets of Legend of the Galactic
> Heroes.
> They are the first and third boxsets. This means that I am missing the 2nd
> & 4th boxset.
>
> 	I would like to know if anyone on this mailing list knows of any place
> on
> or off the web that has these 2 items for sale. I live in Canada, more
> precisely Montreal, but any place in the world is fine: Hong Kong, U.S.,
> Japan...

Try SASA VCD:

	http://sasavcd.com/

They have all 4 LoGH VCD box sets for about $99 each (discount available
if you order more than one box set I think).


> 	They are both very nice. The 1st box contains 13 VCDs and the first 26
> episodes. The 3rd box contains 16 VCDs and has the 3rd season in it. They
> are both made by X'Time Video CD 2.0. I think it is a company from Taiwan.
> The box is white and the disks are all in a plastic case. They do not
> individual cases. They are in Japanese with chinese subtitles. I would like
> to get the other 2 boxsets and not the single Disk types. This is mostly
> for practicality and aesthetics.

I got vol.2 of the LoGH VCD box set recently, but I wasn't too satisfied
with the quality: It turned out that half of the VCDs (the even-numbered
volumes) in my box set are encoded in PAL video format (320x288 resolution
with black strips on top and bottom of picture, 25 frames per second) AND
they used "joint stereo" for the audio MPEG stream (which is noticeably
worse that "stereo" and frequent breaks can be heard in the sound).
If you have a dedicated desktop VCD player, it probably isn't much of
a problem, but I'm using my PC-DVD Encore player, which can't properly
play PAL-encoded VCD's, even with software hacks.  The other half of the
VCDs (the odd-numbered volumes) are of much better quality because they're
encoded in NTSC video format (320x240 resolution with no black strips,
30 frames per second) and the audio stream is encoded in true stereo.
I asked SASA VCD about this odd mixture of PAL and NTSC VCDs in my box
set, but they didn't seem to know about it (but they did offer to refund
my money if I decided to send to back, which I didn't).

I donno if the same problem exists for the other LoGH VCD box sets (anyone?),
but since it seems this is the only source of subtitled (in Chinese i.e.)
LoGH - all 110 episodes - that I can get in the forseeable future, I decided
to order vols. 3 and 4 of the VCD box sets ^_^  Should be getting them next
week.

Oh and BTW, I donno if these LoGH VCDs are legit or pirated copies. There's
no mention of the Japanese copyright holders on the box but they are listed
on the printed side of the VCDs.  Weird isn't it? ^_^


Ming.


P.S. I don't seem to remember seeing any discussions about the LoGH games
	for the Saturn (which is also coming to the PSX I think).  Has anyone
	played them?  I bought the first Saturn LoGH game last year, but at
	that time I had a hard time figuring out the game engine, because both
	my Japanese and my knowledge about LoGH were rather inadequate then.
	But the other day I played it again, and was finally able to
	understand the game manual and the game engine, and I think it
	is a very well-designed strategy game which is truthful to
	the LoGH story.  Of course the story changes according to the
	player's actions, but the overall storyline follows that of the
	anime quite closely.   There's also a "Plus" version of this
	game, with added voices (36 seiyuu in all!) and enhanced CG.
	If you know Japanese, I highly recommend getting this game.