Messages

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Tra$lation Compen$ation - Anearth Fantasy Stories]

I would just like to say that as a total sponge who contributes nothing to the hacking/translating scene (not sure what I could contribute, honestly) that I will play virtually any RPG that gets translated for PCE.

Nothing wrong with being a total sponge as you're the ones I hack these for   Nothing like seeing someone play what you've done and enjoy it

Taking a look at all three.  Anearth I've almost dumped fully as I just need to mark out some of the script commands such as color and other things related to displaying the text.

Xanadu 1 uses the same scripting system as X2, yay!  This doesn't always happen so it's quite nice   And I mean, even the way it grabs the CD sectors is in the same position which is really surprising 0_0 Now here's even the most surprising bit, the compression is different.  It's odd to me as I've worked on quite a number of Falcom games (just checking them out out curiosity and such) and this is the first that doesn't use Falcom's standard compression.  From what I'm seeing it appears to be just a regular ol' RLE algorithm which is really surprising as LZSS is the norm. But hey, can't complain right?   The only other thing I see that may be an issue is if X2 added some script commands but that'll be easy enough to tell so not a huge deal.

Tenshi no Uta II may be the worst out of the bunch.  Not a big deal getting the scripts.  More it's a big deal getting a nice clean script dump out of it as it loads a huge swath of blocks off the CD and I need to see if it's uniform in the positions of how it's getting things or what.  I do see some hard coded positions regarding this but that's related to getting the actual line positions for the town and scene dialogue.  So next up is just finding out whether the CD positions are hard coded in the code or hopefully loaded from a nice table.  We'll see though   Doesn't mean it can't be done, just want to make sure it's less work for SamIAm

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Tra$lation Compen$ation - Anearth Fantasy Stories]

Haven't checked out Anearth Fantasy just yet but hope to do it this weekend  The good thing about compression I have to admit is that it can be useful in telling if you have a legitimate script block or whatever type you may be looking for.  For another game I used it to my advantage for ripping graphics since they were all compressed that way  Course you can miss a few here or there but hey  Hopefully Anearth's compression will make it easier.  At least from what I wrote and recall it appears to just use standard LZSS I'm thinking since standard LZSS always started off the buffer at 0xFEE if I remember right... but as long as it's not as bad as Falcom's we'll be good ;D

Regarding the PCE vs Saturn, I'd like to do both honestly  Most likely I'd say at least 95% of the script matches (say they added a few scenes here or there maybe) so it wouldn't be too bad to do both.  And the Saturn's not a bad platform to hack on as I've poked at few on there  Plus with it's file system base it may be easier to extract the scripts from there and then match them to what's extracted to the PCE version to filter out the junk (We know all about junk in scripts don't we SamIAm )  So hopefully this weekend maybe I'll have something

Edit:  Checking out Anearth for the Saturn... This is the first console game I've seen that comes with a readme on the disc 0_0

Edit Edit:  Going through google translate, words from the guys who worked on this, very cool

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Tra$lation Compen$ation - Anearth Fantasy Stories]

I just wish there were an easy comfortable solution for everyone to encourage more pce games to get translated. other systems have got alot of love, not so much for the pce.

I'm not so sure that other system have gotten a lot of love.  From what I've noticed, really the SNES and NES are the ones who get the most love.  Maybe PSX next.  Otherwise sadly a lot of systems get neglected   Mind you this is just from personal observation not numbers so I could completely wrong.  (I do recall someone did look at the numbers and NES/SNES were the top two translation releases for Romhacking.net).

I think the issue is due to lack of documentation on how to hack on it, lack of tools, and the lack of nostalgia.  For me, I didn't grow up on the PCE but on the SNES and NES.  Once I saw it emulated though then I got really into it and kept coming back to it wanting to hack on it. Took me a long while to really dig into it and figure stuff out.  I'm still no where near as good as Bonknuts or others but at least I know my way around   Really though we have everything we need.  Documentation is there by Charles MacDonald and others.  Tools, you have Mednafen which is really all you need.  Nostalgia.. well...  Admittedly though the PCE is a pain to hack as there's no file system to speak so no easy extraction of files (although SNES or NES doesn't either...).  It's also hard to subtitle them too due to how VRAM is used and lack of VRAM.  Course we do have dubbing so that alleviates that or even text files which can work as well.  Possibly other options too that I may now know of.  Really though I think it comes down to nostalgia and just love of the system.  Never know though, as we get more games translated people may flock

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Tra$lation Compen$ation - Anearth Fantasy Stories]

Donations can help, very true.  I do think the kickstarter idea would be helpful but I just worry it also may attract the wrong crowd (those who do it just for money expecting to be compensated).  Course if we just kept it to those that are trustworthy somehow... but then again I guess those doing the work could setup a donate button on there site which would work as well.  Course this wouldn't persuade anyone to go after certain games.  Then again I'd hate for a translator to tackle something he doesn't like as that can lead to a poor translation.

Far as those people who think that people who enjoy their work are freeloaders, that's nuts to me.  Mind you I have seen it too that they think people don't appreciate what they've done due to some idiots posting bad stuff about them and their project and what not so I know what you mean.  To me though, as long as one person enjoys it other than myself, I'm happy

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Tra$lation Compen$ation - Anearth Fantasy Stories]

I'm jumping in late on this one but I don't think I could take money for guaranteeing that I hack/translate a project since due to real life you never know what would come up.  Donations I'm cool with (and would gladly except cause free money is good ;D ) but with the caveat that I may never finish whatever I'm working on cause you know, real life and such   I love doing this stuff though so don't see myself stopping anytime soon

Now far as Anearth goes I did look at it a loooooooong time ago.  Here's my notes too just in case anyones curious as I don't mind who works on something as long as it gets done :

!!!!! -- Seiya Monogatari - Anearth Fantasy Stories --
Compression Text : Yes, LZSS
Example of text block : 275800 (LZSS block appears to start at 27580C, not sure about bytes before it though)
Compression Graphics :
Example of graphics block :
Notes :
*Letter loading is done at $72DC, uses 1 byte characters too that don't match up to SJIS, dictionary values as well
*Right before name entry screen shows, loads $DA000 ($6D/0000) with compressed block, after name entry its uncompressed to $F7009 (Routine around $56A6)
*Compressed block is loaded into $A000
*Buffer is 0xFFF in size, starts at 0xFEE

Now how easy it is from there to get the script, not sure as really all I did was quick looksy.  Also I looked at quite a few more too but sadly didn't write (type) them all down.  I may have them somewhere else though too... I tend to forget   (Some others: Eiyuu Densetsu II, Gulliver Boy, Mateki Densetsu Astralius, Private Eye Dol, all from the notes file I found).

Also, Xanadu 1/2 is probably one of the worst I've worked on far as extracting scripts go   Falcom in general is I think.  At least they keep the same compression scheme the same for all their games   So anything is easier then X1/2   (I throw in 1 as I believe I looked at it and it used the same stuff as X2... could be wrong though

I'll take a bit more of a look at Anearth and see what I come up with but as SamIAm said, you never know until you really start digging into it

It would be nice if there were some kind of "kickstarter" fund if you will for translations. I can see how money would really gum up the works though.

I'd much rather contribute to a kickstarter to translate a PCE RPG than something like Pier Solar ports. But it would need to have a translator and hacker lined up with a plan.

This would be awesome I think but I wonder how fast it'd get C&Ded since arguably what we do is not quite legal (depending on where you live REing something that is not yours is illegal).  Course if we could guarantee the rights for the project then that'd definitely work.  Definitely an awesome idea though

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

A bit of this or that   Been slow lately myself due to being busy at work and not much time.  Did get some earlier though so fixed an issue with menu not working.  This'll be a huge step I think as now we can really start testing everything and nailing down all the missing text   I know there's still a bit missing (mainly the place names I believe) but hopefully there won't be too much left   Getting there!

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

Very true but you need a nice font for that I think...  Would you happen to have any that would fit?  I suck at font creation and usually just use the system font but VWFed

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

Man your fast Sam   But yeah I'd say hopefully all of the kinks have been worked out of the compressor.  One big thing I forgot since I hadn't looked at it in so long (but was reminded when typing up about the RLE use in LZSS) was that I also implemented the RLE as well (this code is used by other projects).  This of course causes issue with Falcom's routine or can if you hit it just right with the RLE... oi.  So with that removed and a few other things I think it should be hopefully accurate enough to work through the whole game.  I did extensive testing this time and can at least confirm I can uncompress all my compressed versions of the chunks with 100% accuracy   So now that this is out of the way it's just tweaking the text extractor since I still haven't captured all the different codes and we have some messed up lines due to it.  This at least is much simpler to fix and just needs to be handled by a case by cases basis.  Also need to remove any junk output in the scripts themselves but at least it's easy.  Just tedious is all   So yeah I'd say from here on out it should be a lot easier to test and fix, yay

And yup, plan is to implement a VWF.  I just wanted to make sure everything else was working before hand before starting in on it again (I still have my old version for TMZ that I need to redo as it breaks on the real deal) and I'm thinking we may be there

And thanks all for the support everyone

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

Addie's Present, 4th Unit, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, Team Innocent, Captain Rainbow, the Yarudora Series (not sure about that one), and many many more. You are a mad man sir and I have a great deal of respect for all your hard work and enthusiasm.

Wow!  Always great to know someone's waiting on some of the others   None of the games in the Yarudora series has any translators as of yet but Filler is interested so maybe after some of the others he's doing...   Course anyone who's interested is free to offer *wink wink nudge nudge* ;)  And thanks!  I love doing this

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

@TurboXray/Bonknuts, you're right in that the buffer shouldn't matter but for X2 at least it depends if you get lucky   When decompressing, X2 will load it's prefilled buffer and somehow it'll get messed up when it decompresses my compressed version that uses 0x00.  Not sure how it's doing it as I can decompress mine and theirs fine regardless but it's some quirk that I must not have included in mine.  So I get around it by just not compressing any of it and just making it look like it is.  Figure that'll work for 99% of the cases hopefully   Anything is better then doing a buffer for each block (500+)

Edit: Just thought about that you would need to know the original buffer IF they end up using the original/latest LZSS algorithm (I've seen an older one where it doesn't use binary trees).  The original LZSS has a quirk/unintended side effect (I suspect) of RLEing data that matches what's in the original buffer setup.  So in that case, yeah you would need to know how the original buffer is setup

LentFilms, what's bad is I have so many I tend to forget about which ones need what work

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

Nice   Yeah this one's definitely one of my PITA projects   Next up would maybe be Tengai Makyou Ziria but that one was a lot easier to automate (for the most part) than this one.  Although I do have one other that's even worse then X2 but that's cause of the amount of tediousness with tracking down stray sentences and all the asm fixes needing to be done....   Just wish there was more time in the day   Luckily though I'm getting a bit more free time to work on projects so trying to use it to my advantage   Thanks all for the encouragement!

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

Plenty of progress  I finally started back into it full throttle and now have a complete toolkit to insert/(fake) compress/build/insert all into the CD  With this is in hand SamIAm and I are going to start really digging in as this automates everything.  Still bugs here and there but this at least makes it a lot simpler to test and figure out things

If anyone's curious about the fake compression, it's due to Xanadu 2 using a different prefilled buffer for decompressing with for each block, meaning if I don't have that buffer or something similar enough, it decompresses wrong.  So I now I just now set it so everything is not compressed but it still conforms to the compression scheme that Xanadu 2 uses (really any and all falcom games I found out).  Way too much time to find and use all those buffers that are needed and this works good enough for at least 99% of the cases I figure. The only cases it may not are those that go beyond the allocated buffer for loading it from the CD.  It may also slow it down a bit too but really none of the blocks are that big either so I'm not anticipating any issues at this time with the compression

Edit: Clarify it's each block that has a different buffer

[PC-FX Discussion / Re: Zeroigar translation, from the intro]

I think it looks great with the top bordered in white as I couldn't read it to well with the white lights in the background.

And now I need to figure how to get in a new title sceen... hrm...

[PC-FX Discussion / Re: Zeroigar translation, from the intro]

Awesome images filler   I'd like to see one with the top text with a white border then no white border on the bottom (a mix of the two).

[PC-FX Discussion / Re: Got a PC-FXGA? Please help us out.]

I fully support this effort as well

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!]

If I made a bet with you SamIAm I already know I'd jinx myself and lose

If anyone's curious about why it's taking so long with Xanadu II it's due to the fact that each script is hard coded to load for certain scenarios and the pointers to the pointers for the lines are hard code into the code plus they're all spread out (the pointers).  The scripts themselves I think number at almost 200 currently as each one has maybe a max of 10 lines a script (if even). 

The good thing is I can automate finding possible script blocks.  The pain is filtering them (which I do programatically but that doesn't mean a 100% hit).  The other part is just time and RL stuff

The next fun part will be going through all those scripts and setting them up for insertion

We're getting there though!

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: What PCE games would you like to see translated?]

TMZ is still in the works.  The translator I'm working with those is a bit busy right now so it'll be slow going  (I also need to redump it in a better format for him and also I've been busy with RL myself but slowly getting back into things).  For SO2 I've created a VWF for it with a new font which sadly breaks on the real deal

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: What PCE games would you like to see translated?]

For right now it'll probably be me translating it.  I do plan on checking out the series and reading up on it (it seems pretty interesting).  I also plan on finding someone else to help with the translation who knows more hopefully.  If you wouldn't mind though, could I hit you up to review the script and such when the time comes?

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: What PCE games would you like to see translated?]

You know... You may be right about that one...

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: What PCE games would you like to see translated?]

But games translated this way are great ;)

http://elsallia.com/time-capsule/lfd2003/lanigrasser5.html

(And others... http://elsallia.com/time-capsule/lfd2003/)

(If anyone's wondering, the above is actually an april fool's joke, a great one too, it was rereleased later with a more accurate and professional translation )

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: What PCE games would you like to see translated?]

Just to give some updates, Ziria is still in progress, although it may be a bit slow for a bit.  Right now the translator is moving to Japan and will have some connection issues for a while but he'll still be working on the Ziria scripts.  I did dump everything out (I believe) or at least 95% of everything.  The bad thing is, it's well over 500+ files.  The good thing is, each file does not have a lot of text usually (maybe a paragraph or two).

Also, interesting about Gulliver Boy, as I recently looked at that and determined it's uncompressed.  I haven't dumped out any text or anything but I can do that for you shubibiman (I still need to look at the pointer system, but I don't think it'll be too bad, or at least as bad as Snatcher's, now that's an evil game).

Also, if anyone is interesting in translating any games but needs help with the hacking side of it, feel free to hit me up as I would love to see more games translated on the PCE.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: What PCE games would you like to see translated?]

Thanks Tom!

To answer questions about Ziria, so far the intro's been translated (and in the process of being inserted), as well as up to (and including) the first cave you come to.  I've inserted up to the town right now.  I'm not sure of how long before a release but once the font gets inserted (the screenshots below are using a custom syscard3 rom as I was being lazy in setting up the font ingame ;)  ), progress will be much faster on getting the blocks extracted and inserted.

Also, for the versions we'll be doing, it'll be both the SCD and CD versions (I'm working with Dave Shadoff on the CD version).  Luckily the differences between the two seem to be mostly compression (LZSS if anyones curious).  The positions of the blocks appear to be the same so there shouldn't be any slowdown on doing both (I'm primarily working on the SCD one though as that's what I started with, figures I'd had to pick the harder one first )