Spriggan Mark 2 English Translation

[naju]

Hi all, I've made an English patch for the PC Engine Super CD-ROM² game Spriggan Mark 2: Re-Terraform Project. It's a horizontal shooter with an extensive story told through cutscenes and in-game dialogue.

The patch adds subtitles to the voiced cutscenes and fully translates the in-game dialogue, menus, descriptions, and other text. It also adds a small QoL auto-save feature to allow continuing from the last finished level from the main menu.

I tested it fully on a PC Engine CoreGrafx with a Turbo EverDrive Pro.

https://github.com/gagnonpl/spriggan-mark2-en/
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7662/

I do reverse engineering for a living but this is my first ever video game patch. Also I'm pretty new to this system but I just got my Coregrafx and I can't wait to play all the classics.

Anyway I hope you like it.  Feedback/criticism welcome.

I'm also working on an English translation of the original Spriggan (Seirei Senshi Spriggan) for PC Engine CD.

[NightWolve]

Hey naju and welcome!

Thanks for sharing! Not often someone would register for news on a new localization project!

Very interesting, I could swear this was one of the abandoned projects by TurboXray and BurntLasagna many years ago.

How did you accomplish all the variable width font work?? That looks very impressive, similar to what only Supper and TurboXray are able to accomplish. So you are totally new at this and your project has no connection or help to the prior attempt??

Wow, yeah, now that I looked at the screenshots I'm very impressed! Hope you'll tackle more PC Engine CD games in the future!

Once again, thanks for registering here to let us know. I appreciate the heads up as localization is something I've been passionate about since 2001 when I started the Xak III project!

[naju]

Hi NightWolve!  Yeah I became aware of the previous project partway through.  In fact their teaser on youtube inspired me to change my font for the level dialogs to make it proportional. But no I don't have any connection to that project.

The variable-width font wasn't that big of a deal to be honest. I had ripped an 8x8 font I found on the System Card (it's the same font used in the Backup RAM menu, but the BIOS API doesn't make it available for games).  So I adjusted the glyphs horizontally on my font sheet, then made an extra table for the x width of each glyph. The BIOS text drawing function itself takes care of drawing on the background at a specified X/Y coord and supports an external (non-BIOS) font.

For the cutscenes I still use a monospaced font because the subs are sprites (can't use the BIOS routine above) and because the rendering engine I made needs a fixed grid of 10x10 cells to be able to outline the letters fast enough.  Outlining is crucial because the game cutscenes weren't designed with subs in mind so the contrast is rather poor in many scenes (e.g. very light background). It should be possible to upgrade it for proportional fonts though.  Maybe a future upgrade.

There's a gold mine of great but not-yet-localized games on the PCE, especially CDROM² games. It's just the perfect system for audio narration over cutscenes so unfortunately they didn't bother with text most of the time, which makes it harder to localize.  I'm working on the first Spriggan game right now, but there's many more that people have suggested.

[1slowrc]

Hi all, I've made an English patch for the PC Engine Super CD-ROM² game Spriggan Mark 2: Re-Terraform Project. It's a horizontal shooter with an extensive story told through cutscenes and in-game dialogue.

The patch adds subtitles to the voiced cutscenes and fully translates the in-game dialogue, menus, descriptions, and other text. It also adds a small QoL auto-save feature to allow continuing from the last finished level from the main menu.

I tested it fully on a PC Engine CoreGrafx with a Turbo EverDrive Pro.

https://github.com/gagnonpl/spriggan-mark2-en/
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7662/

I do reverse engineering for a living but this is my first ever video game patch. Also I'm pretty new to this system but I just got my Coregrafx and I can't wait to play all the classics.

Anyway I hope you like it.  Feedback/criticism welcome.

I'm also working on an English translation of the original Spriggan (Seirei Senshi Spriggan) for PC Engine CD.

You sir are awesome and thank you!!