Gaming Summer game translation

rml93

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Hi.

I've been trawling the pits of the internet desperately searching for any worthwhile translation efforts and have started tracking progress of a great many of them only to end up disappointed when they eventually get a poor Google translate patch, halt due to legal action or just lose momentum and fizzle out.

What I am setting out to do is translate and release patches for video games that never made their way to English speaking territories.

Now about me! I'm a busy guy. I understand what I'm looking to do will be a heavy undertaking but I won't be letting this consume me. If I find myself with any free time over this summer I will be devoting it what I can spare of it to this end but I refuse to release anything as a rush job.

I would like to start off with some earlier games so we can all enjoy them before they're too far in the rear view to be of any consequence. If you can recommend any resources to help me with my eventual efforts, please don't be shy. I'll take all the help I can get. And while you're at it, feel free to give me the title of a game or two that you'd like to play in English.

-rml93

P.S. Please do not ask for anything released within the last year, with ongoing translation projects elsewhere or games that are just plain bad. And just a note, you may see a similar post of mine in Nintendo DS Translation forum, feel free to suggest a title there as well!
 

Truner

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7th Dragon 2020 and its sequel. Dungeon Crawler RPGs of the finest kind. The first game's (DS) English patch just got released a few weeks ago.

A very easy project would be Brandish: The Dark Revenant. It's another dungeon crawler, this time made by Falcom (known for their Ys series). It's known that the text can be easily replaced and that... there isn't much text in the game at all. If you are just getting into PSP translation, this would make a good learning project.

There's Suikoden 1+2. I think both games have a translation already, so it would only involve hacking? Fans of the series have been looking out for a translation, so it's worth a mention. Another game like this one would be Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Most of the game has been translated into English, but on a different platform. This one has extra content (worth playing, too!) and the prequel has seen an official English release, so maybe it could be used as a base for the hacking?

Again, a similar game fans have been asking for is Rockman DASH 1 and 2 for the PSP. Almost everything is unchanged in these ports except for the controls and the aspect ratio as well as the second game coming with a demo that contains a different story from the full game's. The game accepts the original PS1 script (mostly), but without proper hacking, it kind of craps out and won't show full messages due to the font size.

These are probably the most asked games for besides Fate/Extra CCC (that might be too recent and it still could have a chance here). From these, I personally would like to see 7th Dragon 2020. Though you might be better off picking up the rest as they are much easier to get out: either they are very easy to hack and insert text into, or already have translated text in form of another release, albeit not a complete one (thanks to the extra content).

If you want to get out a quick translation, Brandish would be the best. If you want to do a quick hacking job, give Rockman DASH a try as it accepts files from the PS1 version, yet seems to have trouble actually handling them properly.

I hope this post helped you out a bit.
 

potato3334

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people would go crazy for fate/extra CCC

i dont really have any suggestions, but i would love to partake in helping you out with these translations, i love doing projects like these
 

G-Han

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If you were to text dump Brandish for PSP, I would likely be able to contribute translations.
 

GHANMI

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If you were to text dump Brandish for PSP, I would likely be able to contribute translations.

Be my guest.
There's also some FMVs with cutscenes. Those are perfectly editable too.
I grabbed at the very list an item list and the in-game dialogue, but I have no idea whether there's still hidden system text lying in the eboot files. You should be able to view those with any text editor/hex editor supporting Shift-JIS.
The game supports ascii.

I can't help with the reinsertion, you should be able to reinsert English text that's exactly 2x the number of Japanese characters or less, but I assume you'll want to expand that, and I can't help with my current level (I'm still not that failiar with pointers, those should be the garbage data in the beginning).
I'm extremely sorry for that.

I also have a text rip of Nayuta no Kiseki.
The text is also stored uncompressed as Shift-JIS in Tengai Makyou IV (and it supports ascii indeed) but I haven't located the files.
 

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G-Han

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Thanks! Although I know how to handle moon runes, everything that's not your usual format is quite the puzzle to me. I managed to adjust my Notepad++ to Encoding > Japanese > Shift-JIS and installed a hex editor plug-in, which seems to be incompatible with Shift-JIS. For what it's worth, I'm able to read and modify the text in the .tb files you provided.

bgv5ef.jpg


What's the best way for me to continue? Is there a way to get this orderly in Excel or another spreadsheet?
 

GHANMI

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There are some tools on rhdn by CUE to extract/insert stuff in PSP roms (I'm hardly knowledgeable though when it comes to PSP hacking..)
You can't really edit stuff safely in a text editor without irreversibly breaking it (not scaring you), you have to edit it in a hex editor (hex editors are scarier looking, but they can support shift jis tbl files and have a nice text editor on the side) without adding or removing any bytes (hence the need to use a hex editor since it keeps you on check).
But there's somewhere in that same file something that's not text which determines where text begins and ends (it seems garbage data in text files, but you can spot it more easily with hex editors). Those are pointers. If you manage to edit them, you can extend the text at will rather than being forced to translate with the exact same number of letters (in the case of Japanese, kana is 2 bytes and English is one byte so you effectively have exactly the double, but more often than not it's not enough... because kanjis).
To avoid doing that manually for each and every file, people ("hackers") code simple programs that extract/insert text from these files while manipulating those pointers as they should be. These tools can occasionally export the text to/from nice xml/excel spreadsheets that are nicer looking.

I'm really sorry if I went on this for too long.
Those files are the innards of the game in their unadeltered form. You could edit with translations that are heavily abridged not to exceed those with minimal hex editing (heavily not recommended, unless you have lower standards), or you could post a help wanted ad on rhdn (not sure how much efficient this would be) to get some interested (this being a key word) hackers to help you, or alternatively become one yourself.

Think of these not as a proper text dump, but as a sneak peek inside the game just so you evaluate how much text you have there.
 

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