If you want to get in touch in the future, I recommend
posting in this thread rather than PMing me. PMing means I wont see it until I log in, which could take a year. Other people can help too if it's public.
Got asked this via PM back in March 2022:
> Hello there! I am currently in the process of creating a decompilation project for Rhythm Tengoku along with the help of a few other modders, which is publicly viewable on GitHub. Since the Silver team has already done a lot of work in reverse engineering the game, I'd like to ask about the custom tools in the Silver GitHub repo, specifically the sprite editor and the decompressor. My question is, would you happen to have / know someone who has the source code for these tools? They would be a huge help in handling the graphics data with some modifications and likely have some good documentation of the game's formats as well. Of course, credit to the original developers of the tools would be given. So if you have any way of getting the source code of these tools, I would love to take a look!
I don't see anything in my files that looks like source code for the decompressor(s). If it was anywhere I think it'd be in here.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/rhythm-...thm-heaven-silver.330147/page-15#post-4858879
Here's a dir /b /s listing of my RHS folder. Nothing here looks like source code (I searched for .c and .cpp)
lmk if anything in there looks juicy.
I appear to have
lost my mediafire account (and I've known this for some time). I recommend downloading important files and saving them elsewhere. If you want to be nice, reupload them to mega or something and post here.
---
Got invited to a discord server with people trying to "improve" RHS or make a new translation. A lot of what I wrote in response is specific to those people, but if anyone's curious about our/my translation philosophy this might be the clearest documentation yet on what we were trying to do and why.
edit: In the process of making this post I also found this YouTube video which apparently popularlized the meme that "Rhythm Heaven Silver is bad" which the community took as gospel.
26:12 Cool man. "Rhythm Heaven Silver is bad" JAN MISALI: "There are several somewhat obvious issues with Rhythm Heaven Silver. it kinda tries to be somewhere between a direct translation of Rhythm Tengoku and an official-looking localization, and as a result it’s not that great at being either of them. there’s a bunch of examples where Silver just completely misses the point of a minigame, and parts where it inserts some fanon content, and like, it calls Polyrhythm “Built to Scale” even though in Japanese it’s literally just called the English word “polyrhythm”! it doesn’t even have the same Japanese title as the other Built to Scales!"
Who told you we were trying to be a direct translation of Tengoku? How do you propose we would manage that with no Japanese speakers? I responded to some of the criticism in a new GBAtemp post [this post]. What fanon content are you talking about? Ryan Williams is invented but I just went back to script_fix and the translation we were working from had an interview with Mr. Spaceballer (or whatever you want to call him). It opens in our literal translation we were working from with "I've just now in the void of space interviewed Mr. Air Batter!". There's a language barrier here; do you speak Japanese? I don't know how Japanese radio interviews work, but English interviews usually introduce the interviewer before performing the interview. I explain BTS on GBAtemp. Polyrhythm is a technical musical term I had never seen until Silver. To this day I only see it in technical analysis of jazz. I don't believe an official localization would have left it as-is. Fever's game is called "Donk-Donk", not "Triplets", and triplets are more of a 6th grade band term rather than high-school level jazz band. A non musical player has no idea what these terms are. I go into more detail about various thoughts and criticism of Silver on GBAtemp [here]. I had no idea there was this level of controversy about the game. But hey, glad my 40+ hours of work can get summed up in 4 sentences as "bad"!
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I could go on and on with screenshots, but I've already wasted enough time. Volley Boy and Shaffy apologized to me, but it's Volley Boy's server and I can't reconcile a nice apology with the horrible way this server acted. Shaffy explained apparently Built to Scale is an in-joke about Shaffy's work and not a comment on the Silver translation.
Some stuff you might have been able to piece together if you (1) thought about it or (2) asked me:
1. I haven't cared about improving Rhythm Heaven Silver in almost a decade. The last patch I worked on was, looking through Twitter, December 2014 (8 years ago). I will play the hack, and I love the Rhythm Heaven series, but not work on any Tengoku hack anymore.
2. In a normal world anyone working on anything using my work as a base would get my blessing and my respect. The only counter examples are certain alleged predators using the translation for clout and ad money. And people selling carts without the people who worked on it seeing a dime. Other than that, it's not my game and it's not even my hack or my translation - TheGreatSirNiko did tons of the localization work that this server despises, managed a lot of timelines and work from multiple contributors, provided feedback on my localizations, etc.. We also had some great graphics hackers whose work it seems you are still using as a starting point, because GBA hacking is f-ing hard. We had excellent pixel artists who made, in my opinion, Nintendo-quality work where you can't tell the difference between the hack and the original. The only time off the top of my head where this isn't true is Polyrhythm/Built to Scale, because that title screen was made using 3D models and hacking it is going to be hard.
3. I'm immensely proud of the work I did on RHS. It's one of the biggest things I've seen through from start to roughly "finish". It also stretched all of my skills to the limits of what I could do at the time. I still mention it on my resume from time to time. You can gripe about how certain graphics weren't done due to technical limitations, or songs were never localized (good luck finding someone to work for free in studio Nintendo quality, and also good luck translating music while 3/4 of the people in this server will say the translation isn't 'accurate' enough). But overall we did what we set out to do. So many fan projects die off. We finished.
4. Translation isn't binary good/bad, accurate/inaccurate, normal/meme (?????). Something I learned on RHS, and re-learned reading professional translators who do this for a living, is that there are always tradeoffs between different values. It's not clear what the values of this new /changed translation are ("accuracy" and "exactly like Nintendo of America would make" are VERY EXTREMELY DIFFERENT goals, and the fact anyone here passed them around interchangeably is embarrassing). And for that matter, which NoA? NoA of 2006? 2012? 2022?
5. Shaffy picked up our work and continued it around 2016. I remember them being polite and friendly, and I loved that they added onto the work we made. I linked to their work on the "official" RH0 twitter and from GBAtemp.
6. Some text apparently is straight up mistranslated. I appreciate the translation we got (professional translation is expensive, so this was probably over a thousand dollars worth of work), but people make mistakes. Got tipped off to this on the wiki:
https://rhythmheaven.fandom.com/wiki/Rhythm_Heaven_Silver#cite_ref-14
// --- Literal
//Bon dance[;
// --- Edited
The☆Bon Dance[;
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE84C)
// 0x8052b34
//これが いまどきの[l
//ぼんおどり！[l
//ノリノリだヨ！[l
//イェーイ！[;
// --- Google (new 2022)
//This is the modern [l
//Bon dance! [l
//I'm excited! [l
// Yay! [;
// --- Literal
//Bon-odori![l
//I'm/We're in high spirits![l
//Yay![;
// --- Edited
It's time for the[l
Bon festival again![l
We're all in high[l
spirits, yay! (NP)[;
"Modern" completely changes the context, but we didn't know.
6.5. We didn't pull text out of a hat. We looked at what we had, which was a very literal translation that we knew didn't make sense to English speakers. I've never played a game from Nintendo or anyone else that has as literal, emotionless text as the raw Japanese script that should still be visible in our source code releases under script_fix.txt. We then made tradeoffs about the game that we wanted to play. We considered the space available (literally how many pixels are there to work with on the screen), how NoA might have done it, what the literal translation we had was, what we thought the raw Japanese text actually meant (sometimes using Google translate, but at the time and even today it's not far off from the literal translation we already had), any official media we could get our hands on (official sites, manuals, art, sequels and their official English translations), and what was actually happening in the game.
Everyone in the server seems to hate "Cheese Heist" as a translation of what is noted in the script as "Stealthy Rat" (こっそり ラット). I don't know about you, but in English I've never seen something described as "Stealthy [blank]". It's technically correct but a bit crunchy for a native speaker. I've never heard of a "stealthy cat", "stealthy cop", "stealthy bird" etc. The concept of a "Cheese Heist" is also not based in reality, but there ARE plenty of "diamond heists" and the like. From that point of view, did I then theme the whole game around crime? Yes. That is an artistic decision I made based on my sense of humor and the dryness of the original raw translation text.
I don't think the sense of humor is out of line from Rhythm Heaven Fever, the only game I had played in the series before working on RHS:
The seesaw inspectors are
here, doing important work
to ensure the safety of our
children. Serious business,
you know. No shenanigans.
They then jump as high and hard as they can into a child's plaything.
This is a game series where you shave vegetables, pose with bulging biceps in front of the press, tapdance with a giraffe, and play baseball in space. Looking back, Fever is probably more zany than Silver/Tengoku, but I brought that sensibility into the translation. I don't think it's out of line with what the series became - DS, Wii, and 3DS all have even more humor than the GBA game. To be fair to the critics, maybe a RHS NoA translation in 2006 might have been more restrained. Note, however, that WarioWare did get a US release and those games were always very funny in English.
Here's what I believe is the text from the 2012-14 era of RHS. Judge and translate for yourself.
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE728)
// 0x8053148
//こっそり ラット[;
// --- Literal
//Stealthy Rat[;
// --- Edited
Cheese Heist[;
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE72C)
// 0x8053108
//あなたはネズミ。[l
//大スキなチーズを[l
//めざして[l
//ストップ＆ゴー！！[;
// --- Literal
//You are a mouse.[l
//Aim for your[l
//beloved cheese[l
//Stop & Go!
