Chibi-Robo English translation for Wii

[Brand Newman]

Just out of curiosity, how long do you think this translation will take to complete? It must have taken a while already.

I started working on this project in november 2021. It usually takes me a few months to release the patch, and based on what is left to do, this game shouldn't be an exception.

So I'd say sometime during 2022, most probably after summer since I'll have had some holidays to spend time on the patch, but don't take my word on it, in case I stumble on some unexpected difficulty !

 

[Brand Newman]

Hmpf... Quite an upsetting thing happened today...

So I was checking the patch with Riivolution to see how the text looked on real hardware (considering the font is different than Dolphin), and had the unpleasant surprise to realize the "..." special character doesn't exist on the Wii! (See the "I'm not sure..." below.)

Concretely, this means everytime I used ellipsis in my translation so far, it will appear as blank on Wii (but not on Dolphin)!

That's a big issue for me, considering I use the special character a lot since it only takes two hexadecimal values (81 63), whereas three dots will be "2E 2E 2E".

That means I'll have to go back in the files I considered to be "done", and replace the ellipsis with three dots everytime I can : since I usually use all the space I have, that means I'll probably have to rephrase some things along the way...

This is another example that you should always test-proof your work on real hardware at an early stage : well, at least I own a Wii and could detect the issue before I released anything!

Happy Easter to all!

 

[Mikef1]

I've been burnt testing on emulators before too. Using real hardware is the true test for any software. Maybe you could just use 2 dots instead. Search for 81 63 and replace with 2E 2E. You wouldn't need to rephrase, but it might not look as good..
Keep going forward; I'd like to play this summer if possible.

Mike

 

[Brand Newman]

I've been burnt testing on emulators before too. Using real hardware is the true test for any software. Maybe you could just use 2 dots instead. Search for 81 63 and replace with 2E 2E. You wouldn't need to rephrase, but it might not look as good..
Keep going forward; I'd like to play this summer if possible.

Mike

Yes, I always go for real hardware as well (after all Riivolution is meant to be used with retail disc), but I gotta admit I didn't expect the game to not display the ellipsis correctly.

Should have seen it coming, though, considering Chibi-Robo is using the system font, which is why you get gibberish on non-Japanese consoles...

But it's OK, I have changed all the occurrences already, and only had to change a few things : back to the translation this WE!

 

[Brand Newman]

I also noticed some slight font rendering issues in your video, particularly when it comes to the uppercase T. Is that an emulation bug or an issue with the patch?

Good evening everyone, some good news here!

Remember when we talked about how the font seemed different on Dolphin than it was on the original hardware?

Turns out you can restore the Nintendo system font by finding the Game Cube bios by yourself (or extract it from your own console), and put it into the Dolphin folder (see https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Template:Problems/GC_Font).

I did it today, and the result is quite better (especially uppercase T), and identical to what you see when you play the game on a real Wii! (not to mention it should prevent me from forgetting a linebreak in case I don't test some part of the game on Wii hardware.)

Please find below some pictures for a side-to-side comparison:

I intend to put the tutorial in my readme file, and while I won't provide a link, it's fairly easy to find the bios, so hopefully people who'll play the translated game on Dolphin will get a result as good as on the original thing!

See you later!