ROM Hack Chou Soujuu Mecha MG "essentials" translation

[Supper]

Download patch here: http://stargood.org/trans/csmmg/Chou Soujuu Mecha MG - EN Essentials (v0.2).zip
Source code on Github

This is a partial translation patch for Chou Soujuu Mecha MG that I've been working on for a while now. It translates all of the "essential" gameplay text, like menus, mission objectives, and mecha instructions, with the goal of allowing you to play through to the ending without knowing any Japanese. I'm very interested in making a full translation patch, and I've done all the necessary hacking work for it, but I don't have the skill to do the translation myself. If anyone knows Japanese and is interested in lending a hand, please get in touch!

In any case, this needs more testing, so if you try it, let me know if you run into issues or have other feedback (complaints about fonts, my crappy redraws, etc.).

Overview

If you haven't heard of it, Chou Soujuu Mecha MG (Super Control Mecha MG) is a 2006 DS game developed by Sandlot, who are best known for their Earth Defense Force series, and published by Nintendo. It's a mecha action game with what I consider some of the most effective touch-screen controls on the system. Aside from standard D-Pad movement, each of the 100+ mecha you can obtain has its own lower-screen "cockpit" with a unique set of controls: some mechs have a lever to swing their sword, others have buttons to fire missiles, most have switches to transform into a vehicle, and so on. It's gimmicky, it's unique, and it's more than fun enough to be worth a playthrough, whether you're a mecha fan or not.

I'm kind of surprised the game never made it to the west, since it's quite solid and shows off the touch screen really well (well enough for Nintendo itself to publish it in Japan), but the most we ever got of it were a few cameos in Smash Bros. Brawl. Though the game is decently playable without knowing Japanese, it takes a lot of messing around and consulting FAQs, so I made this patch to try to eliminate the hassle.

Features

This patch translates:
* All menus
* Mecha names and usage instructions
* Item names and effect descriptions
* Mission names
* Mission objectives (pause during a mission)
* Character names in the Character Album
* Dialogue branches (all five of them)
* A few scraps of helpful tutorial text in Missions 0 and 2
* Text for Mission 49, which explains how to complete Mission 50
* The title screen
* The stylized kanji insignias for each Workshop, which are replaced with more recognizable icons. (I won't try to sell you on my artistic skills, but I think these will suffice -- if anyone out there is willing to draw something better, I'd welcome the help!)

It does not translate:
* Scenario text other than the above mentioned
* Mecha descriptions
* Item flavor text
* Character profiles
* The credits (though I did shove my name in at the end)

Basically, you miss out on the plot, which is nothing revolutionary but nicely and surprisingly detailed.

Patching Instructions

This is an xdelta3 patch. Use an xdelta3 patcher, such as Delta Patcher, to apply the .xdelta3 file to a clean, untrimmed Chou Soujuu Mecha MG ROM (which, before patching, should be 64 megabytes in size and have an MD5 sum of ccd7052931e3ae09cb4505d19d16c738).

Known Issues

I've completed the game with this patch, both in an emulator and on real hardware (with my increasingly ancient but still functional R4), so you shouldn't run into any major problems. Here are the issues I know about:

* In dynamically-sized text boxes, there's an issue with how the characters are drawn that causes the rightmost column of each character's outline to get overwritten by the next character's leftmost column. This is because the new English font uses tighter spacing than the original. Due to the shapes and colors involved, this is very difficult to notice (it took me several weeks to spot it), so it shouldn't trouble you too much.
* In instances where dynamically-generated numbers are inserted into dialogue, like the cost shown when building a mech from blueprints, the digits are one pixel too far to the left compared to the letters. This was a quick fix for a last-minute issue; if I'm feeling more ambitious, I'll solve the root problem.
* Due to changing from a hardcoded monospace font to VWF, as well as other tweaks, some of the untranslated Japanese text doesn't display quite as intended -- characters may be too tightly spaced, or incorrectly centered.
* On the character naming screen, the English letters are not quite centered under the selection cursor due to the font's bearing being adjusted to squeeze out a few extra pixels of space.
* If you run the game in DeSmuME from the console, you'll notice occasional "Reading beyond end of cart!" warnings. These are harmless, and occur because I repacked the game using an ancient Windows binary of ndstool due to an issue I encountered with the newer/*nix versions producing ROMs that didn't boot on real hardware. My guess is it's something to do with *nix-style alphabetization of the file name table combined with inaccuracies in DeSmuME's BIOS reimplementation, but I haven't really checked; maybe someone else has run into this issue and knows what's up?
* Not a "real" issue: On DeSmuME only, the text on the loading screen and Character Album has a single duplicate pixel column. This also happens with the original game, and doesn't happen on real hardware.
* Also not a "real" issue, but the English text has been auto-word-wrapped without hyphen-breaking across lines, which sometimes looks a bit awkward or results in inefficient space usage. Improving this will take manual tinkering and/or hooking up my utilities to a dictionary, and I haven't bothered yet.
* Item trading via wireless may or may not actually work. Wireless connectivity isn't emulated, and I have only one DS and one flash card, so I can't test it. I translated all the relevant resources, so if you try it, please tell me if it works or not.

Let me know if you run into any problems not on this list.

Old Versions

v0.1: http://stargood.org/trans/csmmg/Chou Soujuu Mecha MG - EN Essentials (v0.1).zip

Full Translation

So at this point, the base hacking work is 100% done (minus any bugs that pop up). All the Japanese text and graphics are set up for translation, and I'd love to expand this into a full patch. I can't handle anything beyond the most rudimentary and dictionary-friendly Japanese, though, so I'm looking for someone(s) to translate the rest. The story text is moderately long -- I haven't taken a character count, but there are 120 missions, usually with one or two cutscenes apiece, plus miscellaneous flavor text. If anyone's up for some or all of it, drop me a line and I'll send you the scripts.

Anyway, that's about it. I don't know if anyone else is even interested in this game, but I hope someone out there gets a kick out of this.

 

[Deleted member 399092]

Looks cool, I can't wait to try this out!

 

[RikuKH]

Amazingg! I bought the game and played quite far a year ago. The game is super fun, very experimental, so the missions vary a lot, some are fun, some meh. Overall just an excellent game. Thank you!
Btw - is there some list which someone updates every time someone makes a post like this where they release a new patch?

 

[Supper]

Amazingg! I bought the game and played quite far a year ago. The game is super fun, very experimental, so the missions vary a lot, some are fun, some meh. Overall just an excellent game. Thank you!
Btw - is there some list which someone updates every time someone makes a post like this where they release a new patch?

Thanks! Yeah, I really liked the variety too. Even though the combat is the main focus, there's enough racing and other stuff to keep it from getting monotonous. Plus you can screw around and beat missions in weird ways, like winning races by blowing up all the opponents.

I haven't hung out here much until recently, but there does seem to be a thread that lists translations. I'll probably throw this up in there eventually.

 

[NANASHI89]

(see attached images -- I wanted to post them inline, but apparently that's detected as spam)

Download patch here (make the obvious substitution -- more bad spam filtering): mediafire dot com/file/?pz9wdtoyzwcjt4x

This is a partial translation patch for Chou Soujuu Mecha MG that I've been working on for a while now. It translates all of the "essential" gameplay text, like menus, mission objectives, and mecha instructions, with the goal of allowing you to play through to the ending without knowing any Japanese. I'm very interested in making a full translation patch, and I've done all the necessary hacking work for it, but I don't have the skill to do the translation myself. If anyone knows Japanese and is interested in lending a hand, please get in touch!

In any case, this needs more testing, so if you try it, let me know if you run into issues or have other feedback (complaints about fonts, my crappy redraws, etc.).

Overview

If you haven't heard of it, Chou Soujuu Mecha MG (Super Control Mecha MG) is a 2006 DS game developed by Sandlot, who are best known for their Earth Defense Force series, and published by Nintendo. It's a mecha action game with what I consider some of the most effective touch-screen controls on the system. Aside from standard D-Pad movement, each of the 100+ mecha you can obtain has its own lower-screen "cockpit" with a unique set of controls: some mechs have a lever to swing their sword, others have buttons to fire missiles, most have switches to transform into a vehicle, and so on. It's gimmicky, it's unique, and it's more than fun enough to be worth a playthrough, whether you're a mecha fan or not.

I'm kind of surprised the game never made it to the west, since it's quite solid and shows off the touch screen really well (well enough for Nintendo itself to publish it in Japan), but the most we ever got of it were a few cameos in Smash Bros. Brawl. Though the game is decently playable without knowing Japanese, it takes a lot of messing around and consulting FAQs, so I made this patch to try to eliminate the hassle.

Features

This patch translates:
* All menus
* Mecha names and usage instructions
* Item names and effect descriptions
* Mission names
* Mission objectives (pause during a mission)
* Character names in the Character Album
* Dialogue branches (all five of them)
* A few scraps of helpful tutorial text in Missions 0 and 2
* Text for Mission 49, which explains how to complete Mission 50
* The title screen
* The stylized kanji insignias for each Workshop, which are replaced with more recognizable icons. (I won't try to sell you on my artistic skills, but I think these will suffice -- if anyone out there is willing to draw something better, I'd welcome the help!)

It does not translate:
* Scenario text other than the above mentioned
* Mecha descriptions
* Item flavor text
* Character profiles
* The credits (though I did shove my name in at the end)

Basically, you miss out on the plot, which is nothing revolutionary but nicely and surprisingly detailed.

Patching Instructions

This is an xdelta3 patch. Use an xdelta3 patcher, such as Delta Patcher, to apply the .xdelta3 file to a clean, untrimmed Chou Soujuu Mecha MG ROM (which, before patching, should be 64 megabytes in size and have an MD5 sum of ccd7052931e3ae09cb4505d19d16c738).

Known Issues

I've completed the game with this patch, both in an emulator and on real hardware (with my increasingly ancient but still functional R4), so you shouldn't run into any major problems. Here are the issues I know about:

* In dynamically-sized text boxes, there's an issue with how the characters are drawn that causes the rightmost column of each character's outline to get overwritten by the next character's leftmost column. This is because the new English font uses tighter spacing than the original. Due to the shapes and colors involved, this is very difficult to notice (it took me several weeks to spot it), so it shouldn't trouble you too much.
* In instances where dynamically-generated numbers are inserted into dialogue, like the cost shown when building a mech from blueprints, the digits are one pixel too far to the left compared to the letters. This was a quick fix for a last-minute issue; if I'm feeling more ambitious, I'll solve the root problem.
* Due to changing from a hardcoded monospace font to VWF, as well as other tweaks, some of the untranslated Japanese text doesn't display quite as intended -- characters may be too tightly spaced, or incorrectly centered.
* On the character naming screen, the English letters are not quite centered under the selection cursor due to the font's bearing being adjusted to squeeze out a few extra pixels of space.
* If you run the game in DeSmuME from the console, you'll notice occasional "Reading beyond end of cart!" warnings. These are harmless, and occur because I repacked the game using an ancient Windows binary of ndstool due to an issue I encountered with the newer/*nix versions producing ROMs that didn't boot on real hardware. My guess is it's something to do with *nix-style alphabetization of the file name table combined with inaccuracies in DeSmuME's BIOS reimplementation, but I haven't really checked; maybe someone else has run into this issue and knows what's up?
* Not a "real" issue: On DeSmuME only, the text on the loading screen and Character Album has a single duplicate pixel column. This also happens with the original game, and doesn't happen on real hardware.
* Also not a "real" issue, but the English text has been auto-word-wrapped without hyphen-breaking across lines, which sometimes looks a bit awkward or results in inefficient space usage. Improving this will take manual tinkering and/or hooking up my utilities to a dictionary, and I haven't bothered yet.
* Item trading via wireless may or may not actually work. Wireless connectivity isn't emulated, and I have only one DS and one flash card, so I can't test it. I translated all the relevant resources, so if you try it, please tell me if it works or not.

Let me know if you run into any problems not on this list.

Full Translation

So at this point, the base hacking work is 100% done (minus any bugs that pop up). All the Japanese text and graphics are set up for translation, and I'd love to expand this into a full patch. I can't handle anything beyond the most rudimentary and dictionary-friendly Japanese, though, so I'm looking for someone(s) to translate the rest. The story text is moderately long -- I haven't taken a character count, but there are 120 missions, usually with one or two cutscenes apiece, plus miscellaneous flavor text. If anyone's up for some or all of it, drop me a line and I'll send you the scripts.

Anyway, that's about it. I don't know if anyone else is even interested in this game, but I hope someone out there gets a kick out of this.

Can you give me a Delta Patcher with XDelta3 compatibility? The one on ROMHacking doesn't support XDelta3 files.

 

[Supper]

Can you give me a Delta Patcher with XDelta3 compatibility? The one on ROMHacking doesn't support XDelta3 files.

Actually, it works with them fine. The problem is that Delta Patcher apparently refuses to allow you to select a patch file that doesn't end in just ".xdelta", and I gave the patch a ".xdelta3" extension. Doesn't seem like the best UI decision, but whatever -- change the file extension to ".xdelta" and it'll work. I'll fix this for the next release.

Sorry for the trouble, and hope you enjoy.

 

[Supper]

The better part of two months after I had it basically ready to go, version 0.2 is done -- see the top of the original post. Sorry for the long wait, but I wound up getting busy with other projects and it slipped my mind.

The changes are minor -- fixed a few typos and stupid mistakes, no new content.

* Changed the file extension of the patch from ".xdelta3" to ".xdelta" because Delta Patcher will only accept patches with the latter extension. Thanks to NANASHI89 for bringing this to my attention.
* Fixed a dumb mistake at the start of Mission 4 where what should have been a player-name opcode was instead hardcoded to the name of my testing save file. For what it's worth, my name isn't "Jon", and I'm not really sure why I picked that in the first place...
* Fixed the objective text for Mission 82 so the right part of the font outline doesn't wrap around the box.
* Fixed a typo in Steam Puppet Dover-F's name.
* Minor edits to various bits of text.

 

[Deleted User]

The better part of two months after I had it basically ready to go, version 0.2 is done -- see the top of the original post. Sorry for the long wait, but I wound up getting busy with other projects and it slipped my mind.

The changes are minor -- fixed a few typos and stupid mistakes, no new content.

* Changed the file extension of the patch from ".xdelta3" to ".xdelta" because Delta Patcher will only accept patches with the latter extension. Thanks to NANASHI89 for bringing this to my attention.
* Fixed a dumb mistake at the start of Mission 4 where what should have been a player-name opcode was instead hardcoded to the name of my testing save file. For what it's worth, my name isn't "Jon", and I'm not really sure why I picked that in the first place...
* Fixed the objective text for Mission 82 so the right part of the font outline doesn't wrap around the box.
* Fixed a typo in Steam Puppet Dover-F's name.
* Minor edits to various bits of text.

Wow, thanks for your hard work!

 

[stanleyopar2000]

holy shit you are the man!!

first @cjubb translates Chibi-Robo 2 DS now this!?

my childhood is crying with joy

 

[Goofy Time]

Sorry to bump this, but the link to the patch appears to be dead in the OP.

Anybody got a backup?

 

[Supper]

Sorry to bump this, but the link to the patch appears to be dead in the OP.

Anybody got a backup?

Sorry about that -- Mediafire worked surprisingly well for me in the time I used it, but every once in a while they'd lose a file out of nowhere like this. I have my own web hosting now, so I've updated the links in the OP. Here's the latest version: http://stargood.org/trans/csmmg/Chou Soujuu Mecha MG - EN Essentials (v0.2).zip

(Oh, apparently 5 posts is the threshold for not being a "new member" anymore. Enjoy your convenient new hyperlinks. EDIT: and inline images!)

 

[Kayaki]

Holy s***! I didn't expect this game to be translated, especially after 10 years of waiting!

Thank You for the translation, I really appreciate your work here!

 

[Prime_Zero]

It has been so long since I last logged in....

But after seeing something this amazing, I just had to dust off my account to thank you for your hard work! This is one of the best Ds games of all time to me, I managed to stumble through it and beat it and even attempted to try and learn how to read it once lol. Thank you so much for your hard work, I know its not complete but what you have done is simple great. I have not fully played it, but I have played a bit with your patch and loving it so far.

I never thought it would get a translation, I salute you!

 

[Supper]

It has been so long since I last logged in....

But after seeing something this amazing, I just had to dust off my account to thank you for your hard work! This is one of the best Ds games of all time to me, I managed to stumble through it and beat it and even attempted to try and learn how to read it once lol. Thank you so much for your hard work, I know its not complete but what you have done is simple great. I have not fully played it, but I have played a bit with your patch and loving it so far.

I never thought it would get a translation, I salute you!

Heh, well, I've got some good news for you then... https://gbatemp.net/threads/chou-soujuu-mecha-mg-full-translation-release.548671/