This might be hard to judge, but if you were to give a '% completed', what percent would you give the project?
For the project as a whole, that is a real tough one to judge. On one hand, the script editing tool xvirus got up and running means all the already-translated text can be inserted fairly quickly (I'm doing that now). Each file may only take a few minutes but there are a ton of them to do.
Once all that text is in place, I am waiting on the game manuals and magazines (I passed them off to be finished) and now that we are able to extract the Adventure and RPG games, we are able to start translating those, so that is huge step in the right direction. In the meantime we need to figure out how to make the script editor tool work with the Adventure and RPG games so we don't have to do something ridiculously time consuming like manually insert each one with a hex editor. Once that is in place that is pretty much all the text in the game.
Then graphics...oh boy, graphics </sarcasm> Fortunately we don't have to change everything and we can reuse some from the first Retro Game Challenge so that speeds things up quite a bit. For what we do have to edit, some of it is a living nightmare, but fortunately some of the nastiness (menus and the intro scroll) are already done...well, a few of the menus, anyway. There are still a bunch to do. There are spot graphics like the magazine logo and maybe company logos, etc. that might need translation and there are images in the Adventure game that might need to be done as well (e.g. a hospital could have "Hospital" or the red cross on it instead of 病院.) I think one of the most potentially nasty parts is the menu system for the RPG. The whole menu system including buy/sell is a collection of images and image maps.
If you can hold on a day or so (it is 1:30am here and I can't record a video of me playing with sound and commenting without waking up my kids/wife) I'll take a video to show what it all looks like. As promised, I now have enough material to do a play from very beginning up to the first challenge with it almost all in English. If I can, I'll try to finish up the following script that carries the game over to the next challenge, and the next, etc., etc. Basically, the longer you give me the more I can show off, but everyone has been waiting for so long for this project, I want to show off something that isn't a collection of still images. I want to show you this thing in action.
But you want a percent...hrm, when all of what we have translated is in the game with this tool (and another one for the magazines), I'd say it is over 50% done for sure; maybe 60% or so, who can judge? When the Adventure/RPG text is done I'd put that closer to 80%. The last 20% (maybe less) is graphics and depending on the complexity that could take a while (or if we are lucky, not much at all). However, I could be vastly underestimating the weight of how difficult or time consuming the Adventure and RPG could be.
The good news is that getting to this mythical 50% or so based on just the text translations should be quickly achieved now; the tools we have make this relatively speedy and the translations for those are already done. (All Arino dialogue, phone conversations, basically anything in-game that isn't directly part of a mini-game)
Again, don't take that as a hard figure. It is really difficult to judge when there are so many small elements to consider and many potential roadblocks along the way.
EDIT> Even this script insertion tool is having hiccups on random files for different reasons, so it is a bit like debugging the tool as we use it on data we really need to change. This all adds to the time it would take.
EDIT again> Also, I don't know at what point this happened, but I can't get the latest version running on a real Nintendo DS...well, it loads, but it crashes when you select Story mode on the main menu. The game works fine through Desmume, however. It might be related to how I am rebuilding the ROM (dslazy is doing it but it looks like the ROM is trimmed when it is done; I've had problems with trimmed ROMs before) but then again it could be some random file that doesn't work/display right on a real DS for whatever reason
