ROM Hack Jump Ulimate Stars Translation Project

[FAST6191]

Normally pointer tables are merely reversed on account of the endian-ness difference (maybe needed a larger flip for bigger files) between intel and the DS but that sounds like a sensible idea, on later thought though I would just use an spreadsheet to do the damage.

I used un-lZ GBA for that screen so the standard GB/DS bios implementation it is (vram-safe version):
http://nocash.emubase.de/gbatek.htm#biosde...essionfunctions

 

[Sephiroth87]

LMFAO. Oh yeah. There is already a translated text for this game. For 'sho guy. I'll actually be useful and start looking for it, least I can do.

The hard part is actually coding this. I remember a JSS Translation Project that died out a while ago Click here

Those guys had a team too. All we need are some programmers. Damnit. I swear, this can be one of the first successful translation projects for the DS man.

you see, the project is not dead, is only slow...
i've not many times to work on it, that's it...

 

[Mewgia]

Maybe you should move onto JUS, and join this. No one plays JSS anymore, Ultimate Stars is so much better.
But, whatever. Its your chioce, I won't force you to do anything

.

KINGOFNOOBS, those pictures are just mockups, correct? They look photoshopped to me (you did say that they were just scanlations, but I'm just making sure...)

 

[Sephiroth87]

i don't see the point in dropping the project...
if you take a look at the translation scene, you'll see it's plenty of people who still translate NES games...
games of 20 years ago... so i don't see why i can't translate one of about 1 year

also, i'm mainly the hacker of the team, so i don't see the point in joinin' here, as far as i can see, you have plenty of them

 

[KINGOFNOOBS]

Yeah, they are just mockups, they are completely photoshopped. I don't think they will look like that in the final version. In fact i'm pretty sure it simply won't look like that in the final version at all.

 

[Mewgia]

I didn't think they would look like that in the game. The font didn't fit the rest of the image.

And yes, this is a shameless bump for a thread that deserves it

 

[beautifulbeast]

No posts in a month? How's the project going, KINGOFNOOBS? I would really like to see this game coming out in English.

 

[Mewgia]

Likewise.
This is one of the best games for the DS, but it shall never be released in anything but Japanese, at least commercially. We had some hackers, mainly fast6191, looking at it, but no translators. If we could get some translators in here, the project could actually go somewhere, which would kick so much ass.
One of my former classmates is someone who *may* be able to translate, but I never see him online and he lives like 2 hours away from me by car. I'll try-again-to contact him, and if anyone is definitely going to be here for hacking the game I might even be able to get him to translate. The keyword there, however, is "might". First, I have to get him to return to the world wide web.

 

[beautifulbeast]

As for the lack of translators I had an idea that might work. Something like a Web 2.0 approach to it:
Once we find all the lines that require to be translated, we dump them one by one in a database accesible via a webpage (that I could program myself, since that's my job) so that all the translators working on the project could log in anytime and translate them. That way it would be a much lighter load of work and we could even use casual translators, etc.
All I need is access to all the lines that need translation so I can create the database, but the project seems to be frozen

PS: and with this I mean, if any hacker wants to take up the project, I'm in.

 

[FAST6191]

I am still very much invested, I posted a script dump earlier with all the individual files as follows (seperated by a line of --------'s although I am still willing to add names if you prefer):
bgm.bin
chr_b_t.bin
chr_s_t.bin
clearlst.bin
commwin.bin
demo.bin
infoname.bin
komatxt.bin
location.bin
piece.bin
pname.bin
rulemess.bin
stage.bin
title.bin
tutorial0.bin
tutorial1.bin
tutorial2.bin
tutorial3.bin
tutorial4.bin
tutorial5.bin
tutorial.bin

Script dump (.txt encoded as shiftJIS, you will probably have to manually set it to shiftJIS (I use firefox) as it quite literally came of my hex editor and batch files.
http://www.4shared.com/file/10428596/87df6...UStextdump.html

 

[beautifulbeast]

Ah, man. I've no idea what shiftJIS is (well, I'm googling it but still don't know how to view this in japanese scripting). Do I have to convert this or is is enough if I use a japanese font? Or does it have to be a specific japanese font since they use like 3 different alphabets?

 

[OSW]

As for the lack of translators I had an idea that might work. Something like a Web 2.0 approach to it:
Once we find all the lines that require to be translated, we dump them one by one in a database accesible via a webpage (that I could program myself, since that's my job) so that all the translators working on the project could log in anytime and translate them. That way it would be a much lighter load of work and we could even use casual translators, etc.

sounds like a great idea!

 

[beautifulbeast]

Now all we need is to translate the dumped text into readable Japanese. I think I need a table or something, but I don't know how to do it. Can anyone help?

 

[beautifulbeast]

Wait a minute: now that I look at it, the dump provided by OSW is all the code for the game, when I was asking for the text only (and in Japanese). I'm afraid we're stuck again in the beginning

 

[FAST6191]

ShiftJIS is a type of encoding like ASCII or Unicode (you may also see it called SJis).

To open in firefox
Open the file (drag it to the tab or open via menu) -> View pulldown menu -> Character Encoding -> More Encodings -> East Asian -> Japanese (Shit_JIS)

Internet explorer:
View -> Encoding -> more -> Japanese (Shift-JIS)

In Excel (probably useful if you want to create a database):
Data pulldown menu -> Import External Data -> Import Data -> (find file) and hit open -> file origin dropdown box 932 : Japanese (Shift-JIS)

 

[FAST6191]

@Shiro786 We have a readable dump, shift_JIS is one of the most common methods of displaying Japanese text (hell the DS uses it for a lot of games).

Whoever does it though will have a fair amount of work to do, the Japanese is far from simplistic (or I would have done some).

 

[Mewgia]

I like beutifulbeast's idea, it should work well. All we have to do is have the text up on the database and a place where people can post their translations.

Of course, since we have a dump of the text we can do a quick altavista translation or something for testing purposes to make sure that this would actually work when putting the ext back into the game code and running the edited rom, stuff like that. I'm sure it would, but there may be some kinks to work out or something, I don't know. It never hurts to test...

 

[beautifulbeast]

I keep working on the idea, but now I have a new concern: How do we know wich parts must be translated (text) and wich ones don't (code). It would be really helpful if we had some decent hacker helping us, but for some reason they seem to be more interested in tweaking NES games

Any ideas?
P.S: I have read some tutorials on the matter, but they all seem to be quite obscure on this subject. Furthermore: none of thems shows screenshots of text in japanes being translated or anything...

 

[FAST6191]

@beautifulbeast we have done all that, my text dump I linked has the (non graphical) text already available using a common encoding method and ready for translation. The list of files I put up to go with it is the names of the files on the nitroDS file system (my text doc is just those files with the "garbage" removed and formatting altered (00's replaced with 0d0a etc)), the pointer system (basically an index of the text file) is a bit obscure but is sorted as well.
All that needs to happen is the text gets translated, from there it is possible to can reinsert with relative ease.


With regard to old documents they are useful but DS roms are ever so slightly different to most things before it (if you want to read old documents dig up some on the famicom disk system and reference it against PCE hacking, for graphics read what little there is on the GBA (a lot more has been made available in the last couple of months mind) on 2d stuff and development docs for 3d and glance over some of the PS1/2 stuff as well.

 

[beautifulbeast]

@FAST6191: Thanks, I needed to know if the text you provided was just text or code too. Now I have another question: what happens when you put the translated text back in the rom? or, more specifically: what if (most probably) the translation provided is not the same size than the phrase expected by the program? Are you sure you can handle that case? (again, I've no idea about rom hacking, but this could be a problem).
Other than that, I think I might have the web application necessary for the translation in a week (next Monday 26th), then we can start recruiting translators.