ROM Hack Translation Zoids Saga DS Story Translation Project (OUT NOW!)

[Traceytrace]

Thought I'd start a new thread since the title of the old one doesn't reflect the fact that progress is actually being made (And I seem to be the only one working on it at the moment). If someone were to google "Zoids Saga DS English translation" and were looking for anything new of substance, this thread will make it easier for them to find.

This project seeks to translate Zoids Saga DS: Legend of Arcadia for the Nintendo DS into English and develop a patch for the game.

So anyway, there are obviously two sides to this project: the translation and the hacking side.

Translation
The script is 100% complete. You can see the script here:

Spoiler: Update History

26/05/2022: row ~2500, everything up to first boss fight with Blood

26/05/2022: row ~3000, everything up to the first time machine use

26/05/2022: Added a translation completion % bar for people to refer to (currently 8% complete). Added logic to count the number of bits of Japanese text (16 per character) and number of bits of English text (8 per character) so that I can monitor if my translations take up more memory than the original. Right now I am well within the space requirements. So there should be enough memory to fit the translations!

27/05/2022: row ~4100, completed everything up to first boss fight with Opis

29/05/2022: row ~5400, 13% complete!

30/05/2022: row ~6200, 15% complete! Completed the first Zoids Genesis arc

31/05/2022: row ~6400, 15.8% complete. Felt sick today so only gave it a half hour

5/06/2022: Starting to get over my sickness, but have a big test to study for! I'll continue translating on the 10th/11th of June

10/06/2022: row ~7500, 18.5% complete. We're back in business!

11/06/2022: row 8000, 20.4% complete. Up to the Raven boss battle in the chaotic century arc

13/06/2022: row 8600, 21.6% complete

14/06/2022: Row 9400, 23.7% complete. Second battle with Raven finished!

14/06/2022: Row 10500, 26.4% complete. Chaotic Century arc is finished!

15/06/2022: Row 11600, 29% complete. Fuzors arc begins

16/06/2022: Row 12400, 31.1% complete.

17/06/2022: Row 13300, 33.9% complete. Boss fight with Savage Hammer finished!

18/06/2022: Row 14300, 36.3% complete. Fuzors arc is finished!

19/06/2022: Row 15800, 40.1% complete. New Century arc begins!

20/06/2022: Row 16500, 41.8% complete. First tournament complete

21/06/2022: I have to study for and sit my end of semester exams, so I will be back to translate more in about a week See you then

28/06/2022: Row 17100, 43.1% complete. Second tournament complete

29/06/2022: Row 17600, 44.3% complete. Taking a break from translation to begin developing my hacking methods

15/07/2022: Row 18000, 45.3% complete.

16/07/2022: Row 19150, 48.3% complete. New Century arc is finished! What a slog that was..

17/07/2022: Row 21000, 50.7% complete. Guardian Force arc is S tier I love it, what a joy to translate!

18/07/2022: Row 23900, 60.2% complete. Finished the whole damn arc in a day.. exhausted

19/07/2022: Row 25500, 64.3% complete. Started and finished Genesis' second arc in one day! this arc is relatively short.

20/07/2022: Row 27850, 70.2% complete. I've officially finished the main story! Onto the postgame story

21/07/2022: Row 34859, 87.9% complete. The story is completely finished! Just a few things to go back and fix/complete/check

21/07/2022: Row 35000, 100% complete. Deleted a bunch of duplicate lines.

Battle menu translations:~95%
Deck command translations: 100%
Deck command descriptions: 100%
Items: 100%
Item descriptions: 100%
Menus:95%
laboratory text: ~95%
General Arm9.bin text: ~70%
Townspeople text: 100%
Spoken phrases during battle: 0% (may or may not bother with these)

Hacking
Translated event Files inserted into game: 100%
Pixel art translated: 100% (As far as I can tell)
md & mq files inserted: 100% (testing and debugging these will take a lot of time!)

I am currently testing, and testing a LOT

Download
Version 1.0.3 of the patch is out now! Download it here! https://www.romhacking.net/translations/6633/

Support Me
If you'd like to give me your support, you can do so at https://ko-fi.com/traceytrace It would help me stay motivated for when uni work picks up

 

[Traceytrace]

Figured out which bytes in memory correspond to the character portrait used. Not sure where this might come in handy but here are the two bytes that correspond to Earth's normal portrait (20 03) swapped out for Van's picture (20 1E)

edit: seems to be just the second of the two bytes (1E in this case)

 

[Traceytrace]

Quick hacking and translation updates:

Translation
I have to study for and sit my end of semester exams, so I will be back to translate more in about a week See you then

Hacking
I have confirmed you can indeed add extra 'scrolling' lines to text boxes easily just by inserting a newline byte (0A in hex) into the text. Looks like text box space won't be a problem anymore! And if it is, it would affect only a miniscule number of translations, so I can just reword those on a case-by-case basis

To do: check how many English and JP characters can fit in one line of text on screen, and add logic to my google sheet to check how many lines each of my translations would require on screen

 

[Traceytrace]

Back doing more translating 43.1% done now!

 

[CloudLionHeart]

Go for it. keep it up

 

[Traceytrace]

Addicted to the new monster hunter expansion, please bare with me for a few days, I'll get back to translating shortly

 

[Traceytrace]

BIG news, thanks to GBATemp user iamatmylimit pointing me in the direction of a tool made back in 2009 (!) by azerty1, I've been able to make a bit of progress on inserting text into the game. I had to do a lot of coding in VBA for Excel, but I've come up with an effective (albeit convoluted) workflow that allows me to mass insert text into the game.

It's double-byte English text rather than single-byte which is annoying, but It's a hell of a start!
Check out a little demo I made (skip to 1:55 if you don't care about me rambling)


BTW still very addicted to Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak so I'll be back translating more soon

 

[SkullChronos]

Oh man, I'm glad I found this after reading through your last thread. I'm here to support and offer assistance with whatever you need. This project is long-awaited and you're an absolute Legend for getting this started and getting so far into it.

Might I suggest a Discord to keep us all in the loop? I'm working on a translation for Silver Liger Zero (GBC) and it would be cool to have a place to sort of communicate with like-minded people.

 

[Traceytrace]

I fixed the intro narrator section and inserted my script all the way up until the first town. I like the idea of going back and forth between hacking and translating to keep things fresh. feels surreal playing it in English for the first time

Also added logic to my VBA code that auto inserts names. Neat!

 

[Traceytrace]

I've optimised my workflow for inserting text into the game quite a lot. Going through the event.bin files 1 by 1 and I'm already up to event pak 8/200! Here's a picture from one of my favourite scenes in the game

 

[Traceytrace]

Looking at the 200 event files the game has, it seems a whopping 95 of them don't even contain text at all! This means I only need to insert 105 of them back into the game, of which I've already done 15. So I'm actually way closer to being finished than I thought! Obviously I still need to keep translating as well, though. Exciting!

 

[Traceytrace]

I've fully translated the descriptions for skills, pilot stats and XP growth types and inserted them into the game. Figured out the pointer manipulation and everything on my own with a pen & paper and a hex editor, only took me a few hours! Wrote some VBA code to accurately predict the correct pointer values for the translated text. Deck commands are all set up and ready for translation, too. Figured it'd be a waste to not translate all the menus.

 

[mylo02]

Keep up Bro!!! Good work!! Been waiting for someone to translate this game for years love and support from Philippines

 

[Traceytrace]

Well, I've been learning how to code up my pointer manipulation for about 14 hours in a row... but i finally did it, I've got easy access to the pointers and values in the arm9 file, where all the juicy menu text is.

 

[SkullChronos]

This looks fantastic. I'm so excited to see this finished.

 

[SkullChronos]

I have set up a super simple Discord if anyone wants to pop in to offer support or ask questions, or even offer advice! discord.gg/kev2fWJ7

 

[Amy_Symilton_Gamequeen]

Heyo, I'm back. Been a long time since I came to GBAtemp to check on the progress for Zoids Saga DS. I'm sorry if I can't help continue the project. Dave_the_tired is still offline for now and I'm burnout from my college's schedule last month. I would probably focus on helping with the Gameboy version of Zoids Saga 1 instead in terms of polishing these days since the person working on translating is faster than me. I would give him advice for the polishing while working own my own version of the manual translation

 

[Traceytrace]

Heyo, I'm back. Been a long time since I came to GBAtemp to check on the progress for Zoids Saga DS. I'm sorry if I can't help continue the project. Dave_the_tired is still offline for now and I'm burnout from my college's schedule last month. I would probably focus on helping with the Gameboy version of Zoids Saga 1 instead in terms of polishing these days since the person working on translating is faster than me. I would give him advice for the polishing while working own my own version of the manual translation

That's fine I'm happier working on my own. I work pretty fast and I'm also very particular about quality control. If anyone does want to help me though, you can do so by looking through the script linked in the OP for spelling and grammar mistakes. Right click the cell containing the mistake and leave a comment.

 

[Traceytrace]

Also, guess what I did? Notice anything different?

 

[Amy_Symilton_Gamequeen]

Yes sir, yes sir