saturn games with english patches

[sneth]

Ninpen Manmaru
is a beautiful Saturn title. if you haven't played, pray the incomplete patch is enough for you.

there are not many translation patches past the 16bit era. I imagine the hacking it tremendous amount of work.

[MrPopo]

I think part of it has to do with the lack of an emulator for the disc based games for so long. The 16-bit stuff had emulation relatively quickly after their console life, but the disc based stuff took a long time for the PCs to be powerful enough to get good emulation. Sure, we had mod chips and swap tricks for playing backups, but I wouldn't want to have to burn a new CD every time I wanted to test the new text insertion or hack I made for the translation.

[corn619]

MrPopo, point well made. But with so many great and timeless Saturn titles that never got the english treatment you'd think the translation, hacking scene would be bigger. Speaking of emulators, I heard a hacked version of the Cassini emulator works with many games quite well.

[dlmvii]

MrPopo, point well made. But with so many great and timeless Saturn titles that never got the english treatment you'd think the translation, hacking scene would be bigger. Speaking of emulators, I heard a hacked version of the Cassini emulator works with many games quite well.

GiriGiri (repackaged and now called cassini) has been around for a very long time, and was always the best until very recently. At Mozgus's suggestion, I tried the newest SSF build, and provided you have a decent computer to use it on, it works quite well. Plus, you know, it will still get updates, which is something cassini hasn't really seen for 5+ years

[corn619]

Since I bought a Saturn a while ago and modded it, I'm no longer in touch with the Saturn emu scene. I might just try it out just to play games in higher res.

[marurun]

Another aspect of translating games beyond the 16-bit era is the increased amount of text in games like RPGs. Sure, text is small, but with 16-bit games you were wrestling with TINY system memory amounts. I think the SNES had an exorbitant 128 kB available for main memory, while the Genesis had 64 kB and the TG-16 a measly 8 kB main working memory. Sure, you can pull data off a cartridge quickly enough to refill memory effectively, but when you mix text with RPG visuals and scripting it can get a little tight at times. Further, cartridges were expensive to have manufactured, and the larger the cartridge the more it cost. Thinks were packed in tightly, meaning US companies had to be careful with translation not to step over those boundaries.

The Saturn and PSX both have 2 MB working RAM. They also have cheap to manufacture CDs as the storage medium. Boom. More text. Lots more.

[sakicfan84]

Another aspect of translating games beyond the 16-bit era is the increased amount of text in games like RPGs. Sure, text is small, but with 16-bit games you were wrestling with TINY system memory amounts. I think the SNES had an exorbitant 128 kB available for main memory, while the Genesis had 64 kB and the TG-16 a measly 8 kB main working memory. Sure, you can pull data off a cartridge quickly enough to refill memory effectively, but when you mix text with RPG visuals and scripting it can get a little tight at times. Further, cartridges were expensive to have manufactured, and the larger the cartridge the more it cost. Thinks were packed in tightly, meaning US companies had to be careful with translation not to step over those boundaries.

The Saturn and PSX both have 2 MB working RAM. They also have cheap to manufacture CDs as the storage medium. Boom. More text. Lots more.

I've visited the forums at romhacking.net for quite a while now, and it definitely isn't any small feat to translate a game. It seems there aren't enough people interested in the scene that have a good knowledge of assembly language and there still isn't enough interest from people with the ability and the time to translate large scripts from Japanese to English. There are large files of text that are dumped from these games, and it takes a dedicated person to devote the time to providing a service that offers no reward other than the satisfaction of providing a game to people that previously could not enjoy it.

I tried to get a knowledge of this stuff a while ago, but it was just too complex for me. Between getting a method to rip all of the text, translate all of the text, do a whole slew of programming to fit the text back into the game in a presentable and playable fashion and then trying to find all of the bugs that were created through out the process, it's just way too much work for someone who isn't passionate about providing a game to a new crowd. I've got nothing but respect for the people who do this stuff so that gamers can play some of the gems that were never localized for one reason or another.

As you mention, systems have gotten a whole lot more complex and larger over the course of time. Since there are still a lot of good SNES games that haven't gotten translations yet, I'm sure it will be a long while before we see more modern games being attempted. Look at the Shining Force 3 translation project. So much work and time has gone into translating those games, and they still haven't been able to put out finished products of anything beyond the Platinum disk yet.

[MrPopo]

Hell, if you want a good example of how even a 2D game can be a pain in the ass to translate, look at the Mother 3 translation. There was all kinds of screwy stuff they had to deal with. A lot of it is the fundamental difference between the English and Japanese language. If the hub of awesome RPGs was Germany you would see most of the fan translations proceed much quicker. However, since Japanese has a different character set (of uniform width characters) and the ability to say more with less characters you see design decisions made by Japanese developers that don't work for the US.

[sakicfan84]

Hell, if you want a good example of how even a 2D game can be a pain in the ass to translate, look at the Mother 3 translation. There was all kinds of screwy stuff they had to deal with. A lot of it is the fundamental difference between the English and Japanese language. If the hub of awesome RPGs was Germany you would see most of the fan translations proceed much quicker. However, since Japanese has a different character set (of uniform width characters) and the ability to say more with less characters you see design decisions made by Japanese developers that don't work for the US.

Yeah, I guess there is a lot of interpretation left to the translators because a good deal of the Japanese characters don't translate directly into English. I barely had the patience to gain a basic knowledge of French; Japanese is completely out of the question for me.

[sneth]

there are actually a lot of translators willing to help. Translations of text dumps are done well before the rom hacking.
It takes years for some people to get good working hacks of all the texts, but it doesnt take near as long to translate.