Saturn Translation Project

[brunoafh]

Well, even if you weren't comfortable with insertion, do you think you could get familiar with Shift-JIS text encoding and search through code to extract text? If it's easy to extract (no encryption or compression) it'd be easy to find someone willing to do re-insertion code.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. I can do piecework stuff like that, but I'm not the man for the job as far as the lead hacker/coder goes.

Oh, I can also do graphic stuff like editing title screens or whatever. I'm not an expert there either though. I'm a jack of all trades but master of... maybe a few.

[rufus777]

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[pierrot]

Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari might be worth a translation (couldn't get my copy to work on my Saturn, so I can't say for sure). The screenshots certainly looked amazing. Hopefully it's not another Princess Crown deal, where the visuals are the game's only strong point.

I've played Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari to completion, and honestly, the gameplay is horribly slow. I don't think the story is very much of a pay off, either. I thought I posted something about it and Princess Crown after completing them, but it's not in the Games Beaten thread, so maybe not. Between the two games, Princess Crown is the TKO victor. No contest.



I meant to add this to the discussion before, but if anyone were to get raw text dumps of anything, I'd translate.

[marurun]

In Princess Crown is there any spoken dialogue that is critical to the game that is not also represented in text? Is it a game we can get away with trying to find a script dump and going from there?

[pierrot]

There's no spoken dialogue, that I can remember, in Princess Crown.

[marurun]

So let's decide which titles really are the top candidates. Princess Crown and Leynos are, I think, clearly out in front. Leynos has dialogue, but it's all subtitled, so that's an in. I think Tengai Makyo IV also deserves a top spot as well, though it is definitely a more difficult project. Maybe a backup top spot.

[brunoafh]

Well, just a quick response from me. Leynos translation is something that would perk my ears and I would dump time into. Also I am pretty versed in the game already so I could be of help. Love that game. Just off the top of my head I can recall the data and menu screens.

Princess Crown, not really a huge fan of, not sure I would get enthusiastic about it, but I could do some basic work.

[pierrot]

Tengai Makyo IV is probably the most straightforward script to translate of those three, even if it's most likely the most text heavy.

[marurun]

We really need to figure out how these scripts are encoded and stored.

[Ben]

Hey guys, just thought I'd bump this and say that I've been knee deep in trying to learn about dumping code, and am in way over my head. So anyway, I thought I'd throw out a couple of things here regarding my experiments with Devil Summoner:

1. I worked on translating that strategy guide, but I have zero graphics experience, so I might just finish it up and post a text over at GameFAQs for some enterprising graphic artist to take up I'm trying to learn Krita because I'm a Linux and KDE user, this is also much more difficult than I had thought it would be.

2. I knew zilch about coding coming in, not much more now. After thinking about this for awhile and wasting nearly a month of my life, I've come to realize that I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. I just shot off an email to the developer of Yabause, I'm hoping that maybe by using the Translation patches for that emulator I can get somewhere instead of dumping the text, because as someone with no coding experience, I just don't think I can do this by myself.

I was glad to see this thread garnered some more interest, I've been really busy with my work due to the snowstorms in Ohio, but I should have more time after March or so barring any crazy windstorms/tornadoes.

EDIT: Well, the email that I had bounced back. Apparently Yabause has two lead developers now (after checking the site), and they recommend taking questions to the IRC channel.

Contact

Credits
Guillaume Duhamel Lead programmer
Theo Berkau Lead programmer
Anders Montonen Programmer
Romain Vallet Website design
IRC

If you have any questions or remarks, join the #yabause channel on freenode.

I'm thinking I'll hang out there and maybe have more luck when I have ample time for IRC. If I could get a live chat going with someone experienced with Saturn hardware emulation I think it would be better anyway.

Also, one last thing for anyone else interested in taking this up. The best resource I have found for dumping text and using hex editors is Zophar's Domain. One problem, though, is that I do not use (and have no interest in using) Windows, but some of the best Hex eidtors are Windows only. If you are so inclined as to use MS software and want to give those a whirl you may have more luck than I have so far. http://www.zophar.net/utilities/hexutil.html

http://www.zophar.net/utilities/dumpinsert.html


Edit- by the way, another idea I had. Since it seems pretty clear there are people interested in translating Sega games without coding knowledge, maybe something along the lines of the old anime fansub approach could work. Back in the 90's, the website fansubs.net used to host translated scripts of shows as well as raw scripts. This way, shows could get translated and then put out there for groups that knew how to handle video editing/timing to take them up later. If any coders out there could just get the text dumped and put it out there, I know I (and based on this thread probably some others) could just chip away at the translations, at which point groups could take those translated text dumps and create isos/patches from that. Just a thought anway.