Saturn Translation Project

[Kentmick]

Strategic bump.

I hope this gains ground. There are obviously very talented people out there just judging by the sheer amount of translating that went into other console games. My biggest draw is the sheer number of Saturn RPGs/Strat-RPGs that were exclusive to the Saturn or the JP versions of some games that seem to be superior than their PSX counterparts.


I know the Saturn's encoding is very difficult and each game is very different. I know nothing about the process or how to do it. The only advice I do have is if you really want to take this seriously, then you are going to have to throw out a huge net. Find gameplay footage of games you want translated, post on several boards/communities/and consolidate all of this: Make a website/social group profile/etc that you can refer to and potential translators can refer to. Basically campaign for interest. The saturn was seen as a failure and disappointment even though those that look a little further see a treasure trove of incredible games that English speaking countries could possibly NEVER get to enjoy.

One person or a few can own the movement of this but I think it should be anyone who feels the same as I do to drum up this interest.

I do have a question though. If a game is translated and I have a modded Saturn, would I be able to burn the game to a disc and play it on my Saturn? Saturn emulation is not where I want it and I don't seem to be smart enough to figure out SSF...even with a dummy guide. That is probably why there is still so little interest in Saturn translations. The emulation is either bad or a headache.

[Ben]

Well, I can only speak for myself, but the problem doesn't seem to be a lack of translators, but a lack of coders. If someone can dump some text and post it, I would start translating tomorrow. But I have never studied coding, know zilch about it, and haven't gotten very far with this. I'm going to keep trying though, but I think you are right in a sense, that by being Japan only for so many great titles, the Saturn has attracted people who know Japanese, but people who know how to code seem to view it as a failure and don't really give a shit. Also, Racketboy already sells a modchip you could use to play said games if they are translated and released as isos.

[Original_Name]

Well, it seems like the consensus more or less arrived at Assault Suit Leynos 2, and we have multiple people interested in translating the text, so why don't we go ahead and get started translating the scenario, dialogue, and menu text, and worry about finding a coder when we come to that? I'll start transcribing the intro text this week, translate it, and get feedback from those on the boards who are more knowledgeable about Japanese as well as native Japanese who I encounter at school and work. There's no sense in waiting around. At the very least, we could produce an FAQ and sit on it until we find someone willing to help with the code. Failing to start is a far worse impediment to progress than any other difficulty we might face further down the line.

I'll get back to you guys in a couple days. I have an exam tomorrow so that takes precedence, but I'll get started on the intro text as soon as possible.

[After typing this I looked back and realized that support was not quite as heavily in favor of Assault Suit Leynos 2 as I had remembered, so apologies if it came across as though I just picked my favorite and ran with it. To clarify, I am absolutely terrible at this game -- I can barely make it past the first level. So it's definitely not a case of favoritism. It seems like Leynos 2 and Tengai Makyou IV were the main choices and Leynos 2 got just ever so slightly more support... so LET'S JUST GET ON WITH IT.]

[IrishNinja]

saw Princess Crown, was this posted? Cosmic Fantasy Stories @ Sega-16: http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread ... ranslation

[Ben]

Updating this as a resource for my fellow Linux users. I have found 3 pretty good hex editors for Linux that should be suitable for this. Dhex (command line only), ghex (GNOME/gtk editor) and finally wxHexEditor. wxHexEditor is a really fully featured hex editor with a nice GUI, the best of the three IMHO. Where I am at now is that I have managed to dump SMT: Devil Summoner's iso using 7zip. I have yet to figure out a good way to pinpoint the text though; basically each kanji/hiragana has its own hex value, and you can search those with wxHexEditor. The problem is that it's like finding a needle in a haystack without being able to narrow them down; some games have all of their text in one file (supposedly), this one doesn't seem to. I'm only one step away from really getting cracking on this though.

So to sum it up, if you use Linux and want to do this, you will need:
1. wxHexEditor which is available for most distros.
2. p7zip available for most, in the non-free repos.
3. The non-free version of unrar.

To see if your potential distro has them (I'm using Mageia 4), you can check pkgs.org

I might try to get a mention of this over at romhacking.net or Zophar's Domain for future google searchers as well, a lot of people erroneously claimed that there were no good Hex editors/extraction programs for Linux, but I was able to find some. I also had to use the non-free 7zip, I try to stick with pure FOSS software but it just wasn't working for me (so you will need the non-free version of unrar as well).

[pierrot]

2. p7zip available for most, in the non-free repos.
3. The non-free version of unrar.

What do you need these for that The Unarchiver wouldn't do, for instance?

Edit: Just occurred to me that you were probably using the 7zip software (although I can't imagine there isn't an open source tool for it) for compression. Still not sure what the non-free unrar would be needed for, though.

[Ben]

2. p7zip available for most, in the non-free repos.
3. The non-free version of unrar.

What do you need these for that The Unarchiver wouldn't do, for instance?

Edit: Just occurred to me that you were probably using the 7zip software (although I can't imagine there isn't an open source tool for it) for compression. Still not sure what the non-free unrar would be needed for, though.

It's not that they do anything it won't, it's that The Unarchvier isn't available for Linux. Also, I tried experimenting with some .rar ROMs (in extracting them), and p7zip had trouble with them whereas the non-free unrar handled the job fine. This is a common problem with Usenet binaries on Linux too, the biggest cause of extraction errors for those is not using the non-free version of unrar to handle extracting them. I hope that made sense. So I meant more generally for working with isos and roms under Linux, you probably wouldn't need the non-free unrar if you only intend to extract .iso format games.

[pierrot]

Oh, I guess it was just usable with GNUSteps libraries. Can't remember what I used to use when I was running linux, but I don't remember having any troubles extracting .rar or .7zip archives, and I've never really used any extraction tools that weren't open source.

[Ben]

Oh, I guess it was just usable with GNUSteps libraries. Can't remember what I used to use when I was running linux, but I don't remember having any troubles extracting .rar or .7zip archives, and I've never really used any extraction tools that weren't open source.

I think where we're getting confused here is that for Linux, there's a difference between freeware (as in it is gratis, costs you nothing) and a free (philosophically speaking) license. So Debian for instance has free and non-free repositories, none of the software costs money, but some of it is not released under the GPL. So there are often two versions of the same program (for instance, a free and non-free NVIDIA driver). Neither cost you money, but the non-free NVIDIA driver is not GPL'ed and doesn't get installed by default even though it offers performance advantages. With some distros you have to manually enable those non-free versions which often perform better (graphics drivers are a great example of this), and with these compression utilities it's the same deal. So the compression utilities are a perfect parallel to the graphics cards, if that helps any.

I should point out that there are distros that already have all of the non-free software enabled (Manjaro and Sabayon being two great examples). I just try to avoid it when possible but this was a situation where that just wasn't working out.

[pierrot]

That better clarifies for me what you meant, but I was still fairly certain there were GPL softwares available (for at least Ubuntu based distros) for proper extraction of .7zip and .rar archives.

If not, then don't mind me.