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Post by 72pauldaniel on Feb 7, 2022 14:06:13 GMT
Hello Everyone, I do hope that the following question does not appear overly naïve or unrealistic to those who are knowledgeable on the topic, but I was wondering if there are any resources available to reference as a beginner interested in performing English translation for a PC-FX game? The best I have been able to find are the following YouTube videos from over 10 years ago, for a project to translate Team Innocent that appears to have been discontinued: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR8fRpvbFKU&ab_channel=esperknightwww.youtube.com/watch?v=D2LRq4xEqRI&ab_channel=esperknightAny help in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
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Post by elmer on Feb 7, 2022 17:19:51 GMT
The "Team Innocent" translation isn't dead, it's just resting. Beautiful plumage on that translation! Or more accurately, it's waiting for someone to test it and do the boring job of fixing all of the translated stings that don't fit in their text-boxes, all while trying to avoid overwriting program code and crashing the program. While EsperKnight's videos do accurately point out the initial steps in getting started on a PC-FX translation, the question of where you go from there is going to have a big effect on whether you will ever actually end up with a working English game at the end. I say that as somone who has helped fix/restart a couple of translation projects that EsperKnight begun but never finished. One thing that EsperKnight's video does show is that you're going to need to be comfortable with the terms SJIS (or Shift-JIS), hexadecimal numbers, and puzzle solving. Preferably you'd also have some knowledge of the V810 CPU, and of how programs are structured. The first question that I'd ask you, is are you a programmer, or a language translator, or both, or neither?
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Post by 72pauldaniel on Feb 7, 2022 19:29:53 GMT
Hi Elmer,
I would say given how much knowledge has seeped out of my brain over the years, I am neither a programmer nor a translator. I have done programming in the past, but that was many years ago.
More recently, what little I have translated for game manuals has been added in large part by automation, but I have been able to make corrections based on my knowledge of the subject matter. As such, any guidance in the right direction is greatly appreciated.
If this is looking like a substantial learning curve for someone like myself, please let me know.
Thanks.
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Post by elmer on Feb 9, 2022 19:30:52 GMT
If this is looking like a substantial learning curve for someone like myself, please let me know. Oooh, there is definitely a learning curve! A lot of translation projects are done by teams, consisting of maybe a translator, a programmer, a graphic-artist and a tester. A translator may be fluent in Japanese, and might also handle some of the text extraction, but they may not be experienced with how to get translated text back into a game and make it work within that game (which was probably never designed to display English text). A programmer may be able to figure out how to get the text back into the game, and make the game display it properly, but have no actual translation capability beyond using google-translate. An artist will be required to draw new English versions of any text that is embedded in the backgrounds or sprites, but may need the programmer to extract the graphics from the game, make it editable on a PC, and then put it back in the game. A tester will be needed to actually test out any translation, and to report/fix anything that looks wrong. This will usually require playing the game through many, many, many times until they're quite sick of it. Some of these different roles may be taken by the same person, or by a team of helpers. The lack of the right people on a particular translation project can stall it, even when other things are done. Let's use Team Innocent as an example ... the project has been stalled for years now waiting for someone to do the testing, and to fix (i.e. re-paginate) the translated text so that it fits into the boxes on the screen (and into the available memory). So, next question ... what part of that workflow appeals to you the most, are you able to help with, and what specific PC-FX games do you want to see translated?
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Post by 72pauldaniel on Feb 9, 2022 22:29:03 GMT
Hi Elmer, Thank you for indulging my questions and for providing context into the entire translation project effort. My asperations are quite modest, and focused on one game in particular - Zen-Nihon Joshi Pro Wrestling: Queen of Queens. Fortunately many of the game menus are already in English, but there is one portion of the game I would like to convert to English if possible - the scrolling dialog box during gameplay that indicates if a move was successful (displaying the move name), and a failure message if the move cannot be executed. Thanks to machine translation, a background in Japanese martial arts and an understanding of pro wrestling, I have successfully translated the game manual to English (along with manuals for other games as well). archive.org/details/72PaulDaniel-NEC_PC-FX_Game_Manual_CollectionSo with that said, I have a fair idea of what the dialog box is saying in most instances, and Google translate should assist with the rest. I am hoping to leverage that tiny bit of understanding into something that could be used in at least a partial English translation of that game. Please let me know if that seems realistic in terms of scope given my limited skills in this type of thing. Thanks again.
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Post by elmer on Feb 11, 2022 1:35:30 GMT
Fortunately many of the game menus are already in English, but there is one portion of the game I would like to convert to English if possible - the scrolling dialog box during gameplay that indicates if a move was successful (displaying the move name), and a failure message if the move cannot be executed. If that is the (cuurent) limit of what you'd like to achieve, then the techniques in EsperKnight's video will likely be enough to get you there. I don't know the game, but I'm going to assume that it's not text-heavy, and so (like most PC-FX games), there was no need for the developers to use any form of text compression. If you can locate all the SJIS strings that you want to change, then I imagine that it will be easy to replace them with SJIS-encoded English text ... although you'll find the number-of-characters a huge limitation with English text. Getting that far will be a great first-step! *IF* you get that far, then you may be able to attract a programmer to help you hack the game into displaying an 8x12 (or 6x12) ASCII English font instead of the Japanese 12x12 SJIS font. If so, you'll double (or more) the space that you have for the translated text in the next phase, and then you may also be able to have it looking nicer on-screen. The next step is yours ... find the text that is displayed in those scrolling dialog boxes, confirm that it is SJIS (which is likely), and then replace some of it. If you can find all of the text, and show the perseverence and dedication to a game that you care about, then there are folks that may be willing to help you out, if their task is both defined and limited. Have fun!
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Post by 72pauldaniel on Feb 11, 2022 2:45:43 GMT
Thanks.
I will see if I can follow what was outlined in EsperKnight's videos. I was hoping that there might be some other resources available to outline what he covered, but I guess not.
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Post by elmer on Feb 11, 2022 4:49:04 GMT
I was hoping that there might be some other resources available to outline what he covered, but I guess not. You may want to take a look at the romhacking.net forums, which is the biggest translation-focused forum that I know of, and there are also lots of tools available on the site. You can ask all of your generalized questions there, but please understand that very few people there have any experience with, or interest in, the PC-FX. Since you don't identify yourself as a programmer, and so are unlikely to write a lot of your own tools, there is one thing that you can definitely get from that forum, which is the "atlas" tool that EsperKnight liked to use for his text extraction/insertion. Lots of people there will probably be able to help you in using it, and can provide advice on how to use it proficiently, so that you don't end up with a mess that can't be re-inserted back into the game successfully.
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Post by 72pauldaniel on Feb 11, 2022 8:15:21 GMT
Thank you Elmer, much appreciated.
I was trying to fill in the blanks from watching the video and after watching it several times it did still leave me in dark on a number of items.
I now have a better understanding of what to ask on that other forum and what to investigate in regards to the tool you had mentioned.
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Post by elmer on Feb 11, 2022 17:26:56 GMT
I was trying to fill in the blanks from watching the video and after watching it several times it did still me in dark on a number of items. At the end-of-the-day, the most important tool that you're going to have to get used to is Mednafen and its debugger. If you're using a Windows machine, I'd recommend grabbing my latest "happyeyes" build of mednafen from the PCE Homebrew Links thread ... your eyes will thank you!
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Post by 72pauldaniel on Feb 11, 2022 19:32:59 GMT
Thanks Elmer. I had seen your creation and was thinking it might be handy for what I am looking to undertake. My eyes are not spectacular at this age, so I am sure it will prove to be very helpful I will post on RomHacking.net and see if there will be a kind soul that can point me in the right direction.
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