/vr/ - Retro Games

Probably because it's a 1 or 2 person project typically and CD games have a lot more data.

Who the hell cares, JRPGs are shit. Learn Japanese and watch Vtubers.

>>5119893
isn't it true that a lot of fan translations fall apart because of in-fighting and such? i'm spoiled by the world of anime sub translations, there's so much to choose from and always something good in the works. i wish video games had that kind of scene.

>>5119893
The problem with that site is that nothing gets translated into English anymore and the only things that do get translated are RE-translations of games that have already been translated or even games that were originally released in English in the first place rather than bothering to translate any of the hundreds of non-RPGs for old systems that no one's bothered to translate yet.

http://datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/Translations_Request_List
What games in this list would you like to see translated?

>>5119987
Racing Lagoon. It's kind of a shitty game, but always wanted to try it since seeing it mags back in the day.

>>5119987
None because I'm smart enough to learn a language that is relevant to my hobbies.

>>5119893
Well, several days ago someone posted a Dreamcast translation on the forums http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=27209.0

>>5120170
I'm looking for recommendations not your life story.

>>5119954
Game text isn't stored in any form of order, and you can't beta test to make sense of it until the hackers have gotten their shit together (which might turn out to be never).

>>5119987
Phantasie IV: Birth of Heroes

>>5119893
Romhacks are almost all trash anyway. The issue is that they're always designed by AND FOR people like themselves who know all the ins and outs and every mechanic/glitch/exploit there is, and the romhacks all just end up being obstacle course challenges based around pushing these sorts of things to the games' limits. Rather than creating a variation on a game that still has the same level of polish and balance as vanilla.

And the reason why later games don't get hacks isn't because of carts vs discs. It's simply because later generation games get more complex. Takes a lot more effort to redesign and replace assets in new combination and orientations in a game like Crash Bandicoot than it does for Super Mario World.

>>5119954
Translating is the easy part, and is about 1% of translating a video game.
>>5119987
I'd like to see Slapstick for Super Famicom retranslated.

>>5120170
he's right you know

if there are enough games out there that look interesting you might as well. learning is good for you desu

Absolute lol at EOPs. Why are you subhumans so triggered by the idea of learning Japanese?

>>5119987

Not on the list but..

Art of Fighting 1 and 2 for Neo Geo, these got terrible translations that are just the translators goofing around instead of explaining the story.

and..

Rushing Beat 2 and 3 for Snes, originally a trilogy with a shared story but translated so badly that they turned into 3 different games.
(first one already got a translation, now just 2 and 3)

>>5120596
Art of Fighting 1's translation is fine. Not great, but fine. It's AoF2 that's full on nonsense.

>>5120449
Pretty much this. 32-bit and beyond games are larger and more complex. Not to mention the hardware isn't nearly as well documented, especially for something like say the Saturn or N64.

not retro but

a paper mario 2 ng+ romhack would be f u c k i n g s u p r e m e

>>5120596
we seriously need a proper translation for AOF2

>>5120745
Or you could just learn Japanese like a normal person and not rely on the internet to do everything for you. Pretty crazy idea, right?

>>5120526
because they lost to dekinai-chan

>>5120738
I love the thousand year door randomizer.

>>5120748
>just learn Japanese like a normal perso

>>5119954
Not comparable

>>5119987
I don't understand that list.
Why are the Wizardry games on there when they are playable in English?
Why did somebody paste most of the Dreamcast list onto the Towns?

>>5120170
This is where I'm going mostly because Japanese games are still so damn cheap for certain systems.

There are a couple reasons for this:
1. RHDN panders to shitty /vr/oomers who are all low IQ. This means all the PS2/PS3/PSP hacks for something like Pro Evolution Soccer don't get uploaded: pes-patch.com (at least 200 of the links are dead)
2. "Oh no, they made mods that includes the original files instead of our faggot patches": kc-mm.com - Super Smash Bros Brawl (at least 1000 links are dead)
3. Tards make level editors and barely tell anyone how to use them.
4. MrRichard was one of the only ones that cared to reupload hundreds of patches found around the web, but of course, since he dared to be affiliated with baddesthacks and tried uploading the "CNN Sucks" hack, the morons banned him after bothering to help their wretched site for years. The rest are too lazy to reupload anything, and they'll never have the other 1000+ Japanese hacks that are in GoodSet/NonGood as a result of their laziness.

https://www.gtagarage.com/mods/show.php?id=27862
Whoops, just a graphics tool for Sonic Heroes, GTA and Persona 3,4. Just ignore it, /vr/oomers; PS2 is too advanced for you.

>>5120927
You talk like an idiot.

>>5120946
Great rebuttal. Expected from a /vr/oomer.

>>5120685
how so?

>>5120927
Thanks for the info; never know about baddesthacks!

>>5119893
Maybe it's because it's harder to edit the data on a disc (if you can even find it first) without it breaking whenever you run it as opposed to a game that is smaller than the size of a DSLR photo, you fucking cunt

>>5119893
>>5119954
There are two main problems. The first is that the site OP posted is pretty much the central hub for the retro hacking/translation scene due to the url and longevity, which means whatever rules and regulations the site has for their uploads is what everybody follows otherwise their work can't be shared to as many people as possible. The second problem is that people go to great depths to before said rules and regulations whether malicious in intent or not.
The biggest fault with romhacking's rules is that they only allow one submission per category to sort of "streamline" the searching process, and they rarely if ever replace an existing submission unless it's the uploader making an updated version. So if somebody, say Gideon aka Aeon Genesis for example, uploads a rom translation, that is the only one you will find on the site. And because that site is the central hub for the scene it will be the only one you find on the internet as people spread it around.
Now it isn't so bad having things so homogenous, but here is where it begins to snowball. Suppose somebody's translation, say it was by Gideon aka Aeon Genesis, wasn't actually perfect and did things erroneously. Maybe some of the translation is dodgy, or a bug occurs that wasn't present without the hack. Heck, maybe the translation ended up doing something like change what a button does during a set sequence, essentially locking out a game feature that wouldn't be known to exist at all until the game was officially localized by the original company a decade later. Well, because of romhacking's rules you can't do anything about it other than ask for the uploader to fix it and wait on them. Because you only get the one and nothing else.
It's gotten so bad that some people, like Gideon aka Aeon Genesis, abuse the rules to claim upload spots for games and categories for which they have no actual work to show for, locking other potential uploads even if they're further along to completion.

>>5121038
How so what? AoF1's translation is an actual translation of the original Japanese, albeit not into very good English, while AoF2's translation is 90% random bullshit the translator made up because he thought it'd be funny.

>>5119913
>watching other people play video games

I'll never understand this zoomer autism

>>5120748
Normal people don't learn Japanese and the native Japanese will never accept you as one of their own.

I think you have learners remorse or something which is why you're flooding this thread with seething requests to have other people learn a hobby langauage, when there are far more applicable languages to learn for literature or travel.

There's a reason a stigma exists about Western weebs who learn Japanese and there's a reason neither they nor people in the west regard you highly. So no; we don't want to join your club to understand more low brow media like jarpigs and obscure moeshit.

>>5120946
now it's >>5120927 's turn to be banned from /vr/ because his post could be associated with baddesthacks.

>>5120927
They banned him? hahaha he's responsible for most of the submission activity besides the español low effort hack spammer.

You forgot this:

5. The turbografx-16 scene, most of it happens at nightwolfe's place. Since they ostracized him (through no small fault of his) he no longer posts there.

6. they insist so much that translation hacks need to work on real hardware. lua scripts, onscreen translation on emulators (only feasible way to translate a sega cd or tg-16 game without fandubbing the hell of it for years, even konami used it in their shit emulator for rondo of blood), widescreen hacks for saturn/ps1/wii u hacks that work on emulators all get rejected or nitpicked on.

7. Muh copyrighted pixels. Despite small fragments of data reuse for retro hardware cleared by courts in the nineties, reusing content from other games is becoming more and more frowned upon by the submission queue lords. Undubs are no longer kosher, games that port a gba translation no longer kosher (but those that port woosley script to other versions are because that's the mod's personal preference), and more and more making life harder for anyone who posts there.

8. mods and translations uploaded there need a reputable author name. anonymous hacks are not allowed. the mario and wario d-pad hack was by an anon, someone else "fixed" a graphic and got it uploaded under his name to "bypass the rule" and "preserve" it. This is because the mods are, as part of their political inclination, against internet anonymity and want to soapbox that position with the speck of power they have. That also means bootleg translations get rejected.

9. mods became political for a while to appeal to a specific fringe, but then that fringe let them down and posts all of their hacks on personal blogs, tumblr, resetera, and despise the site passionately.

10. intro removal hacks = ban

>>5119893
imagine how much more shitty shit shitters could shit out
FTFYK

>>5121124
FUCK. We need to create an alternative to romhacking.net

>>5119954
>anime sub translations, there's so much to choose from
Doesn't the Meme Cartel maintain its popularity on that? Or are you talking about older stuff?

>>5121110
It's not about the videogames you fool, vtubers are the quickest way known to man to learn Jap.

>>5121119
Wow, your failure to learn Japanese stings so much?

>>5121172
How can you fail something you've never attempted

There is no ps1/ps2 game japanese games that would make the world go WOAH this is amazing glad we get to play it now

>>5121174
Then where does your salt come from?

>>5121178
I'm just calling you out on your stupidity, nothing personnel, kid.

>>5121119
>native Japanese will never accept you as one of their own.
What the fuck does this have to do with learning Japanese or the discussion at hand? Are you one of these weebs with "living in grorious Nippon and going native" fantasies?

>>5121184
No, he's a retard who thinks everyone learning Japanese is such weeaboo.

>>5121187
That's just fucking weird. His entire post reads like some bitter confession about his own unrealized fantasies. I certainly didn't run into any stigmas related to language in my three years there. Stigmas about other shit, sure, but not language. And my Japanese is atrocious.

>>5121190
Yeah, me neither. I'm living here completely fine.

>>5121197
Whereabouts?

>>5121201
Touhoku, previously Tokyo.

>>5121204
Touhoku is a big place, but I probably wouldn't recognize anywhere if you were more specific anyway.

>>5121206
I don't like the idea of being specific on the internet, especially 4chan.

>>5121208
Well, as long as you weren't one of the poor saps affected by Fukushima you're probably somewhere nice, so I'll leave it at that. I spent most of my time in the GTA (Shibuya and thereabouts), although I found the time to hit some of the more traditionally "tourist-y" places.

>>5121124
>8. bootleg translations
Chinese Pokemon translations were erased.
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=20131.0

>>5121217
That picture is so dumb. It's a low effort shitpost.

>>5121215
Yes, I used to go around Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro when living in Tokyo. I do kinda miss it.

>>5121187
If you're learning moonspeak so you can play gook rpgs in the original language, you are by definition a weeaboo

>>5121274
Weeabo means nothing, you've raped that term so bad it could be used for basically anything. If you acknowledge Japan exists you're a weabo.

>>5120831
>Why are the Wizardry games on there when they are playable in English?
Wizardry was and still is big in Japan and most of the versions released there got exclusive content, had to be reworked for different platforms, or have other unique quirks.

Same for some old adventure games like Zork.

>>5119893
8 and 16 bit era games are easier to reverse engineer the dialogue systems and do the translations from a technical perspective. And you don't see major hacking projects like SMW that often because that's a huge amount of effort to build such a framework so they're mostly focused on popular games.

You get to the PSX era, everything was written in C which makes reverse engineering an order of magnitude more difficult (those early C compilers can produce 5-10 times more code than the same thing written in assembly, and it's a lot less friendly to human readers who aren't experienced in that sort of thing). There's way more diversity in compression algorithms and custom data formats that have to be figured out. Some games even go as far as encrypting data. And just in general, there aren't as many hobbyists familiar with PSX and up as there are 8/16 bit consoles.

>>5121097
i met gideon once, he was like 5'2", wore a fedora and was extremely fat, pale and clammy

>>5121287
Wizardry on the PC98 is identical to the IBM and C64 aside from graphics and the additional language options.

>>5121287
One of the weirdest things is all the humor and meta shit from the wizardry games didn't carry over in translation, so the games in Japan are played almost entirely 100% straight. The series is very different from the Japanese perspective.

>>5121514
Just because you read that somewhere doesn't make it true.

>>5121172

>reeeeeeeee learn stupid thing!
>nope
>reeeeeeeeee stings doesn't it!!

retard.

>>5119893
>20 new translations have been added to the database
>Super Mario Bros (Spanish)
>Super Mario Bros 2 (Spanish
>Super Mario Bros 3 (Spanish)
>Mega Man 2 (Chinese)
>Duck Hunt (Swahili)
>...

>>5120452
>Haha I want a game we already have on English haha
fucking kys

>>5121576
>Mega Man 2 (Chinese)
Now just wait a moment there, chink/korean translations have actual effort put into them, programming wise. they're useful for anyone who wants to learn NES rom expansion or font expansion or even begin a translation project for a jp game the chinks translated first. i'm okay with those. Guess what, they get rejected all the time over technicalities.

the hex edited, google translated spanish hacks on the other hand...

https://neko.works/index.php?static=fbcr
I'd rather just have better, Engrish auto-translators than deal with the derpy fan translators that are only going to screw the script to insert their """funny joke""", introduce bugs, fuck around for months, make excuses, translate nothing I give a shit about and overall make auto-translators look morally & ethically superior. It's far better than learning moon for the sake of playing 5 games while it gives the ability to play Chinese & Korean exclusives as well.

>>5121759
I assume most of these are learning projects, but can you really learn that much about them from just the patch file? Don't you need, like, proper source and documentation for that?

At the very least they should be put in a separate category or something, the way they're handled right now, they're worthless to most of the site's casual visitors and they only clog the site and news feed.

>>5119893
>actually complaining about this.
OP, if some game you like hasn't gotten a hack yet, why don't you put in the work instead of just sitting on your ass and pretending this is a real problem.

>>5120526

>>5121769
If you knew Japanese you'd realize that automatically replacing kanji is futile since they have multiple readings/meanings.

>>5120206
>-- snip -- (Please edit link to a patch instead in one or more formats. -Mods)
huh

>>5121986
Somebody should tell them that translations still violate copyright.

>>5121338
>You get to the PSX era, everything was written in C which makes reverse engineering an order of magnitude more difficult (those early C compilers can produce 5-10 times more code than the same thing written in assembly, and it's a lot less friendly to human readers who aren't experienced in that sort of thing). There's way more diversity in compression algorithms and custom data formats that have to be figured out. Some games even go as far as encrypting data. And just in general, there aren't as many hobbyists familiar with PSX and up as there are 8/16 bit consoles.

That why symphony has no hacks?

If PSX translations weren't such a bitch, I'd want to translate some JP only arcade games that have a bunch of minigames in them like Magical Date or some of the Quiz games. If I had a team of like-minded people, I would want to make a random-seed quiz game with the Quiz & Dragons elements in them. Make the questions come out of a list so they can be easily updated.

>this fucking thread
This is sad. When did /vr/ turn into /v/?

>>5121097
>Well, because of romhacking's rules you can't do anything about it other than ask for the uploader to fix it and wait on them.
Bullshit. Addendum hacks get uploaded all the time by people who didn't make the original hack.

>>5121184
>>5121187
Learning an entire language to consume low brow media is cringe and a waste of time.

>>5121190
This stinks so much of projection that I kind of pity you.

>>5121962
I'm sure most people realize that there are untranslatable subtleties between two different langauges

>>5121056
The pic needs an updated version for the edgelord magnum opus that is Goblin Slayer.

>>5119893
my hope is that we'll eventually run out of snes games to translate. we'll finally get the goemons and popful mail snes and whatnot
and maybe one day other consoles will get translations

>>5120734
You can't do graphics stuff for them either unless you have a 90s SGI workstation or something like that.

Why do you think the Atari 2600 is the most popular console for homebrewers?

Consoles up to the 4th gen were mainly programmed in assembly language, after that everything was in C++.

>>5121596
Who pissed in your soup?
The English translation is terrible mate, it's full of errors and it's barely readable. A classic game should have a good translation.

>>5122058
unfortunately, a long time ago

>>5119893
There's a guy working on Napple Tale and Linda Cube Complete, and I understand that these projects just take time, op. Cart games are primitive toys by comparison.

>>5122364
>Napple Tale
its very pretty, im excited

>>5119893
Are you stupid? Romhacking for modern, non-ROM based games is simply called "modding".

I want to translate a Dreamcast game but I don't have a clue how to repack the game back into the CDI format to test the translation (some anon tried to help me sending me some tools, but they didn't work at all)

>>5119893
There are still plenty of non-CD games that need translations, no wall has been hit yet...we need a dedicated community to get on all the PC-98 games, only about 10 have gotten translations so far.

But at least I know the Brandish series is being worked on.

>>5122482
>Are you stupid? Romhacking for modern, non-ROM based games is simply called "modding".

A CD based game is still a ROm you moron.

>There are still plenty of non-CD games that need translations,

The world will be fine if another Dragon Quest style J-rpg doesn't get translated.

>>5119893
Tbh senpai, you're wrong about that

>>5119893
desu senpai

>know enough japanese to play untranslated games (while occasionally looking at a guide)
>nothing interests me

>>5122636
Why are you here if you aren't interested in games?

>>5119987
I just want to play the PSX remake of Uncharted Waters(Daikoukai Jidai ) 1 and 2. There's even a PC version of these remakes but I was never able to found them.

>>5119893
>Imagine how great the kind of quality and variety of fan content could be made for games as has been made for Super Mario World, or Super Metroid.
what garbage. every single smw hack is fucking cancer. the lamers of the rom hacking community pumped out shitloads of different versions, all of which are totally forgettable lumps of shit. since when has cancer wrapped in ebola been great? never.

>>5122963
These "games" (visual novels and rpgs are not games) usually haven't left Japan for good reason

>>5122636
Games are a very inefficient way to learn languages, you have to stop every couple of seconds to look words up in a dictionary, break down kanji and grammar patterns, all of which completely ruins the fun and you'll still get most of the meaning wrong. You're better off hanging out at 5ch and youtube for a couple years and only after you've built enough confidence to read without pauses start playing games.

>>5123339
What about the games that left Japan?

>>5123345
You are playing the wrong games if you have to worry about grammar, complicated kanji or difficult meanings. Just take screenshots of words you don't know and look them up later.

Internet is only useful for learning internet slang.
Games and comics are good because they offer visual feedback while accommodating your own reading speed.

>>5119893
>Romhacking has hit a wall
EAT
SHIT
http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=smtif

>>5121110
>I'll never understand this zoomer autism
You've never watched an older sibling or friend play a 1 player game? Because I did this all the time in the 90s.

>>5122482
>CD-ROM
>GD-ROM
>DVD-ROM
>BD-ROM

>>5123619
>raped with memes and retarded changes
Thanks, Gideon, you hack.

>>5123525
It's not even the grammar that fucks me up, it's the sentene structure that I need to write down to parse into something meaningful. Japanese is so compressed if you don't get 1 word you fail to understand the whole sentence. I'll stick to internet, it's more efficient and more fun and I'm a lazy leaner.

>>5123487
Those also suck if they are JRPGs. JRPGs are just irredeemable trash in general.

now in glory american language

>>5123654
Now you can finally experience a mediocre waste of time.

>>5123619
>>5123654
And of course it's the SFC version.

Honestly kind of surprised there hasn't been a romhacking alternative site yet considering how absolutely terrible the layout and navigation is for that site. (on top of arbitrary rules and nonsensical drama)

>>5119987
The Tengai Makyou/Far east of eden games. Even just a text doc of the translated script is fine.

>>5123773
They lose all their uniqueness in translation.

>>5123345
Imagine someone trying to learn English from 4chan, especially when the lingo and memes here are constantly evolving.

>Shoop da whoop I shiggy diggy you soi boy

>>5121338
>some guy asks me to look at a PSP game
>no encryption
>no compression on important files (and mature tools for the files that are compressed)
>emulators with inbuilt debugger and disassembler
>game uses a small bytecode language of ~70 instructions to do everything

>>5122501
What game?

>>5119987
Any and all Quiz games like Nanairo Dreams/Adventure Quiz: Capcom World 1&2/Quiz King of Fighters.
Koei Rekoetion games like Taikou Risshiden 1-5 & the untranslated Daikoukai Jidai ones.
Libros de Chilam Balam also seems really cool.

>t. learning nip in order to play games like these

>>5122217
I looked this game up on YouTube. Holy shit it's so cute!

>>5120526
I wouldn't if it used a normal alphabet. As it is the asian written 'word' is LITERALLY hieroglyphics. Who the fuck can be bothered? I'm sure google translate will eventually figure all this shit out anyway.

>>5123947
A lot of asian languages are pretty backward but the japs have a few scripts and i hear one of them is like an alphabet so not totally retarded.

>>5123339
It would be nice if you were killed by a drunk driver or something. Here's hoping.

>>5123654
>>5123704

Just furthers the point. SMT is kind of notable, buti t's another Dragon's Quest style j-rpg, and it's the cartridge version, not the CD version.

>>5123979
Forget to take your meds today anon?

I look at the list of patches they have for FFVI and I get discouraged. So many of them are nice, but I've found that putting on too many makes the game crash and so I can't figure out how much is too much.

>>5123631
Sentence structure is the first thing you should learn. Vocabulary doesn't help you if you can't make sense of sentences.

>>5123625
You did it because you had no alternative. Now that you're an adult you don't have to sour grape. Beating a sp game together can be fun. But this eceleb shit isn't.

>>5124080
Dully noted captain obvious.

>>5123749
Stay tuned.

>>5119893
romhacking is a fascist dick sucking circlejerk for Gideon Zhi. it's a Resetera-like persona cult shitshow that bows to and sucks the dick of a single self-absorbed hack. a massive amount of translation projects never saw the light of day because of that mentally ill faggot.

>>5121056
lol this pic is great

>>5119893
Like a lot of modern problems, it's something that could be easily fixed by cleansing the world of mentally-challenged faggots that dwell on Tumblr, Resetera, Twitter, Reddit, etc etc
The older braindead stragglers that would remain after the purge wouldn't be capable of jack-shit since nobody pays attention to the plight and rabble-rousing of "oppressed groups" who consist mostly of people past 40

>>5119913
>Who the hell cares, JRPGs are shit. Learn Japanese and watch Vtubers.
Why would i learn Japanese just to play Video Games when i have no connection to Japan whatever so (no onions
japonés) and that the written form is harder then the spoken form?

>>5128180
Go for a walk son.

>>5128259
>why would I learn a skill for my hobbies
woman detected

Maybe the topic has strayed too far from the OP, but here's my 2 cents:

Hacking CD games is an order of magnitude harder than cartridge games. Not only is there much more data to consider, but you're often forced to reverse engineer entire file formats from scratch, with no documentation or idea how the data is layed out. Often times, the games can have their own compression or encryption schemes which can be almost impossible to reverse engineer. Games were programmed in higher level languages like C, and do not disassemble easily, as well as being far more complex in terms of code than for earlier consoles.

It's certainly possible with a talented enough team, but anyone who's smart enough to pull it off is likely doing more important things with their lives.

>>5128259
>the written form is harder then the spoken form?
That's wrong. Written Japanese has aids like kanji that are missing in speech.

>>5128338
>more important things with their lives
Bitching on Twitter/Discord about politics, posting cat pics and playing video games every chance you get doesn't count.

>>5128180
meanwhile on 4chan, big brain posters like anon

>>5128259
You wouldn't. You'd just cry about how people didn't give you free translations like an entitled little bitch.

>>5128338
Possibly the most impressively wrong post I've seen all week. Most CD games are an order of magnitude easier. If you're overwhelmed by data and file formats you're probably looking for text in FMVs. You're probably also retarded enough to call shift jis "their own compression or encryption scheme". All machine code disassembles just peachy. But no disassembler can magically make you understand it's output. A talented enough team is any kid who knows Japanese and a little about the platform. You're clearly not that.

>>5128959
While yes it's easier for some systems that have standard ISO formatted CDs, it can still be a lot more difficult because there's so much more do debug and so much more that can go wrong. And then you have some games on systems like the PS1 that don't use standard disc formats which can be a pain to reverse engineer in and of themselves.

For example, let's look at Saturn Grandia. The File formats are easy enough to figure out to inject a new script. The hard part is that changing the script size causes graphical corruption to happen as now the game isn't copying all of the data into RAM that it should, causing garbage to be sent to VRAM.

Trying to debug this is nightmarish as the game actually generates some of it's code at run time. So you can't just look for the Hex Values of the Assembly you want to edit for a simple ASM hack. You instead need to backtrack through various areas in RAM to try and figure out what the game is using to generate it's code, then find those few bytes in the games 100's of MB of data so you can make a permanent fix. Throw in that on the Saturn you have multiple RAM banks, as well as multiple CPUs to debug at once and it can become frustrating quickly.

It's not impossible, but it is time consuming. Especially when you have very poor and buggy debugging tools for some systems like the Saturn.

>>5128347
That's what he said.

>>5119893
>Imagine how great the kind of quality and variety of fan content could be made for games as has been made for Super Mario World, or Super Metroid.
Is this bait or are you retarded?

>>5123947
>Who the fuck can be bothered?
not even the japanese, given the rise in kanji illiteracy

>>5129235
Every source I read says they are increasing the amount of common kanji due to the popularization of digital devices.

>>5119893
True, but you have to understand that most teams are working their ways up. The reason being is that there are community efforts behind certain systems. let's look at the NES. Only within the last 5 years has there been a dedicated group trying to produce FAQs for every single NES game.

Now with CD games, there are millions of shitty web games and pc games. How could you even ask a community to get behind an effort? Perhaps you want to lead the effort to do all the games behind a company for example.

In terms of real ROM Hacks though, why make a hack when you could make a new game just as easily?

Also romhacking.net is a terrible website run by literally communists. They ban you if you have any kind of political opinion they don't like.

>>5120526
Can't learn it unless you move to Japan. Can't move to Japan unless you learn it. People who say they learned Japanese while living in their own country are just playing pretend. They can read or translate at their own pace, but they are not fluent at all.

>>5123947
lol at your life EOP

>>5129272
This is correct. What's going down is people's ability to write kanji, and this is also because of the popularization of digital devices. When you write digitally, you write a word in hiragana and then select the appropriate kanji from a pop-up window, so you never need to remember exactly what each kanji looks like, just be able to recognize it when you see it.
Same way people's ability to do simple addition in their head has gone down due to the popularization of cell phones with calculators - people forget skills they no longer have to actively use.

>>5129301
How did I learn English without ever leaving my country?

>>5129428
English is one of the easiest languages to learn, Japanese is one of the hardest.

>>5129714
By what measurement?

I just wanna see all super robot wars games translated

>>5122070
Addendum hacks that have to be pre-approved by the hack author and RHDN mods, aren't allowed to make outright changes to the original code (sometimes not even allowed to use the code if the hacker doesn't approve), pretty much still having to wait longer than you should because of their rules being messed up.

>>5123619
>Gideon
>He shoveled in a bunch of unfaithful script changes (ie memes) just to spite people who were waiting on it
>Big long sob story about how hard it was for him to sit on the game for a long ass time while ruling the roost and getting donations for not working on hacks
>Only rushed the release because baddesthacks was calling him out
Yeah you really must eat shit if an EOP like yourself enjoys this kind of thing.

>>5123749
You have to blame the fact that the domain name makes it so googling "rom hacks" or another variant shoots it right to the top of the search pages. Even other rom hack sites with several years under their belt can't compete with that kind of presence.
Another problem is that it's where all the hackers and community is, they aren't going to move unless they decide to pull a reshitera and use some allegation drama as a front for their hostile reshuffling of power.

>>5123842
w-which game

>>5129098
It does suck that saturn debugging tools suck. But addressing the problems you give is no harder on a CD than on a cart. The main difference is people who do translations of cart games have understood for decades that you can't just open a hex editor, insert characters, and expect it to work. I'm not saying it's "easy" and it's certainly beyond the capabilities of someone who can barely handle a hex editor. But it's easier than doing it on a cart based system. Saturn grandia has all or most of the text in easy to find locations in shit jis and the platform has plenty of resources to approach translation in a number of ways. The only reason these things don't get translated is because the people capable of doing it can play the game in it's native language and have better things to do with their time.

Japanese is an especially difficult language to learn even compared to other East Asian languages. It's highly context-sensitive, has three (or four) different writing systems (all of them with their own unique purposes and caveats), and a system of ideograms that not only change meaning based on their combination with other ideograms, but even change meaning based on what phonetic reading happens to be assigned to them in a given sentence.

It's not even remotely an easy languge to learn in its written form and I don't understand the weird superiority complex people on 4chan have when someone isn't willing to learn it just to play another generic JRPG.

>tfw would like to learn Japanese but it would cut into my gaming time in my already busy work schedule

>>5131469
>has three (or four) different writing systems (all of them with their own unique purposes and caveats),
Hiragana and Katakana are a non-factor for difficulty.
Inconsistent pronunciation and orthography is something you commonly find in English as well. Natives speaker have trouble properly writing it.

>>5131469
>It's not even remotely an easy languge to learn in its written form and I don't understand the weird superiority complex people on 4chan have when someone isn't willing to learn it just to play another generic JRPG.
>only a fool would take anything posted here as fact

>>5131529
Case in point: Now that SMT IF finally got translated people realized it was just a generic first person crawler and discussion died almost instantly after a day or two.

>>5131469
>I don't understand the weird superiority complex people on 4chan have when someone isn't willing to learn it just to play another generic JRPG.
If you care about retro games you should at least invest some effort into them instead of demanding to be spoonfed every little bit. If you are too stupid or lazy to learn the language, shut up about it instead of gloating about it like some retarded achievement.

>>5131469
When there are people like crying about how hard it is and others learn enough to get by in games in 6 months it's hard to not see one as superior. If you'd prefer everyone who knows moon could be considered just average. But that would mean you'd be retarded by comparison.

>>5131580
What if I'm interested in Arcade-like games, not JRPGs and Novels?

>>5131736
Then there are plenty of Japanese arcade games to play as well as interesting secondary materials. It's definitely not a reason to expect things like Art of Fighting get translated for you.

>>5131551
A lot of people screaming for shit don't actually care about it. Had a GCCX thread up for weeks waiting for part 2 of the Zelda 2 episode. It finally dropped, and no one was even talking about it for a day or two. I suspect most of the whining about getting stuff is just people wanting an excuse to whine.

>>5132306
Maybe it's because they didn't fucking know it came out

>>5119893
>Every time you hear that a new translation is released, it's some obscure NES or SNES j-rpg

What's the problem here exactly

There's so much that can be done, but talent is squandered due to no coordination. Dumping text from all games on some site for people to translate on their free time could lead to good things.

>>5132607
You're assuming that all of the people who want to "help" are actually qualified for the job. Many a legitimate project has been stalled when the lead decides to actually check someone's work and realises they're a retard running the script through Google Translate.

And even if you don't attract any idiots, actually translating something isn't the hard part. Getting it into the game is the hard part, because you need a rom hacker.

>>5132647
Translating is immensely hard.

Games up until the mid 90s were all pretty simple, code-wise. As the 2000s marched forward, games began getting more and more standardized. Everything in-between those two eras is a goddamn nightmare to hack. That's why emulation for mid-late 90s consoles took so damn long compared to what came before and later.

>>5132469
That thread is still in the archive. Regular posts on Thursday, Friday, then Saturday morning it gets posted RIGHT in the thread. A few posts the next 10 hours, none of which are about the release. 10 hours of dead silence about it until I commented on it. No one else bothered posting about it until SUNDAY. People around here whine alot about getting stuff now now now, but then ignore shit when it happens. Hell, look at the archived MK3 source dump thread. Got posted, then for hours nothing but shitposters saying "who gives a fuk lol!"

>>5132651
>>Translating is immensely hard.
Translating well, maybe, but anything gaming related? A retard could pump out passable work, the standards are just that low.

>>5132673
Just because idiots eat it up doesn't make it passable.

>>5132702
If 99% of the consumers don't care, it's passable work. Hell, you could pretty easily get more than 70% of people to support a machine translation with a bit of clean up and guesswork by an ESL.

>>5131141
Saturn Grandia's text is not in Shift-JIS. If it was it would have been translated a long time ago.

It's text is encoded in a custom format that uses both single-byte and double-byte encoding. Long story short, it has a custom compressed font table that's in it's own unique order, and the text is encoded by the ordering of that table + 0x20. When it reaches the max of single byte encoding, it adds a control code to indicate what page in the font table to jump to.

So to dump the script, you need to first reverse engineer the custom font compression, then decompress the font table. Then you need to figure exactly what characters map to what byte codes as well as the paging system. While not hard at that point as it's in order, it's still time consuming and easy to make a mistake.

How do I know all this? I'm actively working on translation patch for the game at the moment. Attached is the game's font table. Have fun.

>>5133227
>I'm actively working on translation patch for the game at the moment.
Well you better be done within a year now or FUCK YOU

>>5133236

I've already got the English PS1 script converted over and inserted into Disc 1.

However as stated above I'm running into palette errors due to file size changes. Even though the headers for the files that hold script and graphics have had their pointer tables updated correctly, the game still seems to be using the old values for copying data into RAM so not all of the palette data is being copied over causing problems.

>>5133227
>>5133241

Y-you're going to translate Grandia Digital Museum too, right? RIGHT? ;_;

>>5133252
It would depend entirely on how similar the file formats are. If they're similar and the script can be dumped, then it probably wouldn't be too hard. Though it would be harder than what I'm currently doing as I kind of got lucky and found the PS1 file formats are very similar, so converting the already translated PS1 script wasn't too hard. For Digital Museum an actual translation would need to be done of the dumped script which would take more time probably.

>>5133261
I see. Well, I hope it turns out okay because I've been wanting to play that little game for so many years... but that's pretty selfish.
Out of curiosity, why are you working on the regular game when the ps1 version is already translated?

I wish I could into romhacking, but I never really understood it fully it since I'm absolutely not working in anything computer-related, so I got stuck with weird nes pointers and gave up.

>>5133278
Generally speaking the Saturn version is better than the PS1 version. That and as a Saturn Fan I've just wanted to see it translated for years now.

To be totally honest I'm really not that experienced with it either. I know how to program but it's more in application based languages like Java and not lower level stuff like C and Assembly. So it has been a learning experience for me so far which is probably why some of the things like the palette bug have been giving me such a hard time trying to track down.

>>5133287
Do you keep a journal or memo files? I suppose that could be useful for "the romhacking community" or whatever you call it.

Best of luck to you on that long journey.

>>5133294
Yeah, I've been posting progress and findings on various Romhacking/homebrew forums.

>>5133227
Maybe I got Grandia confused with another game you claimed was so difficult. If so I apologize and look forward to hearing your reasoning as to why that one wasn't translated long ago despite it being shift jis. The text encoding you describe is pretty much the same as any cart game with a large font. It's no harder than and in no way typical of most CD games. If it works the way to say it does then you have everything you need to dump the script. Since you haven't I suspect you haven't quite figured it out.
>I'm actively working on translation patch
And there you have it. You're actively reading other peoples failed attempts and hopefully learning from their mistakes. This doesn't make the translation of that game hard and doesn't make it an example of how CD games are harder. It makes it a good example of how an inexperienced person has difficulty taking on a game that's not as easy as a typical CD game but rather as hard as a cart game.

>>5133625
Making the table to dump the script isn't hard, just time consuming. I never said finding the script and changing it was the hard part of it either.

The hard part is debugging and fixing the bugs that changing the script introduces. Again, the main issue here is poor or nonexistent tools for the Saturn. It's hard to narrow down a bug when the only emulators you can use to debug are constantly crashing because they can barely run the game under ideal conditions.

Under ideal conditions it shouldn't be harder than a cart game. But sadly for some of those systems you don't have ideal conditions because you don't have the mature tools and documentation that's available for the older cart based systems.

>>5119893
>Romhacking has hit a wall
>hit a wall
>wall
good

How hard is it lo learn romhacking from scratch, as well as japanese?

>>5133261
>>5133241
>>5133227
How different is the Saturn version?

>>5133695
If your issue is just the tools I can't disagree with you there. There are no child friendly romhacking tools like for the NES or whatever. You might want to look into period dev kits or modern alternatives. And while not ideal, debugging an emulator the runs a game is always better than using an emulator with a built in debugger that doesn't.

>>5134145
They wouldn't even need to be child friendly, just something that could actually work to be honest. Another problem is even some of the tools and dev kits from the period barely work right. Video encoders are a prime example of this. Then some of the documentation out there from Sega happens to be the earlier versions that had translations errors, so you need to take everything they say with a grain of salt.

Again not impossible to deal with, just annoying and more time consuming than what you have to put with on say the NES/SNES/Genesis. For those systems if you need a tool to edit graphics, there's plenty to choose from out there. You need to decompress data? Most of the compression schemes used on those consoles are well documented and have tools to do it for you. Meanwhile on the Saturn you're pretty much stuck making your own tools from scratch. Again not impossible, but you do start at a disadvantage.

>>5134137
Overall the game just looks and runs better. Buildings have shadows, floors in towns are done by VDP2 and are laid out in a more logical manner, spell effects look better in some cases, audio sounds better, etc.

One of the biggest ones though is the battle backgrounds are much higher resolution so they look better. They look so much better in fact that it's easily fooled people into thinking the Saturn was rendering the backgrounds in real time.

>>5132664
>look at the archived MK3 source dump thread.
the one which was deleted by a jani?

>>5121962
What we really need is just the overlay from auto-translators, so that we can import a script onto a layer sitting over the game. As others have pointed out, the actual translation is the easy part, the hacking is where the biggest problem resides.

>>5134092
Japanese is moderately difficult but doable within a year or two at a reasonable pace. Romhacking seems moderately difficult as well, though realistically speaking I would say it depends massively on what you're trying to do. There seems to be a lot of different skillsets that go into it. You could end up working on a system with mature tools and straightforward file formats, or you could end up working with a buggy undocumented mess with files from hell. And the difference between what you need to get things done under those environments is enormous.

>>5119987
Metal Max, Boku no Natsuyasumi, Summon Night. All of them.
Not retro, but Tongari Boushi games.

>>5129718
Not the guy your were replying to, but it's true. English is me 2nd language so I can compare it to my mother tongue, and it's incredibly easier due to several factors, like for example:
- simple sentence structure
- shorter words (on average)
- the same word can be a verb or a noun, making it slightly harder to interpret but drastically reducing the variations of the same word that you have to memorize
- it's the same with verb conjugation. in many languages your get a different word for I, You, We, etc... while in english it's almost always the same, or just with an S at the end

>>5133227
TrekkiesUnite118 senpai???

>>5134387
Estonian?

>>5119893
>Every time you hear that a new translation is released, it's some obscure NES or SNES
Because everything not obscure has been localized.

>>5120526
English is my third language though

>>5134807
What are the first two?

>>5134807

Same here. Japanese doesn't seem so extreme to speak, but reading and writing is bullshit.

>>5134976
Portuguese is my main, then there's English, I can bullshit my way through Spanish, and a tiny bit of Latin.

>>5134981
Are you from Brazil or Portugal?

>>5135209

Huefag.

>>5134324
This is the simplest approach if you're fine with emulation. But there are still many soft core autists who are just hard core enough to insist on real hardware but not hard core enough to learn a little moon.

>>5134734
Portuguese, actually. Not the easiest language, according to my foreign-born friends

>>5134981
Reading and writing is easy. Speaking is harder. Because sometimes they use some strange made up sound for one of our characters and other times they pronounce it almost correctly. Very strange.

>>5131469
lol at your life, EOP

>>5133297
lol at your life, DJT EOP

>>5134807
EOP gets used for people that aren't JOPs regardless of how many languages they actually speak.

>>5136083
The language of SA trannies is Spanish with a Russian accent

>>5119893

OP is right. Romhacks are gonna stay with cartridge systems basically forever. Which mean they're gonna be translating FC and SFC games basically forever.

They say it's complex, but it's just being lazy and disorganized.

>>5119893
Do the emulators for them have text hookers? That might be one reason

>>5138503
>text hookers
protip: if you print an ascii whore you don't have to pay her

I wish someone would create a tool that can be used like the Tecmo Super Bowl for Bad News Baseball

>>5128347
you're right in comparing kanji to aids, and that's it.

>>5121962
It will be solvable, but it might require machine learning.

For fuck's sake kanji are only 2000 shapes they are not that hard to learn. Get a grip you pathetic cuckold weeabos.

>>5138597
I kek'd

>>5129783
isn't orden's smt patch on there? gideon actually hates it

>>5122006
It depends on the game, really.

Symphony for the Saturn has the script understood and fairly easily editable, but the text positions are inside a spaghetti of pointers so you need to essentially decompile and recompile the entire script file if you want to insert a translation that has more letters than the Japanese equivalent.

>>5140259
>spaghetti of pointers
Sounds like Earthbound's shop system. The entire thing is one giant if/else tree. Every single shop in the game jumps to the start of the tree, then advances depending on which flags have been set by events. Every single shop in the game. I swear the internals of Earthbound look like an AI attempted suicide.

>>5140275
BUT IWATA WAS SUCH A GENIUS PROGRAMMER. Nah.

>>5129718
A lot of languages use the same letters as the English alphabet. We have mastered them since we were children.

If I hand my spanish-speaking parents an english word, they will be able to read it aloud. Maybe not with the best of pronunciation, but they will recognize it at least. If I show them hiragana, katakana, or kanji, they will have no fucking idea of what I've just shown them, and if I were to show them that again, they wouldn't have remembered seeing it before.

There's something that is underrated in the learning of English, and that is the fact is is EVERYWHERE, and people are much more likely to be reading English sites and forums than they are likely to read Japanese sites and forums. It helps develop the language much faster. Ever since I finished school, I've never taken a single English class. Instead, I developed it on my own just by interacting on online forums.

My grammar isn't the best and my spelling may be off from time to time, but at least I can fluently read English to enjoy games.

This, pretty much >>5123947
>I wouldn't if it used a normal alphabet

Not to mention having to learn an entire new language would only be worthwile if we were talking about a literal pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Most great games have received English translations, and I doubt people have bothered to play all of them already.

>>5131483
>Hiragana and Katakana are a non-factor for difficulty.
Bullshit. Anything that adds into the difficulty of learning a language is a factor for difficulty.

>>5140279
>>5140275
yeah let's judge his programming skills based on compiled code

>>5140630
>giant if/else tree
>giant if/else tree
>giant if/else tree
>giant if/else tree
Japs can't code for shit.

>>5140630
>compiled
>snes
pick 1

>>5140245
For what reason?

>>5140279
actually they hired him because it was spaghetti. its a miracle the game happened at all.

>>5140686
well its what i heard but i guess because he's a manchild and wanted to fix it himself (would've been done by 2100)

>>5140630
>>5140635
EB is really interesting on the inside. Rather than have normal routines for things happening in the game, they created a system of control codes the game would interpret to do various things. They even created a register system for storing values in memory and doing loops. So rather than program this stuff directly, they created a pseudo-code system to do the exact same thing. They created this code system/game engine, then programmed the rest of the game events and whatnot from inside that system. Yes.

The map is really fun. Every single location in the entire game on one giant map. You would think they would make some effort to group things together in some form of logical manner. There are a few attempts, but for the most part the many single rectangle rooms are just jammed wherever they had a spot.

This doesn't even cover how much of the various parts of the game are scattered all over the damn ROM for no apparent reason. They used to try hacking Earthbound by modifying the game part by part. These days they just wipe everything and work from a "base" ROM so the end result won't be the mess the original was. Because it's easier to wipe everything and build from the ground up than it is to poke the Jello that is Earthbound.

>>5134981
Well, no shit. By those rules I speak like 6 or 7 idioms.

>>5140629
There's nothing difficult in learning 100 extra characters for syllables when you have to learn thousands of pictograms.
If you think Japanese is harder than Chinese because it has two extra sets aside from Chinese characters you are wrong.

>>5140625
>people are much more likely to be reading English sites and forums than they are likely to read Japanese sites and forums
If only people learning Japanese could just switch their habits to read more Japanese material, like you did with English.

Sadly, that's impossible, because as we all know there isn't a single Japanese person on the internet.

>>5140779
Japanese is fucked, kanji isn't even the biggest challenge, the grammar is ridiculous, it's a massive time sink for very little gain considering 99% of worthwhile anime and games are already translated.

>>5140625
>Most great games have received English translations,
Those translations are trash and in no way a replacement for the real deal.
A lot of games have Spanish translations yet you wouldn't want to play them that way either.

>>5140791
I've always knew that the Final Fantasy 7 translation was way messed up but I don't really care. I'm more interested in the gameplay not the character's story, and JRPGs provide neither.

>>5140783
>it's a massive time sink for very little gain
It's a miniscule time sink for a very large gain, though. I spend maybe an hour a day, tops, studying. And 99% of that is just flipping through flashcards.

I literally watch more than an hour's worth of nip TV a day in your average week now, and if I didn't 99% of that content would be utterly inaccessible to me, because nobody subs any of it.

Playing games 6 months early without butchered dialogue is wonderful, I could honestly never go back to English translations. They always sounded awkward before, but now it's nails on a chalkboard tier because you can tell exactly what stock phrase was poorly translated literally into English every sentence. I can count the number of competent localisations on a single hand, so it's always funny to see people who would rather read the kind of garbage an intern shits out over something an actual writer worked on. There are plenty of bad writers in Japanese too, but getting the double whammy of shitty writing combined with shitty translating is even worse.

And then you have all the fan communities, porn, livestreams with developers, people really don't realise how isolated Japan is from the west because they've spent all their time on global sites like this one where everyone speaks English. A miniscule amount of Japanese content actually gets translated, and even if you pretend it's the top 1%, the top 9% is still a pretty good addition.

>>5140818
Japanese TV is trash and I can already enjoy most of the shit you've mentioned with my poor Japanese skills. It's an useless skill and you just have sinking cost fallacy.

>>5140818
By the way you weebs better enjoy the few remaining years of 2chan because that community is clearly on its last legs.

>>5140805
That added to it's charm

>>5140629
Said the dingus who never learned another language

>>5140720
What needs fixing?

>>5140824
>with my poor Japanese skills.
>you just have sinking cost fallacy.
You mean poor English skills

>>5140910
That's exactly my point, poor skills are good enough to get my point across so why bother getting good.

>>5140919
>why bother getting good.
The legacy of your degeneration

>>5128180
get some professional help

please

>>5120526
I speak two languages though. As do all continental Europeans on 4chan.

>>5121119
There's nothing abnormal about learning Japanese, and why exactly are so many of you people desperate to be accepted as a full-blooded Japanese whose ancestry goes back thousands of years?

>So no; we don't want to join your club to understand more low brow media like jarpigs and obscure moeshit.
Moeshit doesn't exist, and you're pretentious.

>>5129301
English is my second language. I've never set foot in an English-speaking country.

>>5141053
>Moeshit doesn't exist

Moetan

>>5141084
Moetan can't be moeshit if moeshit doesn't exist.

>>5140919
If your point is that the voices in your head made you parrot some tumblr words then mission accomplished. No one over the age of 30 or with an IQ over 30 knows what you're rambling about.

>>5141089
>he knew exactly who Moetan was

>>5140818
>Playing games 6 months early
Because it will make the slightest fucking difference to your life that you can consume something a whole few months earlier. What about people who were born six months earlier than you? They get everything later than you in their lives right? Do they have such horrible lives? No, because it doesn't make any difference. Watch something else in the mean time that you intended watching anyway or better idea - work on your real life.

>>5131469
>I don't understand the weird superiority complex people on 4chan have when someone isn't willing to learn it just to play another generic JRPG.
It's because 4chan is full of weebs, mate.

>>5134359
>Tongari Boushi
The Animal Crossing Konami clone? It wasn't even emulated at all until recently (melonDS)

>>5134737
>everything not obscure has been localized
They run tournaments of Tetris Battle Gaiden and it's untranslated to this day
Also PS1, Saturn, PS2, DS, PC-Engine have more untranslated than translated games.

>>5140259
>but the text positions are inside a spaghetti of pointers
On par the course for Konami games, really. Saw this while doing a non-burger translation for Goemon 1 to spam RHDN with (lol jk, I never upload there anyways) and the pointers are scattered. It gets worse for 2, and 3 which added dictionary compression.
Dealing with them is simple enough though. Text extraction tools can also extract from a list of pointers provided in a text file (researching them can be tedious since you click on each beginning of a string separately but i use a pointer calculator to expedite the task) so you can not tamper with the spaghetti besides what's needed to make the script file size longer since you'd just add stuff to the end.
If that's not possible, you can add some basic form of dictionary compression to cram more text in the same existing room for text (in fact that's just what Gemini did with the SOTN retranslation).

>>5140275
>>5140279
Iwata ported on his own an existing JRPG that was in development hell and collapsed on itself to a new engine that could at least work. He did well with what he had. Highly unlikely he was the one who came up with the event scripting.

>>5141398
I was referring to people under the age of 30 not you old grandpas.

>>5141023
Have fun wasting your time bruning precious brain neurons learning a repetitive task of very little real life use. I guess you're a gamer after all, learning useless crap is what you excel at.

>>5141493
I'll tell you how the dialogue looks like in Tetris Battle Gaiden:
>fufufu I'm better than you
>no you're not nyoron~~n
Why you even want this trash translated is beyond me.

Don't lie to yourself that learning Japanese was in any way a worthwhile endeavor, just don't, that's embarrassing.

>>5141815
That's right buddy, keep trying to convince yourself.

>>5141802
douché

>>5141802
>bruning precious brain neurons
Looks like I've got oodles to brun

>>5141819
I already know all the japanese that I need, and I know for a fact it was useless.

>>5141824
Cry some more you big baby. You've wasted your life mastering a useless skill, come to terms with it already or kill yourself.

>>5141403
What about it?

>>5141815
So if something is personally not worthwhile to you, it cannot be worthwhile to anyone in the world?

What about non-translation hacks? I recall every 8-bit platformer stuff on RHDN are mostly kaizo shit.

>>5141938
They are mostly kaizo shit.

>>5141927
I'm not a fan of gitting gud for gitting gud's sake, famlamam.

>>5141945
And?

>>5141950
Exactly. I'm comfortable with my Japanese skills, shouldn't you be grinding flashcards on anki instead of wasting time on an EOP?

>>5141953
What are you talking about?

>>5141956
YoU kNoW dAmN RiGhT wHaT I'm TaLkInG AbOuT.

Why are sites like this so easily overtaken by insane trannies and/or leftists in general?

>>5141963
Not sure where you're seeing any leftists.

>>5141953
t. N2-kun

I approve of you mocking EOPs though.

>>5141963

Because liberalism has infinite financing from globalists. If they want a place subverted into the ground, it will happen.

>>5141962
No, I don't.

>>5129098
You make that sound more complicated than it already is.
- yabause has decent enough debugging tools
- there's only 2 memory banks used by the CPU, and out of those, 1 is used for storing graphics and 1 for code (due to their speed). So really you only need to look in one place most of the time. And the main game code is almost always a relatively small file, the rest of that 100+ MB is just textures/audio/level maps and whatnot.

>>5133227
>it has a custom compressed font table that's in it's own unique order, and the text is encoded by the ordering of that table + 0x20. When it reaches the max of single byte encoding, it adds a control code to indicate what page in the font table to jump to.

That's the most basic custom font mapping that's also present in damn near everything, and there have been tools to get mappings like those readable/editable since at least 2002. Basically all you need to do is make your own table of value = letter, and since the values are in the same order as the font table, you can very easily automate this. The kana is in standard AIUEO order and for the kanji you can do automated OCR to dump it into a script.

If this poses a "challenge" to you then you have absolutely zero skills at translating games.

>>5142216
From reading this thread, it appears to me that a lot of translators have no experience of programming outside of translating.

>>5142225
That's correct. Rom translation projects have relatively little to do with translating, and someone being willing to translate a game generally has little to do with whether or not it will actually get translated. It's the actual hacking of a new script into the game that's most of the work, and the stuff that takes time and holds up projects.

>>5141493
>Text extraction tools can also extract from a list of pointers provided in a text file (researching them can be tedious since you click on each beginning of a string separately but i use a pointer calculator to expedite the task)

Which tools do you mean?
For SOTN Saturn you have like, a bunch of pointers, that point to a bunch of pointers, that point to a bunch of pointers (repeat a few times), that then point to a script entry. Which is why I think you could fit in much longer text and still not hit the file size limit, because there's quite a bunch of unused space.

Is there a tool to automate the de/recompilation of a mess like that?

And that's just the inventory screen. Which is, honestly, all I'd need to translate for the game to be fully enjoyable. I didn't even look into anything else, but from what I recall the cutscenes have pre-baked full bitmaps which should be easy to edit.

>>5142237
It is telling that most of the complaints I've seen are related to encoding tables and pointers (and related: hard-coded memory allocation for strings).

>>5141815
t. Gideon Zhi

>>5142205
Yabause shits the bed trying to run Grandia at the first FMV. With some tweaking in settings you can get it to run, it's still a complete glitchfest though.

As for finding the code in the game's data, I think you misunderstood what was said. The game's code isn't 100's of MBs. But it is scattered across 100s of MBs of data. Finding the exact code you care about in that data can be very time consuming.

With Grandia there's an additional catch in that code is compressed/generated at run time. So for example, the code that determines which font to use, the 16x16 Japanese font or the 8x16 English font you will not find anywhere on the Disc. It's not in any of the BIN files, nor is it in the small 0.BIN file that's the games main executable. The reason being is that the code that controls that is generated at run time from data it reads out of the SCNRL.BIN file.

Again, once you figure out that's what's going on, fixing it is trivial. But realizing that's what's going on takes time and could easily throw someone off.

>>5142216
Again, I didn't say this was difficult or challenging, just time consuming. I was merely pointing out that the game did not use Shift-JIS as implied by the other poster.

>>5119893
>cd game
>romhack

>>5142564
>CD-ROM

>>5142564
what would you like to call it

>>5142578
Patching

>>5142605
rompatch? i guess i can dig that

>>5142560
>The reason being is that the code that controls that is generated at run time from data it reads out of the SCNRL.BIN file.

translation: the data is compressed on the disc, and gets decompressed once the game loaded.

>>5142647
Which I mentioned later on. Point was, it's still a small piece of data buried in a lot of data. So it takes time to sift through it all to find exactly which file it's trying to read from so you can make your changes permanent.

Yes this can exists in cartridge based systems too, it's not quite as bad as when you see you're reading from the memory locations that correspond to the cartridge, you can then go to the same location in the actual ROM and make your changes most of the time.

On a CD based system like the Saturn you don't have that. You instead get to an address that essentially just pokes the CD ROM drive to say "Hey, give me some sectors of data." You have to figure out what's in those sectors of data yourself and then what file on the disc the correspond to so you can go make your change.

Again, this isn't necessarily hard, but it is an additional step that makes it take longer.

>>5121167
Can you give me some links, actually? I was looking into this.

>>5142674
Plenty of cartridge games also use compressed data, and have parts in code that tells the game to take rom data chunk x and decompress it.

You are bitching about nothing. Literally the only legit concern you posted so far is that yabause doesn't run the game. Everything else you mentioned, is something that even a mildly experienced rom hacker would have seen before and could get around easily.

I'm sorry that you expected the game to have ascii/shiftjis text you could just edit, but games haven't worked like that since the NES days.

Shit, all this talk about rom hacking makes me want to re-play the old FFV SNES translation.

>>5142686
I didn't expect the game to have ASCII/Shift-JIS text. Someone else claimed that and I pointed out that it wasn't the case.

I'm aware other games use compression. The issue I was describing wasn't taking data from one place and decompressing it elsewhere. The problem was finding where it's coming from on the Disc.

On a cart based system you have a dedicated part of the memory map that represents the cartridge memory. If your game isn't using a memory mapper, then that data is your entire ROM. So if you see data from a particular address in the Cartridge address space is being copied to RAM, and you need to change that data, you already know where in the ROM you need to go to find it. This isn't the case for a CD based game. You instead need to see what exact data is being copied then start sifting through the CD to find it. Sometimes you may get lucky and see some information that tells you exactly what file it's reading from, sometimes you don't.

Again this isn't hard, just time consuming. That's really been the point the entire time. CD games are bigger and therefore it takes more time as there's more data to deal with. Throw in that you don't have the amount of mature tools that you have for older 8/16 bit systems and you can see why there's less people willing to jump into it. I'm not really bitching about it, just pointing out why there's less people doing it for CD based games.

Honestly if you feel it's so trivial then why not jump in and give it a try? No one's stopping you. In fact I'd welcome it, the more people getting into translating/hacking Saturn games the better. At the end of the day I could care less about who translates a game as long as it's translated.

>>5121124
>6. they insist so much that translation hacks need to work on real hardware. lua scripts, onscreen translation on emulators (only feasible way to translate a sega cd or tg-16 game without fandubbing the hell of it for years, even konami used it in their shit emulator for rondo of blood), widescreen hacks for saturn/ps1/wii u hacks that work on emulators all get rejected or nitpicked on.

ANY romhack developed absol-fucking-lutely should be tested against real hardware and should be able to run on real hardware. It's a pain in the ass for some games as you've mentioned but it's the only way to ensure forward compatibility. There are a bunch of romhacks now that simply won't run with modern emulators because they relied on hacks or tricks implemented in older ones.

If you let that gate open, you'll end up with entire generations of romhacks that'll end up just not working eventually.

>>5142725
>This isn't the case for a CD based game.

Yes it fucking is, take the main executable and add whatever offset it is padded to when it gets copied to main ram, and there you go. On the Saturn, 99% of the games I checked have something like "0.prg" on the disc, loaded to 0x6010000 or so (the initial program that is on sector 0-16 of the iso gets loaded first), and that's mostly it. On large RPGs you often have text crap in separate files, but the few I checked have the full scripts loaded at all times too, since it rarely amounts to more then a few dozen kilobytes.

>Sometimes you may get lucky and see some information that tells you exactly what file it's reading from, sometimes you don't.

Identifying what files each game uses is piss easy, unless the game has everything compressed. Even then, you can associate easily from the filenames, or even just check in a debugger what LBA of the disc gets accessed when you load scene Z, and then compare what file is in that LBA. Once you do that for 2-3 files, you'll note patterns in the file names corresponding to the given scene, and you can make the logical assumption that, for ex. all SEQ files hold music and so on.

>Again this isn't hard, just time consuming.

Yeah, it takes as much as an hour or so to make a spreadsheet covering the file system, then you extrapolate.

>Honestly if you feel it's so trivial then why not jump in and give it a try?

Because I already know how to universally auto-translate every rom I play for my own use: I know how to use a notepad and a fucking dictionary. Which is what I used 30 years ago when I couldn't read English, and eventually I learned enough that I could drop the book. And the same thing also works for everything else I learned, be it a language or programming.

fucking entitled zoomers, an hours work and you are already bitching about how difficult and time consuming your task is.

>>5142740
I agree with this. This isn't the 90s anymore either, when it was near impossible to test your hacks.
For $100 you can get either a flashdrive or even an actual rom programmer. Testing your hacks is easy now, and with more and more people playing on original hardware, it should really be a requirement.

>>5119913
>lol just learn Japanese bro it's that simple :^)

>>5142784
you can learn basic kana in like a day, and that already covers half of all Japanese videogames since they just use phonetic English transliterations. Like on a title screen you see
アーケードモード
オプション
セーブ
ロード

for arcade mode, options, save, load. With katakana + English you can navigate through practically all arcade style games.

>>5142740
Hmm. I never thought of it that way. That's a really good point.

>>5141938
There's a small percentage of really great non translation hacks. Stuff like restoration hacks that restore mechanics to games that get butchered during the localization process (7th saga for eg).
Or some old famicom hacks that make zelda 2 less of a cunt to play and make it more enjoyable. Stuff like that.

>>5142756
Again I didn't say what I was running into was hard. Just time consuming. Sitting there stepping through Saturn code in a debugger takes time, especially when your emulator is crashing constantly.

As for documenting the file system, I don't see how that would have helped figure out which compressed BIN file was controlling the default font used throughout the game. SCNRL.BIN doesn't really scream "I control the text boxes." now does it? At the end of the day I'd still need to go through the debugger and figure out that the code that controlled it was compressed, and exactly what that compressed code looked like so I could find it on the disc to make changes.

It's great you're able to translate everything for yourself. But not everyone as that kind of time to throw around.

>>5142740
lol, just say what emulator version you were using in the readme.
>entire generations of romhacks
as if anyone actually cares about archival to the point of over 200 of them being lost, let's worry about whether it works on stupid hardware.

>>5142794
but those games aren't the fun one's to play. it's all about them Jay-Are-Pee-Gees

>>5143079
rpgs are boring as hell.

>>5142252
>Which tools do you mean?
For your case I'd bother only with the last layer of pointers directly pointing to the actual text offset.

For extraction: cartographer.
Alternatively, abcde (didn't try), pointer table (http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/502/)), kruptar (easily the best one but i can't find a good documentation for the damn thing pls help faggots)

For insertion: atlas.
Alternatively, pointer table and kruptar.

I have a homemade hacky tool for calculating pointers, with formulas for the nes, super nes, etc. An important difference between cart consoles and cd consoles is that the former's pointers refer to position within the ROM, while the latter usually refer to position within RAM after it gets copied (but can sometimes refer to position within a specific file like in goemon uchu kaizoku agokingu, that became standard practice for later systems).

PS1 will be little endian with 4 bytes + a potential offset, but it can be less than that. Saturn is big endian.

I'd click in a hex editor where the string should begin (of course accounting that there's a bunch of control codes before that to tell it who's speaking, etc) and get that offset, convert it to how a pointer to that offset should look like with my homemade tool, and do a hex search in the entire file for that. Usually I would find a bunch of pointer groups together pointing to different text strings confirming my hunch, but if it's a stray pointer or multiple results I modify and test in-game to check if it's a dud or not.

>>5142252
2/

Now cartographer and atlas allow multiple modes of extraction/reinsertion of text:
- raw: you insert to an offset (where og text was) as if you hex edited in the text.
- pointer table: for when pointers for many strings are in succession. you state in a config file how big it is, what endianness they are, how long each one is, the offset to add to get the real offset value, etc. (kruptar is better because it's far better at covering as much possible cases as possible, but even this is fine) - this mode inserts text and automatically updates pointers that are in direct succession if the text of the previous string is now longer and invades the personal space of the second og sentence.
- pointer list: when the pointers are hopelessly scattered for all of the text in the game, you can prepare a file with a list of pointer locations (that when watched in the rom will have offsets to the text), and it will extract the text each one points to.

"Proper" way would be to properly disassemble the game's code and see how it parses that script so that you can program your own tool that decompiles and recompiles the script, but who has time for that, and for that version of all things?

If the game uses +2000 kanji, you can cheat and cram two characters in each glyph. Look at the old romancing saga 3 fan translation to see what I mean. someone on gbatemp shared a python script to prepare a similar font and text converter iirc.

>>5142560
>I was merely pointing out that the game did not use Shift-JIS as implied by the other poster.
An easy assumption to make. Previous Lunar games used it for actual text encoding, and a lot of games even if they don't use it keep the same character order as the shift-jis spec.

>>5142740
ANY romhack?
So you think romhacks should not exist if they can't, because of unique features they had, run on real hardware? Good for you, RHDN has just what you want, you can stick to it and stay safe from all of those horrible hacks.

So we would rather have zero new PC Engine translations than one that applies soft subtitles whenever it detects ADPCM samples played onscreen, or text rendered in the fugly BIOS font that can barely fits anything onscreen (just dub it or give the missing text in a readme, duh). None of that PS1 and Saturn widescreen hack bullshit, that's not "accurate" enough, better wait for the planets to align and some turbo fan ports and remakes the game in a widescreen engine with its share of bugs. None of those colorized GB games and HD sprites for NES games that don't respect the 3 color palette limitation, they are not allowed.

Only Konami (subtitled Rondo of Blood on PSP/PS4) or Nintendo (NES Remix) or Capcom (Rockman PSX with arranged music) or Sega (Wonder Boy Dragon's Trap HD reskin) have earned the right to do romhacks that do stuff the original hardware could not, I guess.
Other romhackers all need to learn their place and stay in their lane. It would set precedents! Romhacks need to be exclusively things with the potential to be sold in repro cartridges on real aging hardware. MSU-1 barely earns a pass because the collectors have a working real hardware version of it.
Funny how no one gives a shit how accurate that official emulation is.

>>5142674
Just decompress it yourself then recompress it when you're done translating. Cartridge games have compressed data, too.

someone 95% finished a translation hack of Dragon Quest Monsters 1+2 for PSX but quit when it was just down to last bugtesting. I followed it for years. So lame, I wish he would release it even if it's not perfect

>>5141806
>bruning precious brain neurons
Doesn't get much more ironic that this
>I guess you're a gamer
Yup. That's why I'm here. Most of us aren't here just to shitpost

>>5143416
AAAAH BUT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT TAKES HOURS OF LOOKING AROUND IN A DEBUGGER

>>5142972
It's not just about emulator version. There are a bunch of early SMW romhacks that only specifically work in ZSNES and fail to work on more accurate emulators.

It's not really about archival purposes, it's about compatibility in general. When you get it working on actual hardware, you guarantee that any properly-written emulator can handle it. If not then congrats, you found a flaw in the emulator itself which needs to be fixed.

>>5143403
At that point you're not creating a romhack. You're essentially supplementing the original. Like it's fine if you want to create SM64 online or what ever but once you start creating an external framework around said game that's required to play it I would argue it's beyond the realm of romhack.

And plenty of people give a shit on how accurate official emulation is. That's why we have people trying to create shit as close to the original hardware as possible. You could create a SNES game that runs in an emulator which allows for limitless memory, but what would be the point?

>>5119893

after finally fidgeting through the pokemon gba change the title screen sprite, i understand kinda how to do it to other games... but i was wondering how hard it is to change combat mechanics through asm hacking? is it something that would be at all possible?

>>5141825
Keep telling yourself that

>>5141826
The amount of assmad you have at your failure to into language is fucking hilarious

>>5128347
This. Not to mention Japanese is spoken so quickly it is hard to understand exactly what is being said. A て or で can sound very alike when spoken quickly, especially if it's a Jap girl who speaks softly.

>>5119893
>Lord Alucard
>not Señor Alucard

>>5144249
Wouldn't Don Alucard fit better?

>>5144249
>>5144313
There's a 99% chance it's just translated from English by someone with 0 knowledge of Japanese and imperfect knowledge of English.

>>5143403
>None of those colorized GB games
Not a part of this argument, but making GB games take advantage of the GBC's faster CPU and color palette isn't that much different than all the MMC1/MMC3/MMC5 hacks out there. Plus I've tried the SMB2 colorize hack on a GBC, it works perfectly.

>>5144441
And the remaining 1% are by foreigners with Spanish as a second language.

>>5144249
Lord would fit much better than Señor or Don, IMO. "Lord" has connotations of royalty, as opposed to either Señor or Don, which makes him feel more like a drug lord or a mafia boss.

t. native Spanish speaker

>>5144526
>>5144313
>>5144249
>>5144441
As a matter of fact, the issue here is that the second line reads "haces" instead of "hace". "Haces" is informal, which doesn't blend in nicely with the formal "Lord".

>>5144526
>which makes him feel more like a drug lord or a mafia boss
Are you from the Americas or Spain? I'm just wondering if the druglord connotation is more present depending on where you're from.

I'd love it if someone translated the Lunar games straight instead of the Working Designs joke-fest we received.

>no little princess 2 ever

>>5143358
>>5143375
what tool should I use for viewing a file with a custom text encoding? Like, it doesn't use ascii or shift-jis but stuff like 01 for A, 02 for B, etc.

>>5144960
I decided to put my Japanese to use for that purpose. It's actually stiff and generic. Lunar rode on its presentation more than anything else.

>>5145000
Relative search to generate a partial table, and a hex editor compatible with tables. You will have to complete it yourself for anything besides A-Z or basic hiragana/katakana, which can involve lots of trial and error, keeping notes, and painful human kanji identification from low res moon scribbles.

Things you will have to include in the table manually to get a full understanding of the compiled text data (some might not be applicable depending on game):
- Special instructions (line breaks, end of text, new message box, wait for player input, character picture, text color, text timing...) First two are the most important.
- Spaces
- Punctuation
- Various other characters
- Dictionary bytes that call premade words with just one or two bytes
- Table page swap bytes that change the encoding (for japanese games typically hiragana/katakana swaps, not much editors handle this properly)
- Branching text special instructions (Yes/No choices)
- Event scripting (changes how NPC act onscreen)
- Event flag setting instructions (items, events)
- etc...

Of course you could just disassemble the text parser, but it would be just as tedious. It's doable

Picture related is an attempt to try and display all valid characters onscreen and see how they match to characters. This particular game was a bitch because not only the encoding was arbitrary, but the way symbols were ordered didn't follow any logic (alphabetic, iroha or otherwise) so relative search just fails normally, if you don't use certain workarounds. Be prepared to see this creep a lot in NES games.

>>5144526
I assume it said "Alucard-sama" in Japanese, which is NOT how you address royalty at all. But I'm sure the Spanish "translator" had no clue what the text he was "translating" actually said anyway.

>>5140686
Because Gideon is a pretentious asshole who can't stand people doing anything involving his work, going so far as saying he won't do jack shit for his original hacking of SMT1 and 2 that left massive gamebreaking bugs that happened at random, not allowing certain events to occur or endings.

I remember working with Orden on /vg/ to help bugtest his patch, and I think it fixed 99% of it, aside from some textbox overflows in very specific dialogue trees.
That said, at least Gideon won't be doing Devil Summoner, or else it'd be done some time in 2035.

>>5119893
>tfw you are fully qualified to make translation patches from a technical standpoint, but you only speak English and Frog
If my Frog translations were good enough, do you think I could become an eCeleb Royale w/ Cheese? I don't feel like there's a French market for these things.

>>5146189
What French games are there to be translated?

>>5146208
There's a French patch for Samurai Shodown RPG and Star Ocean Blue Sphere.

>>5146208
It's less about translations Fr->En and more En->Fr like >>5146216 is talking about.

>>5146226
Who would want that? English is almost as easy to learn as Japanese.

>>5146229
That's exactly the point I was trying to make in >>5146189.
Oh well, maybe I can just partner with somebody and inject off of a script

>>5145951
Looks NO different that those baby tier translation attempts from the early 2000s when they only managed to translate the first sentences of a game and the rest is just garblage mess of text.

>playing DBZ Super Gokuden 2 like this on ZSNES or a copy of Pokemon Gold before its official release on NO$GB

>>5146229
This is a stupid statement. English is easier to the point of incomparability. Japanese is not a challenging language per se, but the irrecoverable writing system increases the amount of necessary knowledge, practice and memorization exponentially. Besides the sheer amount of work necessary to master the writing system, it also slows down the learning practice because normally most of it is text-based. Of course, to imply that English is somehow easier is beyond silly.

>>5144798
Americas. Argentina. It's possible that the media influences what words you associate with the mafia and the cartel.
>>5146057
You could argue for "Señor", but it would still feel awkward. Why? Because it's retarded to translate honorifics: I'm pretty sure said Spanish translators probably used "Lord" to denote "Sama".

A good question to ask is: who is Death and why does it use "sama" to refer to Alucard?

>>5146267
M'lord
*tips hood*

it's probably being translated from english 99% of room translations to other languages are made using the english script the only exeptions i can think of are chinese and korean they usually translate the jap script

>>5146265
>Of course, to imply that English is somehow easier is beyond silly.
English is basically babby's first langauge, so it's not at all a silly notion.

>>5146263
I didn't make that as a translation attempt. The character order is really that nonsensical. The image is a list of characters that match with hex codes from 0x20 onwards to 0x4F to see how they look like in-game.

The base version is in English and the font was already. This was a personal use only romhack that's half fixing the horrible font, and half fixing some of the shitty terminology used.

I changed just the text and nothing else in previous pic related. What you are talking about is when you overwrite only the font (from a nip version with jp font) to an english font, then don't change the actual text. Nothing shitty about it either, it's pretty normal and typical of unfinished translations. The problem sorts itself out when you finish the job and insert all of the english text, even official products like Harvest Moon FoMT or Suikoden 2 had it.

>>5146287
I meant to say the opposite: "to imply that Englihs is somehow harder...". As you can tell from the rest of the damn post. It's a typo.

>>5146286
There are some quite good Japanese to French/Spanish translations for games untranslated by the anglosphere.

Sometimes games done from official english localizations for convenience (text display, additions, bugfixes) will have an editor go over both the english and japanese scripts and port back the japanese sentence whenever there's an instance of lol-calization, and for further editing work, they build on that. Happened for a lot of Squaresoft games on SNES and PS1 (even obscure shit like Threads of Fate).

It helps avoiding cases like Fire Emblem Fate, where the European translations (spanish at least) have treehouse's jokes (like "rawr means i love you in dragon") literally translated after they had them work from the english script with zero deviations. That's what a lot of english localizers hope for, since they see themselves as co-writers, not the same ilk as those subhuman non burger translators, and want to see "their" jokes and more serious changes into other languages with zero concession.

>>5146327
>There are some quite good Japanese to French/Spanish translations for games untranslated by the anglosphere.

For example?

>>5146327
>Sometimes games done from official english localizations for convenience (text display, additions, bugfixes) will have an editor go over both the english and japanese scripts and port back the japanese sentence whenever there's an instance of lol-calization, and for further editing work, they build on that. Happened for a lot of Squaresoft games on SNES and PS1 (even obscure shit like Threads of Fate).

Post comparisons.

>>5146327
>(like "rawr means i love you in dragon") literally translated after they had them work from the english script with zero deviations.

Rawr significa «te amo» en dragon?

>>5146335
Symphony of the Night version differences alone are enough to break a man's heart.

>>5146330
Star Ocean Blue Sphere
Surging Aura
Samurai Showdown RPG
Power Sokouban
Atelier Iris PS2
Phantasy Star 1/2 (Sega Ages PS2)
Romancing Saga 3
Ni no Kuni DS
Captain Tsubasa series (also almost completely covered in arabic for some ungodly reason)
+ more obscure shit on Satellaview, NES and SNES no one really cares about

It became almost standard procedure to do two text dumps from the Japanese and English versions, then use the English version as an insertion target and backport anything needed (censored assets, etc) - there's an excellent uncensored Secret of Mana romhack like that... in French (a retranslation by the way).

Those scenes are so prolific they even translated games that were already officially translated (Ducktales 2, Soleil, Shaman King Master of Spirits) just because the scene dumps didn't have the localized version yet. It makes sense in lots of ways, since that's the second global market for turbo weebs.

Final Fantasy VI was retranslated eight times in French in all kinds of flavors (even Babelfish), and a new patch is in the works using the Japanese ROM, not just referencing it, to make Cyan's techs usable again and to practice more serious games. Their Go Go Ackman translation patch is miles better.

They also host text translations.

>>5146373
>Atelier Iris PS2
>Romancing SaGa 3

I thought these had English translations.

>>5146373
>Captain Tsubasa series (also almost completely covered in arabic for some ungodly reason)

It is one of the most popular anime in Arabic speaking countries. Most ‘90s kids grew up watching "Captain Majid."

>>5144798
Spain here. Señor works just like mister, Don is actually pretty close to sama. Neither one have any sort of criminal connotation.

I don't really understand why they didn't use Don, maybe because it can sound a bit weird in a non hispanic context.

Of course a CD wouldn't be ROMhacked. It's not a ROM, you idiot. It's an ISO.

>>5145951
>You will have to complete it yourself for anything besides A-Z or basic hiragana/katakana

I already have the full font table written down, and the few strings I looked up manually were all found exactly in the form expected, including kanji. I can already switch strings out, just not efficiently, and I haven't mapped any of the control codes down yet, only the obvious ones like data pointers.

I just want to know if there's an easy way to punch these numbers in so I can see the text AND see what is not in the table. It would save me the time of writing my own parser.

Turns out that a newer version of my hex editor actually does support tables, though, so I'll try that first. If not, I'll have to write my own graphic converter.

>>5140275
>>5140635
>giant if/else tree
There really is nothing wrong with that. In a game like that it's a fine way to implement things.

>>5146373
>Final Fantasy VI was retranslated eight times in French in all kinds of flavors

Knowing how big weeaboos the French are, I'm not surprised. All the anime we got here in the 80s/90s were imported French versions, and took on the names they used... so in Dragonball we had Satan Sans-Coeur and Tortue Genial and the like. And I have to admit, it made the series so much better.

>>5143464
I remember this, did the translator die? It hasn't been updated since 2015, if it's the romhacking aerie website you're talking about. I've been waiting to play this game for over 15 years. I could've learned Japanese three or four times over by now.

>>5146965
Exactly, EOP. At least you're aware.

>>5146770
Except there's no good fucking reason to have every single shop in the game tied together by it, requiring the game to jump through needless steps every time you go to any store. There is no reason to have any store do ANYTHING other than throw the open window control code, and then put text in it. They already had a system in place, this just adds complexity for no benefit.

>>5146978
Yeah this is fucked.The romhack guys would at least keep old Dragon Warrior terms for spells and such, but it's not enough. I just want to play the game as it was intended, puns intact. How long would it take studying 2-4 hours a day to 100% comprehend Dragon Quest games? I might bite the bullet and learn moon glyphs. It's either that or Bulgarian so I can find an autistic wife with a unibrow.

>>5146754
WindHex has a table editor, but it's very unpractical and doesn't even display non japanese characters properly. It only accepts ascii and shift-jis formatted tables for some reason.
You could write the characters in succession on that and press Return each time and write the next value's character. You'd press save and close and then it brings back the hex view but with the newly added characters to your table appearing as they should in text, and rinse and repeat to complete the table.
The big problem is that windhex is a massive piece of shit especially for japanese, and actually expects you to CLICK on each individual CJK glyph to write it either in the table editor or the text search.

There were table tools before but only standalone (not coupled with hex editors), and very shitty.

>Turns out that a newer version of my hex editor actually does support tables, though, so I'll try that first.
Highly interested.
If you are going the route of writing your own solution, i recommend you add table support to wxMEdit since it supports big files, and look at abcde's table file spec that resolves a lot of interesting aspects (like the hiragana/katakana swap)

If you want to make a graphical hex editor that takes a graphical font formatted as a 16x16 tile bitmap with the characters needed, to display the text without kanji identification, the idea has been explored before but never in satisfactory fashion. You would make romhacking great again (even if it never really was).

>>5146553
One of the only two translations on RHDN for Sega CD is for that. It's a hilarious situation really.
I think the current company doing CapTsu games noticed the trend and threw them a bone with an official localization not too long ago.

>>5146550
Both have English translations yes but as the french/spanish romhackers pitying EOPs and well after the patch is out.

Romancing SaGa 3 has another old, very shitty translation, but the lesser said about it the better.

>>5147064
>Highly interested.

I checked it. It does support tables and works absolutely bloody great... but it can only import sets up to 0xff. Multibyte sets can't be exported nor imported, although you can set values one by one (but fuck setting up 1000 letters that way).

>If you want to make a graphical hex editor that takes a graphical font formatted as a 16x16 tile bitmap with the characters needed, to display the text without kanji identification, the idea has been explored before but never in satisfactory fashion. You would make romhacking great again (even if it never really was).

haha, not exactly, no. I have the font converted to a png, so I figured I'd just whip up a PHP script that creates a CSS spritesheet from that, and displays every two bytes either as a sprite (if the value is present) or as the four letter hex code (if not). Pic related is me coding.

Checked a few other apps, they only support 8-bit values in TBLs.

Fuck it. Guess I'll have to do my own parser.

>>5119893
Why can't anyone translate SOTN on Saturn?

>>5147138
It is already half done.

>>5147138
>>5147145

>>5147153
Also, if you play it in SSF, you get no slowdown and you can turn meshes into real transparency.

>>5146189

Just team up with someone who speaks Nihonese.

>>5147156
>and you can turn meshes into real transparency.

How? Is that just innaccurate emulation or some kind of feature?

>>5146965
>4 times
>for dragon quest
You can learn enough Japanese to play DQ in a year easily.

>>5147162
Mesh is a hardware feature on the Saturn VDP1. In the SSF emulator, you have the option for "Mesh translucency", which then writes all sprites flagged as mush as half-transparent sprites, and without the pixel overwrite bug. It's a very simply hack, basically.

But if a game uses VDP2 meshes, those will stay unaffected since they are actual tiles with the mesh pre baked.

>>5121167
Why are they better than watching subtitled Jap TV or anime or reading voiced VNs?

>>5143416
I haven't really had a need to decompress it yet. So far I've only had to make 2 very small changes to it to get it to do what I want.

Really the most time consuming part was dealing with a crashing emulator and then trying to find what file was being decompressed. Luckily the latter part was eventually solved as I was able to find a tool that could search for Hex values across entire directories that wasn't behind a pay wall. With that I was able to to easily find exactly what file was being decompressed so I could make changes to it.

>>5146990
At least the oldest DQ games read like they're written for very young children and are very easy to understand. Dunno about the later ones.

>>5147145
>>5147153
>>5147156
big if true

>>5147089
>Both have English translations yes but as the french/spanish romhackers pitying EOPs and well after the patch is out.

What does this mean?

>>5146776
Estonia?

>>5146267
Well, Death is a servant/friend to Dracula and possibly defaults to threat his son with due respect, even if said son is not in good terms (understatement) with his master.
Dunno makes sense to me, at that point Death is probably willing to reason out of duty or his personal relationship with Dracula, past that it's "welp warned ya".

>>5149482
oh my fucking god, "treat" not "threat" fuck damnit.

>>5120748
Normal people don't learn a practically useless language so they can consume lowbrow media.
A normal person would learn Mandarin or Russian or German or something

>>5119893
Disc image i/o is an order of magnitude harder than normal i/o. MysticLord of bhdn is working on it. Shares his code too.

Misleading bullshit as always. Yes it's harder but several big name projects over the years have been done. It's really a matter of interest and dedication.

>>5150160
Weebs in the British Empire, Anglophiles in the secluded Chinese and Japanese empires, and Frenchophiles in America and Europe (because Jules Vernes) existed because they deemed consuming shitty entertainment in foreign languages was enough of a worthy conquest to offset its political uselessness.

>>5129718
His ass

>>5151951
Yeah but none of them did it right. They hardcoded addresses, making it impossible to expand or move files. This cunt ML is doing it right.

>>5149482
In that case I would use the expression "joven Alucard", literally "young Alucard". Basically, if you are serving a master and said master has a son, "joven" wouldn't be weird at all, and it would perfectly convey that meaning of respect.

I'm trying to remember if the Spanish dub of Ricky Rich used both "amo Ricky" ("master Ricky") and "joven Ricky".

>>5152126
Wouldn't that be Bocchan?

>>5152556
I don't speak Japanese but judging from Google, it would appear it is basically the same thing.

It's not so much a "nickname" nor a title, but it's the closest thing I can think of that makes sense.

>>5147153
>Alucart Sword
>Alucart

>>5153456
You can find both the Alucart and Alucard equipment in the game.

The weird name seems on purpose and Alucart equipment boosts your luck. The Alucard equipment makes you strong.

>>5153456
>confirmed to have not played the game

http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Alucart_Sword

Is anyone working on Rival Schools, the evolution disc, with the create a character mode and the dating simulator?

Jeez, I had no idea the romhacking scene was such a mess.
Is there even any single scene or group left nowadays that's not full of drama?

>>5153456
>Alucart (アルカート)
>Alucard (アルカード)
Name was supposed to be a hint it's a cheap replica put by Death as a red herring for the real equipment he stole and stashed away.
Description was trimmed but still makes this clear.
SoTN's official localizations (PSX, PSP) have lots of problems but this is not one of them.

>>5153881
Localization restorations for untranslated text, badly translated text and dummied crap have only been a real thing recently on the SNES and some by Wrecking Designs, but are understandably scarce and a lot of it has to do with the "fans" of the "original localization" who are scared their favorite shitty incomplete censored version will be spirited away once the project completes. Someone has even been whining that youtube walkthroughs of the fixed version will be made, and he will have to make EFFORT to look for the "good" version by date filtering.
So forums like gainjinworks and neogaf and sites like kotaku organize abuse mailing campaigns on the project leaders to get them to drop romhacking completely, to "respect the nostalgia and not insult the fanbase" by their patch's existence, and they try to report uploaded ones on the database for any reason to get them removed (except when they port the shitty lolcalized translation to newer versions). The moderation of rhdn is complicit and will tolerate trolls who openly insult retranslators for "wasting time not translating my unrelated fave game" because they hate them too. Undubs only allowed on warez sites.
When you add the political belief that localizations "fix problematic japanese culture" and "introduce diversity and proper mores" you then get political activists fighting retranslator (who reject localizations) devils who will resurrect hitler. You can get these types of people to defend anything, even mobile and predatory loot-box micro-transactions.
It means in practice that projects like this, which were rare enough already, become fewer and fewer.

>>5154091
I think you're replying to the wrong anon. I was just asking if the japanese psone rival schools got translated.

>>5154043
no, most involved in ANY type of weeb project are fullblown autists

>>5154895
lol, you're just cowards.

>>5155583
you'll cowards don't even rom hack

So did that guy on youtube ever get the one million usd he was asking for the samurai showdown rpg translation? What a piece of shit that guy is. And people wonder why the translation/hacking community is such a shit show.

>>5119913
Ignoring the bait in this post, how are JRPGs and virtual Youtubers related at all? This post feels like a non-sequitur.

SOTN has a "hardtype" that just buffs the monsters - its mostly bullshit, and removes shield rod combo (becuz muh hard) even though this is a hack you might actually use it in. I'd love to fix that shit but I haven't the foggiest how to do it.

Also on the subject of learning nippon: there are content romhacks (as in, levels and revamps and nontranslation shit) in Japanese for a lot of games I've always wanted to play. Those are not likely to get translated if they have new text. Example: there's a Tactics Ogre: LUCT sfc hack that adds a ton of classes, changes balance, and redoes some of the story. Looking at screens makes me salivate.

Nips have a lot of interesting hacks out there that are literally never going to be English'd.

>>5123947
>As it is the asian written 'word' is LITERALLY hieroglyphics.

Hieroglyphics were also mostly an abjad (alphabet with no vowels). They used pictures as word delimiters but the essence was the same.
Kitten(cat)goescamping(tent)

Chinese is nothing like that.

>>5140837
>By the way you weebs better enjoy the few remaining years of 2chan because that community is clearly on its last legs.
So is 4chan with all the retarded fucking normalfags infesting it. I barely even come here anymore. What's supposed to be wrong with 2chan nowadays anyway?

>>5155583
>>5156356
speak English ESL

>>5159173
>speak Englais esé
fix'd

>>5158831
>So is 4chan with all the retarded fucking normalfags infesting it.

That's what you get when you make board cultures against the rules and then hire hordes of new janitors every six months to enforce it.

>>5158756
These nip hacks need to be preserved somewhere, and any mobile stuff for that matter. It's all on geocities blogs and that shit is going out of service in spring 2019.

>>5158756
>>5159327
I entirely agree. The FF6-T hack thingie looks pretty damn awesome. Take a look at this shit:
https://poematocx.com/ff6t/

>>5121151
>reading all the romhacking.net drama chain of posts
>thinking to myself that it's probably not that bad
>fast forward today
>watching Macaw45 playing Hiryuu no Ken 3 for the nes
>always liked the series with all the jank and everything
>thinking to myself that would be cool if the series was fan translated with the real cheesy martial arts tokusatsu original plot and not the rewrite that some of the games received here and there.
>or at least the snes version that i have a soft spot even if it was a bad game
>decide to see a playtrough of the Hiryuu no Ken S - Hyper Version on youtube
>search for the name
>second result: Hiryū no Ken Hyper version English translation, Fighting mode hard level
>wut
>Published on Nov 25, 2017
>This English translation patch for the Snes will be releashed at RHDN in 2018
>search the site
>itsnothing.jpg
>go back to the video comments: https://www.mediafire.com/file/9qq3ekl23c9jrqq/Hiryuu_no_Ken_S_-_Hyper_Version_%28Japan%29_%5BT-En_by_Yugisokubodai_v1.0%5D.zip/file

Man fuck this shit, could at least mention the translation without hosting, now i see why all the owners of the site have accounts on fucking resetera of all places. Fucking faggots.

>>5158756
>Example: there's a Tactics Ogre: LUCT sfc hack that adds a ton of classes, changes balance, and redoes some of the story. Looking at screens makes me salivate.

>>5159327

Preservation techniques:

1. Have archive.org save the pages. Put the url into waybackmachine, and if it doesn't have it, you can manually save the page.
2. Save the hacks themselves and collect them.

>>5159357

Oh wow, I dont' get this guy. His webpage is tiny and plain. Then you download the patch and it's a 21 mb file. You open that up and it has an HTML pages listing all the changes.

This nigga too cheap for hosting so he just off-loads it to some download site?

>>5159327
Could we get a preservation thread here, a Discord or a separate anon site for GoodSet, NonGood or something else? ROMShepherd kinda sucks in general, and it sucks that there's only BlueMaxima's Flashpoint Discord for Flash & Unity games.