Snatcher Pc Engine Scd Translation

[turbofan]

I have been following this pretty closely the past few months. The same guys that are doing the Policenaughts translation for the Ps1 are attempting to translate Snatcher for the Pc Engine - http://forums.junkerhq.net/viewtopic.php?t=1389. NightWolve I think this is where your boy GillanSeed has been spending his time at. Anyways i guess they dumped the script from the Sega Cd version to use for the Pc Engine version. Since you no more about this than most other people do, do you think it can be done?

[NightWolve]

In this case, you need the best man for the job and that would be none other than Tomaitheous. He succeeded in accomplishing what eluded everyone that wanted to translate PC Engine games back in the day and present. That is, altering the font print routine to go from this:



to this:



and even this, variable width style:



Personally, I must comment that I'm truly amazed that I have been around long enough to have seen the day where a variable width font would be implemented on a PC Engine game via hacking. That is a noteworthy accomplishment that I don't think has been given the praise it deserves.

But yeah, basically, if you don't have someone with his talent, 99% of the time, you're stuck with this:



Reference, where he hangs out at: MagicEngine Forums.

His home page: www.pcedev.net.

His Email:

Voila. All set.

What I would do is put him in touch with this group and see what happens. I recall Dave told me he can, in many cases, reuse his variable-width font hack on other CD-ROM tiles if he believes the work will be put to worthwhile use by a group that is serious about carrying out the project to the end (In other words, he would prefer not to waste his time with potential quitters).

EDIT: Hah, I'm getting old. I could've sworn he had posted here before, but under a different username. He's our very own malducci. Duh. He hasn't been around here since April 1st, though.

[turbofan]

Aheh,I don`t no the first thing about hacking A Pc Engine game.I had`nt dropped by in A while,so i just wanted to get you opinion on it.I think Tomaitheous spends most of his time in the pc engine fx forums.I think him and Dave Shadoff are working on two,three different games.I no one is Dead Of Brain,I couldn't tell you what the other ones are.Who no`s.maybe he`ll see this and comment on it.But im not going to go out of my way to contact him  .

[NightWolve]

Who no`s.maybe he`ll see this and comment on it.But im not going to go out of my way to contact him  .

Tsk. Such laziness with what would merely involve firing off an email disappoints me... Some "turbo fan" you are... Got overwhelmed at the thought of taking some initiative to get things rolling on this, huh?? Heh.

[malducci]

*Poof*

 Ehh!? huh!? wha!?

>_>...<_<...

 Heh. I was contacted by someone from their team(??) about this a few months back. I answered a few questions they had, but that was the extent of it. They didn't ask for any other help though, but if they need someone to handle the hacking side of things or just some help in general - I'm game. I should send them an email to see how things are going. I'd love to the PCE port in english

 Been busy with documenting compression schemes for PCE/CD games. Just finished Downtown Nekketsu, Bonks Adventure, Seiya Monongatari, Gate of Thunder (have a WIP extractor). LOX 2 is probably next. Btw, Cosmic Fantasy 1 is getting a vwf text routine as well.  Dave's been doing some research on it - no translator yet, but it'll be prep'd and ready for when the time comes.

-Rich

[NightWolve]

Hey, welcome back Rich. See, firing off an email wasn't that hard, turbofan...

Heh. I was contacted by someone from their team(??) about this a few months back. I answered a few questions they had, but that was the extent of it. They didn't ask for any other help though, but if they need someone to handle the hacking side of things or just some help in general - I'm game.

Unless they got lucky and found there's a built-in 8x16 font, which is highly doubtful, it's not gonna happen without a font hack like yours. Xak III was the only game I ever found that was 100% ready for localization with its 8x16 English font. No advanced hacking was required. Ys IV on the other hand was 50%. Getting that to work was based on luck in that Dave and I managed to reuse the extra space they had allocated for the bolded uppercase tiles. We overwrote that area with lowercase regular tiles, modified the font routine, and switched the menus to use the regular font, etc. Hudson left something workable behind that we could deal with, basically. Anyway, all rare cases, these. I'm sure this game is the usual, being stuck with 16x16 deal.

I dunno, did this group seem serious to you? Well, it'd be nice to see if this gets anywhere, I suppose. Not entirely necessary though in that I prefer something we don't have as opposed to something that I can try with a Sega CD emulator that is already available and professionally translated. Yeah, Seiya Monongatari sure would be something, right along with LOX II.

Anyway, great work. You have power over the PC Engine I once sought but failed to obtain. You have tamed a beast that I could not. This makes me jealous...

EDIT: Oh, happy b-day. I clicked your profile to check something and saw that the forum software had added a b-day cake image to it. Heh.

[turbofan]

Hey malducci lives,or is it Tomaitheous?.Yeah i would be interested to see if the get anywhere`s on it.Maybe you could lend A helping hand nightwolve.Get you back into the Pc Engine translation scene again.

[NightWolve]

http://forums.junkerhq.net/viewtopic.php?t=1389

Post Date: Wed May 02, 2007 4:29 pm

At this time, we are looking for a person, or persons, with sufficient free time to work on the technical aspects of the project. This would involve extracting the text from the PC Engine version, reinserting the translated text back into the game and making necessary code changes, and graphics adjustment. The Sega CD text has already been extracted. Contact can be made through the email address in my profile.

[SkyeWelse]

Wow, cool project. I'm excited to try it out when the patch is ready, though I still need to finish Snatcher for Sega CD sometime. College classes end in another week or so, so maybe I can find some game time in the two weeks of what is left of Summer vacation.

Malducci, you mentioned that you were finishing up a "translated version" of Downtown Nekketsu? Or did I mistake what you said with something I'm just assuming... That is the PC-Engine version of River City Ransom isn't it? That would be all kinds of badass mixed with a dash of nostalgia. Do you all have a project website that I could refer to sometime?

Sorry for all the questions and good luck with your projects.

-SkyeWelse

[malducci]

http://forums.junkerhq.net/viewtopic.php?t=1389

Post Date: Wed May 02, 2007 4:29 pm

At this time, we are looking for a person, or persons, with sufficient free time to work on the technical aspects of the project. This would involve extracting the text from the PC Engine version, reinserting the translated text back into the game and making necessary code changes, and graphics adjustment. The Sega CD text has already been extracted. Contact can be made through the email address in my profile.

Heh - they want someone to handle *all* the hacking side of things? Between Dave and I, and my own personal projects, I have enough on our plate as it is for a game that's already has a translation (even if it is on a different platform). I'd help with the text routine,  but otherwise I'm too busy at the moment to take on a whole project.


SkyeWelse: No, I'm not working on the translation of Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari. Someone mentioned that they were looking at do it as a project, but couldn't find the font. I took a look at it, found the font, and wrote a doc explaining the compression used for the font (LZSS). Other than the font, it should be an easy project since that game already uses an 8x8 font (old NES style as tilemap chars - no vwf for that game).


Anyway, I wish I could jump start the PCE CD translation scene. Everything seems to be focused on SNES at the moment (as it has been in the past) :/

[SkyeWelse]

Anyway, I wish I could jump start the PCE CD translation scene. Everything seems to be focused on SNES at the moment (as it has been in the past) :/

That's true. SNES pretty much takes the cake as far as rom translations go. Matter of fact, other than Plight of the Fan Translator, Frozen Utopia and the site for the Snatcher PCE project, I've not seen any others save for some occasional discussion on the Magic Engine forums. Jump-starting the PCE CD translation scene would be a fun challenge though. Perhaps what is needed is a site with a generalized name like... "The PC-Engine Translation Scene" heh, that has a community or message board like the Pantheon over at AGTP Translations that links all of the known PCE projects together and keeps it active. I think the problem is that since there are not a great deal of people who know how to hack PC-Engine games, perhaps there is less interest in working on PCE projects. If a site came together to showcase current dev projects, possible or "preferred" projects to be worked on in the future, (with screenshots) tools and guides for how to really get in there and start learning how the process is done, more interest is almost certain to come about.

I'd certainly be interested in helping set something like that up and I'm sure others here would gladly do the same. Besides if the information on how to learn how to romhack and translate PC-Engine games was set up in a resource guide format, I'd certainly want to take on a PC-Engine translation project of my own one of these days. If anything I'd certainly give it a try if it meant that there was a chance to one day see a translated version of Xak I & II for PCE.

Anyhow I think it could be done and if you all decide to give something like that a try I'll definitely sign up for a piece of that action.

-SkyeWelse

[turbofan]

If you look hard enough,I think in total there has been like fourteen games translated.Eight hucard games,and six cd games.If you head over to the Magic Engine boards,Dave shadoff was looking for people to beta test Maison Ikkoku.The Pc Engine community has been pretty dull the past couple of years.Only thing that ever goes on is A bunch of bickering and arguing to what the system can and cannot do compared to other systems of its time.

[SkyeWelse]

All the more reason to have a site that encompasses all of that information, which games have been worked on in the past, which projects have been completed, et cetera. I wouldn't mind knowing the full list of completed projects simply out of curiosity. I think part of what keeps the scene from getting off the ground again since the days of Rigg (which sadly I was not around at the time to be active in) is that the information of PC-Engine games, projects and overall interest are too far spread out and spread too thin. Having a site that ties most or all of that information together would give people who are interested in starting, continuing or even just reading about said projects a good resource to use and a wealth of information at their disposal. I hope that this idea sparks some interest because I'd be really psyched to help out with it... but unfortunately I don't think I have time enough as it is now to head the development of such a site/community.

However I would always be interested in assisting or working with someone who is also interested in putting something like that together, and I do have vbulletin forum space (even if it is an older version) that is open for projects such as this over at MiraiGamer.net forums. The entire idea of that MG forums is so that interesting gaming projects can get started off the ground and most of the forums that are there now act pretty independently of each other as individual communities anyway.

Just food for thought with a dash of random babbling to myself...

-SkyeWelse

[Dave Shadoff]

Well, there is information out there, but there aren't too many people who know how to do these translations.

Worse, it seems that you're looking for one of these people to create a nice beautiful website to showcase their knowledge for other people to consume.  Well, the people who do know this stuff basically aren't the webpage-building type.  However, you can log into EfNet on IRC, on the channel #utopiasoft, and hang out... you'll pick up some knowledge.  And if you can make the webpage to showcase all that knowledge, I'll give you a cookie.  Secretly, you'll be learning (just like "wax on, wax off" in Karate kid).

We started to put together a wiki with some partial, yet severly technical information here:
http://nfggames.com/hack/doku.php

Some people might understand some of those notes - but these are not completed works.  They are, however, games which we have a few hints about, and could help somebody learn-by-doing.

- Dave

[SkyeWelse]

Well, I'm not sure exactly how beautiful I can make the website if I tried to do it, but if it came down to it, I'd probably at least give it a go if no one else out there was interested in designing it. Thing is, I've pretty much already got my work cut out for me with the one website I'm working on called XyZ and I'm finding that with my higher level college classes that I've had less and less time to work on it. But we'll see. I've got about two weeks off until my next set of classes begin. Maybe I can at least brainstorm some ideas and designs. I do have server space to at least get something like that off the ground, but maintained and constantly updated... that's a another story entirely.

Thanks for sharing some of those links by the way. I'd like to look into some of those in further detail when I can grab an opportunity.

-SkyeWelse

[Dave Shadoff]

Excuse me if I exagerrated; iit's not a question of beauty - it's more a question of centralizing things as you previously lamented.  Many of those SNES hackers have spent an inordinate amount of time building a website to showcase their works... only to delay their projects.

I'm more interested in just progressing on the projects (because my spare time is extremely limited), so I'd prefer to leave the webpage stuff to somebody else.  But I'd support it.

[babyima]

I ain't no professional about webpages, but I have built one in the past...

http://www.boomspeed.com/babs6658/

I did that one from scratch. Babs did the art, I have no patience, nor the ability to do the art work sadly. But I have tried though.  Yes, it hasn't been updated since christmas since I was basically was coding about 96% of the site and constance backing changes for the seasons. After a years work of constant coding, my fingers finally gave in.

In all, if you need help about webpages, I can offer some services. (Yes my grammer and spelling does reaeK!) Like I said, I am not a professional at HTML'ing, but I do know some things about it.

[SkyeWelse]

Well I'm going to try and see if I can at least get a webpage concept started for the idea. Turbofan offered to help me find some information that might help get the process started, so that's good to know since I'm probably the last person to even know where to start when trying to put together a PC-Engine related site. Even though I love the system and I love many of the games on the system, I really don't know all that much about it, so putting something like this together would be a learning process.

But graphics I can do and a general layout I can do. I just need to find some time to brainstorm it some and bring it all together.

First there needs to be a name for the site and right now I'm thinking that to make it apparent as to what the site's main focus would be about, something along the lines of: Turbo Grafx/PC-Engine-Scene or at least something that had both names of the system Japanese and English. The reason for that being that I've discovered that many of my friends who once enjoyed playing Turbo Grafx games have absolutely no idea what I'm referring to when I mention the PC-Engine. The site itself can explain briefly about the system and what the intentions of the site would focus on as well as a generous link to the wikipedia article on the system. From there I can start adding some sections and content slowly. This could work... maybe...

Any other suggestions of names for the site?

-SkyeWelse