Hi !
> absolutely! I remember last year or so begging people for us to try
>something like this. I only wish we could even take it a step further
>and actually plug in the english text into the game ROM itself. i'm not
>all that great on kanji (i only know about 350 or so) but my kana
>excellent. i personally think with the resources of this list we can
>pull off a Xanadu type game. MY personal preference would be Tengai
>Makyou II & III which are, undoubtedly, the most underrated and
>underappreciated Duo games IMHO. can you imagine playing a japanese game
>with english subtitles on the duo? hell, that would light such a fire in
>the turbo community! anyway, i'll volunteer to help any game everybody
>would like to see.
Thanks for the offer.
My katakana and hiragana skills are fine too - but my japanese language
skills and vocabulary are weak. I'm probably about the same as you with
kanji (a few hundred), and kanji that I don't already know get pretty
tedious when looking them up in the dictionary. Happily, I have a Seiko
SR900 IC dictionary which helps a bit.
I agree that those games you mentioned would be amazing, but they are also
the hardest to translate for a couple of reasons:
(1) they use compressed text - even finding the text would be a supreme effort
(2) they have among the largest amounts of text of any PC Engine games
I was looking more at some games which would be simpler to translate... but
I'm not restricting myself to ROM games - CDROM games are also fair game now.
Speaking of which:
I already looked at Neo Nectaris. Nectaris is included in here, and looks
to be BY FAR the bulk of the translation effort. If the translation
focused only on the Neo side, there is very little text, and it's easily
found. But, in this case... the size and placement of the text on screen
is a difficult issue.
I'm sure we could work our way up to something like Startling Odyssey 2...
but for the moment, I'd prefer to select candidates at a lower difficulty
level, for a few reasons:
(1) it gets more games translated faster
(2) it generates excitement in performing translations
(3) it gives an opportunity to write translation utilities (which will be
necessary for the more difficult translations) without delaying the
translation.
By the way, a fellow who calls himself 'NightWolv' already has an
impressive start on Xak III, and I feel that he has a very good chance of
completing it fully soon. Plus, the tools that he wrote/is writing look
very helpful for translations.
http://home.earthlink.net/~nlivaditis/xakiii/index.html
He mentioned that some games are better candidates than others, because of
the way that they were programmed. For example, on the PC-Engine, most
games use the CDROM system card built-in functions to print 2-byte SJIS
codes. But they won't print standard ASCII, so you need to use the 2-byte
SJIS codes for wide roman characters. And the english text would take more
space than the Japanese, so pointers need to be adjusted.... and so
on. But some games use their own print functions, and ASCII codes can be
used easily. I expect that PC-98 translations would be more likely to
write their own print routines in this case.
And I may have some information from a couple of started translations that
didn't get much progress - Bubblegum Crash (or was it Burning Angel ? I
don't recall), and Maison Ikkoku.
Oh, and actually... PC-FX games might even be easier to translate, because
space issues (within the CDROM itself) are not likely to be problems. It
accepts 1- or 2-byte codes equally, at least on my test on Lunatic Dawn
(unlike the PC Engine, which separates SJIS from regular ASCII, except for
certain 'custom' games).
I'd wager that 'digital comic' games would be really simple to translate on
the PC-FX, in the technical sense. Since they have lots of text, that
obviously makes them harder in the "total translation effort" sense. But
I'd be keen on extracting the script from, say, Tenchi Muyo... then handing
it to a translator, and merging it back in later.
The only problem with PC-FX games is all that full-motion video that makes
the data track huge. Searching for text becomes much more difficult.
- Dave
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