Samurai Shodown (Spirit) RPG translation (French to English)

[Apocalypse]

So after a brief discussion with some members in the chat, it seems that there isn't any English translation of SS RPG available yet.
Luckily it does exist a French translation made by LeNobleBahamut. Translation isn't an issue for me as I'm a native French speaker with academic level.
The technical part is a bit harder. First I've noticed that LNB has modified the tileset from 8*16 to 8*8 to save space (as you need much more characters in French than in Japanese).
The drawback is tiles are stored in an unconventional order, lines being paired.
Order is: 2nd character of first line, then 2nd character of second line, 1st character of first line, 1st character of second line, and so on (3rd and 4th characters, etc.)
I've made a small tool to decode the text but there are few issues:
- Until you get all the pointers you can't know where a line starts or ends without playing the game (which is not really convenient as I don't have any "cheat codes" to jump wherever I want in the game)
- Some characters have several different tiles (e.g. in the introduction the B character have at least 2 different tiles). I don't know if it's intentional.
Any help or ideas would be much appreciated. I've got all the knowledge and experience needed to discuss it at a highly technical level.

 

[lolifoxgirl]

Bravo, apocalypse.

 

[Hellfromabove]

Cool

 

[Wyeth]

I have been looking for the English translation of this, but it seems while it was started...it never came to fruition. So this would be great, I just can't enjoy a RPG that is in japanese unfortunately. Keep us posted.

 

[Apocalypse]

Ok I gave it a try with the shitty tools I've made.
I can edit and modify tiles (I've used it to create tiles for J/Q/Y/Z/? as I didn't find these characters in the French introduction text), extract and re-inject text but I don't know where to find the text pointers.
Here is a movie I made of the modified intro using CamStudio for capture and Nebula for emulation:
http://sendvid.com/h73dnav8

 

[lolifoxgirl]

If you can boil some of this down to busy work I can help you.

 

[wyndcrosser]

Nice job.

 

[Apocalypse]

Thanks for your support.
So now I would like to translate the in-game texts however I'm facing a new issue with Nebula: I got stuck on the loading screen just after starting a new game.
Anyone has ever managed to play SS RPG in Nebula from the ISO?
Also it doesn't play music although I use a CUE file and audio files are in WAV.

 

[wyndcrosser]

When I did the "hack" to english for SSRPG, I burnt a lot of CD-R's. I spoke to LB who helped out a little with finding the files etc. I haven't had time to go through my notes. I have a lot of projects that I start, but can't finish, so I move to another one. I hope to finish a lot of them soon.

 

[Apocalypse]

The issue was Nebula actually.
I've switched to NeoRaine and now everything works fine (both music and game).

When I did the "hack" to english for SSRPG, I burnt a lot of CD-R's. I spoke to LB who helped out a little with finding the files etc. I haven't had time to go through my notes. I have a lot of projects that I start, but can't finish, so I move to another one. I hope to finish a lot of them soon.

What do you mean by English "hack"?
LNB is unreachable...

 

[wyndcrosser]

I talked to LNB on the french forums. It literally took me about a year for him to finally respond to my PM. I tried doing some of the hacking to it, I believe I modified the main screen options and a few item files once I figured out how to do it. He uses the same type of hacking for all his releases (Star Ocean for the GBC for example)

 

[Apocalypse]

Do you have some information that could be useful for me?
What did stop you from completing it?
I'm working on the characters presentations now and it's a complete mess... Tiles aren't ordered in a logical order (which isn't an issue if you have the pointers table). Maybe it's intentional, now that I'm more into the subject I understand why there isn't any SS RPG translation in any other language.
If LNB would have released his pointers table it would have been a breeze to have the job done.

 

[GoodTofuFriday]

Without knowing ngcd games in particular, I would start with making sure you use the same amount of characters per text box as the french version. spaces included.

 

[Apocalypse]

Without knowing ngcd games in particular, I would start with making sure you use the same amount of characters per text box as the french version. spaces included.

What you say isn't valid for SS RPG as it uses "independent" tiles instead of a tileset. So the maximum number of characters per text box is the size of the text box in pixels divided by the size of each tile.
Ex: If the text box is 80 pixels wide and 32 pixels in height and your tiles are 8*8 then you can display 4 lines (32/8) of 10 (80/8) characters.
It's in fact a bit more complicated cause during the intro characters are made of unique 8*8 tiles and in game it's 2x 8*8 tiles.

 

[GoodTofuFriday]

What you say isn't valid for SS RPG as it uses "independent" tiles instead of a tileset. So the maximum number of characters per text box is the size of the text box in pixels divided by the size of each tile.
Ex: If the text box is 80 pixels wide and 32 pixels in height and your tiles are 8*8 then you can display 4 lines (32/8) of 10 (80/8) characters.
It's in fact a bit more complicated cause during the intro characters are made of unique 8*8 tiles and in game it's 2x 8*8 tiles.

That makes things pretty complicated for translation/interpretation. jeez

 

[Apocalypse]

Now you understand why you're still waiting for an English translation...

 

[GohanX]

Only now, at the end, do you realize the power of the darkside.

 

[lolifoxgirl]

Need a dark sacrifice, to draw forth a demon to make us hacking tools.

 

[GoodTofuFriday]

Now you understand why you're still waiting for an English translation...

Might be easier to give everyone french lessons lol

 

[xsq]

damn it.

 

[Apocalypse]

I've edited the tiles and made the translation of the introduction:

http://sendvid.com/5wpl19s2

 

[lolifoxgirl]

Looking good apocalypse. Youre hard work is appreciated.

 

[Apocalypse]

Looking good apocalypse. Youre hard work is appreciated.

Thanks.
Now I understand why things are so strange with that game: Japanese characters are 16 * 16 pixels or LNB has used 8*16 for French characters but without changing the display function. Therefore each time he calls a character (or what is considered a character by the game) it displays 2 letters instead of 1 so he had to create all possible couples of letters in the game... (e.g. "Bonjour la France" would be made of "characters" Bo/nj/ou/r /la/ F/ra/nc/e ).
I've made a new script to extract in-game texts tiles but still I have to validate them one by one (developing a function to recognise letters based on the pixels colours would take ages) and another one to extract in-game texts.
It would be good to have a simple tileset made of all uppercase and lowercase letters plus numbers 0 to 9 and few other characters (exclamation mark, full stop,etc.) and then modifying the display function. However each tile address is 4 bytes so it won't fit easily unless you store them in a specific location and then only code them on 2 bytes and add automatically an offset.
Once all tiles and texts would have been extracted and translated I could make a script to count how many different pairs of letters exist in the English translated version of the game. If it's less or equal than the French version then I would simply re-inject new tiles and texts. If not back to previous remark.

 

[lolifoxgirl]

I am glad you are the one doing this. Sounds like you are all over it!

 

[Xian Xi]

You should accept PayPal donations for your hard work.