GuyveR800:
Since I've never done this before, I thought I'd start with something that's been done - more english context to work with. Also, I thought the existing translation was... not good I'm translating Runemaster II. I've tried Oasis' translations, and actually, II was the only one I couldn't get to patch, for some reason. And when I played III, I found that not only was the game in English, but most enemies had 0 HP and gave me lots and lots of gold. Translating is fine... breaking the game is not Since Runemaster II was my favorite, I thought I'd give it a go.

nyyrikki:
I'd be very interested in using SUPER-X, but w/o a manual, I'm at a bit of a loss...

Here are some tips to get started:

Load: BLOAD"SUPER-X.LDR",R
Start debugger: CALL @
Get command summary: GRAPH+SPACE

Some typical commands:

Monitor address #4000 in slot 3-2
I4000#3-2

Look/edit data in HEX format at address #0 in default slot
D0
(or to move back to default slot D0#S)

Load command2.com to VRAM address #100
L#COMMAND2.COM,100#4

Disassembler #c000 - #D000
SDC000,D000,MYPROG.GEN

I bet that you can get started quite easyly. When you need more info, that command summary gives you, you can try to use Babelfish or Excite (Much better) to translate sentences from the manual.

~NYYRIKKI

Quote:

And when I played III, I found that not only was the game in English, but most enemies had 0 HP and gave me lots and lots of gold. Translating is fine... breaking the game is not

I've noticed a lot of the english patched games online are severely corrupted!
Unfortunately Oasis' patches were suicide, so finding a correctly patched disk in good condition is the only way to get a good diskimage.

The translators of those games mostly used cracked versions of the games, instead of the originals (understandably, in a way)....

the result however was a patch that only worked with the crack used by the translators, mostly not even on the original version

Sometimes exist even different versions of the original non-cracked game, so releasing a patch 100% working is a hard task really.

Quote:

The translators of those games mostly used cracked versions of the games, instead of the originals (understandably, in a way).... the result however was a patch that only worked with the crack used by the translators, mostly not even on the original version

Applying the XAK2 translation on a (copy of) the original resulted in a badly fux0red up disk.

Quote:

Sometimes exist even different versions of the original non-cracked game, so releasing a patch 100% working is a hard task really.

Well, the point is that - legally speaking - those patches should only work on the original disks, and not on cracks.

Indeed... Only the problem is the patches are made on cracks because originals are/were not that easy to obtain and making a backup copy of original disks sometimes results in a non-working disk because of copy protections.

The fixes I made on the SD-Snatcher translation (and the new patch disk made for that) were based on a crack, but I managed to get a correct translation on copies of the original disks as well.

How hard is it actually to get the texts from a game and alter them? Cannot be that hard, can it? I mean, some of you guys are MSX asm guru's, so i'd be rather disappointed if you couldn't get this kinda job done

Maybe it's possible to create some text substractions for popular gamez, put them into a public forum (like this one ) and let people translate. Then we would get a nice translated game collection Or am I thinking way too simple?

Sometimes it's not JUST a matter of changing the texts. There's also the issue of routines that may need altering (or sometimes a rewrite) to display texts correctly. When (for example) the JIS ROM is used for fonts which would be nice squares on an MSX without JIS ROM the text display routine would need to be rewritten, or there is no alphabet in the font range, meaning letter shapes would need to be made first. And since there are cases graphics (including font shapes) are stored in a compressed way the whole thing needs to be decompressed, changed and recompressed. And there are cases input routines need to be changed or rewritten to complete such a translation.

For the Final Fantasy translation I was working on, the main problem was not only text-size, but also the windowing system only allows 3 lines of text to be spoken by any person. This is enough for japanese text, but even when shortening the english texts you would still often need 6 lines or more.
Thus, the entire text display subsystem must be reprogrammed! This would not be a terribly difficult thing if it weren't for the fact that you have no idea of where these routines are located in memory and on disk!

I remember I patched my original Xak Tower Of Gazzle with an OASIS translation patch.....Fortunately, it worked.....Still, it was quite a stupid move from me, I think.......Risk was high......

I'd never suggest patching original disks anyway. Us non-japanese paid a too high price for the title to even risk such things.

Oasis fans sometimes do crazy things, don't they

GuyveR800:

I had the same problem when translating Randar 3. I had to reprogram some routines for correct text displaying. I found them by using the brmsx built-in debugger. You only have to stop the execution of the game (pressing F10) and trace step-by-step (keys F7 and F8, just as the Borland debugger). It's a piece of cake to find these routines in RAM.

Once you have located them on RAM you only have to look for the opcodes with a HEX editor for locating them on disk.