Translated games?

[Arkhan]

I was always a big fan of the RPGs that cut to anime scenes, because you're usually some little stumpy sprite version of the anime character on the box.

[Aggie Tsubi]

If it was just about the titties, there are other PC-FX hentai titles that could've been translated, but I assume Pia Carrot specifically was done because it's genuinely a nice little dating sim, better than most dating sims, in my opinion. (Heck, better than tons of galge, period, although it's got nothing on, say, Key's games, but those came out a decade later after the genre evolved a lot.) Even if the sexual content was all removed, it'd still be well worth playing (although I would argue that some of the stories wouldn't be as effective, since the sex actually plays a worthwhile role in how they're written).

[16bitgium]

I'd be interested in translating Last imperial prince.... My japanese is far from perfect, but I studied it at Uni for two years and with a dictionary I might be able to pull it off (in a couple of years time ).

But I was wondering if there is a sort of guide on how to go about translating games (in general) and maybe a toolset for how to extract the text from the games? Is there also a faq how to set up GCC for the PCFX and where can you download these?

[NightWolve]

But I was wondering if there is a sort of guide on how to go about translating games (in general) and maybe a toolset for how to extract the text from the games? Is there also a faq how to set up GCC for the PCFX and where can you download these?

A fan translator that I used to work with on Ys games was a "hack" (and a cheat as well as I found later!) that was translation software dependent on Jim Breen's WWWJDIC. Not a "real" translator in other words. Here's the link for that:

http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?9T

Every S-JIS Japanese string had to be converted to Unicode encoding for him and copied/pasted into that "Text Glossing" text box for processing - sometimes that led to "guesslations" on his part. Also, he couldn't handle images until the text was drawn out of them with something like Japanese IME Pad and then processed with WWWJDIC as usual.

So, I think that would give you the dictionary support you need. It doesn't try to form a translation like http://translate.google.com does, it breaks a Japanese sentence down into definitions and you have to understand enough of the result to make sense of it.

As for script extraction and guides, that all depends on the game, finding a good programmer, etc. There's never one magical guide out there that you can use to jump right in. It's a slow process. I hate to share it, but yeah, I guess the best centralized place to get started is www.romhacking.net. There ya go.

[elmer]

I'd be interested in translating Last imperial prince.... My japanese is far from perfect, but I studied it at Uni for two years and with a dictionary I might be able to pull it off (in a couple of years time ).

But I was wondering if there is a sort of guide on how to go about translating games (in general) and maybe a toolset for how to extract the text from the games? Is there also a faq how to set up GCC for the PCFX and where can you download these?

There are 2 basic tasks in translating games ...
[uldecimal][li]Translating each piece of text that you find from Japanese to English.[/li][li]Making the game display your English text.[/li][/ul]
The first task can be handled by anyone with a knowledge of Japanese, and you can probably find a few people here that would help out if you can get the text into an editable file.

The second task is (IMHO) where you'll probably have more trouble.

You MAY find that Last Imperial Prince stores all of it's text as shift-jis encoded strings
... and you MAY find a tool that will scan an ISO image and tell you where potential text strings are
... and you MAY find another tool to replace those strings with your new English ones.

You can probably find some tools like that on romhacking.net (don't know, didn't look).

That's the simplest form of hacking that can be done with off-the-shelf tools, and it's very limited.

The chance that you can replace any reasonably interesting Japanese text with a decent English translation that fits into exactly the same number of double-byte encoded English glyphs is ... remote.

If you're really, really lucky, then the game's text printing code might accept single-byte ascii characters as well as double-byte kanji, but that's not common because the game's original programmer is unlikely to have needed that capability.

If you are that lucky, then fitting twice as many English characters in the same memory space as kanji may give you enough translation space to do a good job, as long as the game will display them.

Anything more complex than that is going to need a competent programmer who is familiar with V810 assembly language (or is willing to learn it), and is interested enough in the project to spend weeks/months of their time digging into the game and trying to figure out what is going on.

Do you have those skills? Do you know someone that does?

P.S.

Notepad++ on Windows can convert text files between shift-jis and unicode for editing.