It would probably require someone highly efficient in Hu6280 with access to the original programmers' documentation (or WAY too much free time for disassembly).
Hahaha ... yep, how else do you think that we've come this far!
Even with the documentation (which is all out there), it all still requires hours/days/weeks of disassembling and understanding what the game is doing in order to actually change things without breaking everything.
It's a
much more time-intensive process than actually writing the darned thing in the 1st-place.
So, yeah, practically impossible even if not technically so on the base PCE.
It's basically a resource-management issue for every single different camera-cut of every single cinematic, boss-fight, and voice-over in the game.
For every one, you have to ask ...
[ul][li]Do you have enough VRAM left to display the subtitle sprites?[/li][li]Are there enough unused sprite SAT entries left to display them?[/li][li]Is there a place on the screen that the subtitles can go?[/li][li]Is there enough RAM left to add all the new code/graphics to do it?[/li][/ul]
And then, for every single one you've got to figure out
how in the flow of the code, all of those resources could be put together to hack in the end-result that you want, including actually getting the subtitles to change and sync up with the existing audio.
You've also got to figure out whether what can be
technically achieved would actually be
visually pleasing, and worthy of the game.
Finally ... subtitles in this kind of a game are, IMHO, actually more of an intrusion than a dub.
You're changing the look of each screen, and distracting the the player from what it is that the original creators actually wanted you to pay attention to in the cutscenes.
Don't forget too, that
if the game had been localized back-in-the-day, they'd definitely have recorded a new set of English-speaking actors for a US release.
*******************
So, after all of that ... I think that there
may actually be a way to
technically get subtitles displaying on a regular PCE in all of the Xanadu 1 cutscenes and boss fights that I've looked at so far.
But, and this is the killer, I don't think that there are enough free resources to make them look good (in my opinion), and the amount of work required to even seriously test out the practicalities is pretty immense.
I wouldn't want to display the subtitles over the top of existing graphics, that's too intrusive (IMHO), and doing so would kill the possibility of doing fully anti-aliased subtitles, which are the only kind (IMHO) that would look good-enough-to-use here.
Putting subtitles
below the main screen would actually bump it up off-center, and make it look too high whenever the subtitles are not displayed.
Although the visual cutscenes are displayed in a letterboxed format, the boss fights are
not.
Seriously ... the more that I look into this, and the consequences of trying to do it, the more that I come to firmly believe that the dub is the proper way to go. As much fun as it's been to figure out the technical puzzle of "Am I smart enough to do it?", that doesn't mean that it
should be done.
Even if you don't have faith that SamIAm and the fans here and elsewhere can put together a good English dub (and I really do have that faith), then with a dub, it could always be professionally re-done at any time if there was the funding to do so.
I know, and I'm sure that some other folks here know, a couple of companies that would be happy to take on the work, if it were a commercial "paying" job, and if it had the legal go-ahead from Falcom.
