You're welcome! It's actually the biggest project counting team members I ever worked on and it took some of the greatest known talents to make it possible!
Neill Corlett - Advanced SNES hacker/reverse engineer/reprogrammer for Seiken Densetsu 3, Bahamut Lagoon, Magic Knight Rayearth, etc. Known for so many impressive things, only that link that lists most would do it justice! We dumped the Ys IV Japanese script together with some basic info on my part and thanks to his early work on the project before I came along such as the LZSS decompression code.
David Shadoff - Senior PhD-level Software Engineer from Canada that helped me by reversing Neill's LZSS "C" decompression code for Ys IV after Neill left the project to me and he also helped me hack the 8x16 font. He's a high-priced IT consultant these days that makes a great living, a rare talent I was lucky enough to get for free!
2 Translators - Shimarisu and B.J.DeuceBag, although, as many know, DeuceBag worked out being a criminal monster of epic proportions that cheated me out of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in commercializing 4 scripts from our fan projects with
X.X.XSEED Games, and pocketing 100% payment/credit, then playing stupid/silent for some 3 years about it! He commercially profited from thousands of my free fan work hours for Japanese script extraction/preparation and my 100% legal translation software... He's a stain on the project, but he is responsible for finishing 200 strings that Shimarisu didn't and he found a transcription of the Ys IV voice-acting by a famous Japanese fan, Sugimo, which he also translated via WWWJDIC to eventually dub or subtitle the game.
2 Dubbing Directors - Justus Johnston and BurntLasagna, I began the dubbing attempt with Justus, but he only got so far. We owe him the dubbing of the opening which was fantastically done and recruiting the voice actor for Dogi. Burnt I met in 2012, and we finished it off, so add in all the voice actors that were recruited too like ParanoiaDragon known for homebrew work (Mysterious Song), SkyeWelse who has done many notable things and projects over the years, etc.!
Other Special Thanks: D-BOY for the image software to help with the insertion of a new 8x16 font and then you list all the people for testing, advice, etc. over the years, yeah, basically, it wasn't the usual 1 programmer + 1 translator standard of most fan translation projects! Serious and widely known talent came together for this one, issues with some notwithstanding!
Anyway, I ran into an awesome interview collection with the staff (both Hudson & Falcom) of Ys IV if anyone is interested!
"Ys IV Developer Interview Collection"
http://shmuplations.com/ysiv/
The Ys IV development team, with series director
Masayuki Katou (upper right) and arranger Ryo Yonemitsu (lower left) .
Some Highlights:
This fourth installment of Ys was produced in a very unusual way, wasn’t it? Normally the Ys games are ported to other systems by other companies, but this time you could almost say there wasn’t an “original” to begin with.
Katou: Yeah, that’s very true. We at Falcom couldn’t seem to get a plan for Ys IV off the ground by ourselves, and at that time Hudson approached us and said they’d like to do a sequel. We talked about a game where we would make the story and music, and Hudson would do the system and gameplay.
—What do the other staff at Nihon Falcom think of Ys IV?
Katou: They wanted to make it all themselves, but with the current workload, it just wasn’t going to be possible. Many of the staff at Nihon Falcom love Ys, so naturally they want to do it. However, we don’t understand today’s PC market very well. It seems to have moved from the PC-8801 to the PC-9801. I’m wondering if PC-9801 users are interested in an Ys game. Our current PC game, Eiyuu Densetsu III, is also geared more towards adults. In that sense I think releasing Ys IV for the PC Engine was the right choice.
Pretty long one with music arranger Ryo Yonemitsu too, one of THE best of the best in the videogame music business!
