Dragon Slayer 2 and Blood Gear Translations

[wyndcrosser]

So, I've been messing around with PCE CD translations.

I was able to identify specific areas of the game text using WINDHEX and a SHIFT-JIS table. However, not all the Kanji are showing up, so that's odd.

For Dragon Slayer 2, I identified the text for the action menu (Spells, Items, Save, etc.). Now, when I try to use 16font such as 53=S 50=P and L=4C, the menu goes bananas, and nothing works But the world SPL show up (and that menu works), however if I only replace the kanji letters with 32font, everything works fine 8272 = S and 826F = P. Now, my question is why. Does the PC Engine not read single 8font (i.e. 53-S) as only taking up one area? being a smaller letter size like the Wii does?

i.e. whether I use a 16 or 32 octet, the area is the same, like the 53=S and the 8272=S take up the same room. The Wii console doesn't do this....

[wyndcrosser]

changed the topic

[lukester]

Good luck with the progress!

Blood Gear is definitely a game that interests me.

[whisper2053]

Good to see you're still cracking away over there Wyndy! I'm greatly looking forward to seeing some of these finally finished and playable by us non-moon-speaky folk

[wyndcrosser]

any help or areas, I'm thinking that it's going to require ASM hacking and I'm not that good yet.

[Bonknuts]

Not sure what you mean by 16font and 32font. The system card has three font sizes; 12x12 (the most common used for Japanese games), 16x16, and 8x8. It's pretty rare for a CD game to use its own font size and set (since this takes up precious cdram space), but there are a few (Xak III being one of them IIRC). Some US games use the 16x16 font of the system card, but scale each character to 8x16 before uploading it to the screen. It's a decent approach, if you can't find enough free space in cd-ram for your own font.

 I personally like the 6x12 font. Since most games use 12x12, it breaks very little of the original font routine. It looks pretty decent too.

 Blood Gear, I can almost guarantee that the SJIS script is compressed via LZSS (probably identical to LOX, Ys4, Emerald Dragon. Though the 4bit length operand might be setup slightly different location; just a slight difference in operand syntax). Not sure about Dragon Slayer 2, but I would assume it's LZSS as well. Some games also have another small layer of compression on top of that. Since SJIS is 2bytes, some games will represent simplier hiragana characeters as single bytes, with a look up table to translate those single byte values back into 2 byte SJIS for 'get_font' bios call. LOX did this.

 If you get fair enough along, I can help out with font routines (and single byte ascii support as well). I just don't want to do this prematurely, as I've done this for about 4-5 games for people and nothing came of it.

 As far as LZSS, I would contact David Shadoff. Last I remembered, he had a few LZSS tools for PCE games. Sometimes LZSS is nice, because text is in huge blocks and you have direct access to it. But, you'll still need to figure out the pointer system as some point (no pun intended). The only downside to LZSS stuff, is that they almost always never have headers to the compressed block - which makes locating them a bit more of a pain. Though I'm sure there are some ways to semi-identify them, but you'll have to write that search/logic in some higher level langauge yourself (perl, java, C++, etc)

 Edit: If you're looking for a game to work on, Magicoal script is uncompressed SJIS. That might be an easier first time PCECD project.

Edit: Fixed my acronyms.

[roflmao]

I would wholeheartedly support a Magicoal port.  Still stuck fairly early on in that one...