Cyber Knight translation

[BigusSchmuck]

AWESOME! I hope there will be more translations in the future. 

[megatron-uk]

Thanks Chris.

I'll check the Captain text again, but it should be correct.

Yep, sorry, the extraction was messed up on that list. The NPC list is one of my earlier extractions and was missing several characters.

I've just re-run it and it now shows as the following:

Code: [Select]

0x1cbae クレイン Klein
0x1cbb4 キリ Kiri
0x1cbb8 シャイン Shine
0x1cbbe ヴィンド Vynd
0x1cbc6 ニジ‐ナ Nejena
0x1cbcf MICA
0x1cbd5 キャプテン Captain
0x1cbde パイロット Pilot
0x1cbe7 プロフェッサ‐ Prof.
0x1cbf2 ドクタ‐ Dr.
0x1cbfa エンジニア Engineer
0x1cc07 バックアップメモリ BackupRAM
0x1cc14 きょうじゅ
0x1cc1b だいとうりょう President
0x1cc24 だいとうりょうふじん First Lady
0x1cc31 トレ‐ダ‐ Trader
0x1cc39 ロボット Robot
0x1cc40 シ‐クラン Shi Clan
0x1cc47 ちょうろう
0x1cc4d げんしじん Atom Man
0x1cc55 しゅうちょう
0x1cc5c いわ Rock
0x1cc5f シリコンせいぶつ Silicon Lifeform
0x1cc6b クジラ Whale
0x1cc71 サソリ Scorpion
0x1cc76 かいぞく Pirate
0x1cc7c きかい Machine
0x1cc80 へいし Soldier
0x1cc84 しょうぐん Shogun
0x1cc8b しれいかん Cmmdr
0x1cc91 ガライシアン Garaian
0x1cc9a スラウレ Suraure
0x1cca0 クイ‐ン Queen
0x1cca6 メンタ‐ナ Mentana

The Hiragana きょうじゅ is 'Enjoy' ... but the Kana is キョウジュ which is 'Professor'. All my extractions since the very early ones do both character sets, to help in situations like this. e.g.:

Code: [Select]

{
        "block_range" : "0x1cbad-0x1ccac - Ouji? - professer/teacher in first world school",
        "block_description" : "NPC character names.",
        "string_start" : "0x1cc14",
        "method" : 3,
        "start_bytes" : [],
        "end_bytes" : ["00"],
        "raw_size" : 7,
        "raw" : ["b7", "ae", "b3", "bc", "de", "ad", "00"],
        "raw_text" : "きょうじゅ",
        "alt_text" : "キョウジュ",
        "trans_size" : 0,
        "trans_text" : "Prof."
    }

The alternate extraction now makes sense as its the character who appears in the school to offer you a star map.

[megatron-uk]

Demo movie of the translated ship menu structure:

Here's another clip - a demo of in-game translation from the first level in the game (Far World).

[Arjak]

Wow, this is looking really good! At this rate, you'll be done in no time! It will be great to have another translated PCE game to play.

Keep up the good work!

[Punch]

I loved the legend of the Old Earth... this game has great storytelling!

Keep it up my friend. It is hard to have translation projects on the PCE, hopefully it will change one day.

[megatron-uk]

I loved the legend of the Old Earth... this game has great storytelling!

Keep it up my friend. It is hard to have translation projects on the PCE, hopefully it will change one day.

  you caught that bit, did you? There's a few words in the second part of that phrase I can't quite work out.. so I dropped a placeholder in to remind me to fix it 

[SuperPlay]

Nice to see how you are progressing with this :-) Keep up the great work.

[esteban]

Demo movie of the translated ship menu structure:

Here's another clip - a demo of in-game translation from the first level in the game (Far World).

Again, I have never paid much attention to Cyber Knight until you started this project.

Now, things are looking pretty darn interesting. 

[megatron-uk]

Someone I've been talking with over on Romhacking.net has redumped the English script from the SNES version  - I'm currently working on a programme to match the untranslated PCE and SNES text, so that I can automatically pull in the translated SNES text. I'm getting good results initially, and, as there are hundred of strings to translate, this should speed things up somewhat.

It's 'mapScript.py' which is up on my github repository now.

[NightWolve]

You are the most prolific status updater I have ever seen. Haven't decided if this is a good or a bad thing.

[esteban]

[NightWolve]

That is an impeccable argument, John, I must admit.

[megatron-uk]

The latest commit (https://github.com/megatron-uk/cyberknight-pce) now adds patches which have gone through the mapping script (mapScript.py) 3 times.

At this point well over 50% of the game dialogue has been matched from PC-Engine to the SNES english dump by my mapScript.py - that's a LOT of work that now doesn't need to be done manually.

I'll have to go back over the matches and manually insert control codes, linebreaks etc, as the SNES version is totally different in that regard. But I'll try and do it world by world, so I can play through each in 100% english before moving on.

[megatron-uk]

I've re-dumped the main game dialogue - the SNES text doesn't have anything like the <wait for button press at end of dialogue>, so all of the strings dumped for the SNES english version are much, much shorter than the PCE version. To explain, here's a simplified example:

PCE:
StringA: "Hello, I'm the president<0x08>Welcome to farworld, its our home<0x08>Can you get rid of the monsters?<0x08><0x00>"

SNES:
StringA: "Hello, I'm the president"
StringB: "Welcome to farworld, our home"
StringC: "Can you defeat the monsters?"

Instead of breaking on null bytes (0x00), I've dumped the main text again breaking on the <wait> control byte (0x08) - so that the strings are split and more closely match the SNES. I've re-run that new script through my PCE to SNES mapper and have got a good two-thirds to three-quarters match. That's *hell* of a lot better, and means I won't have to go through many hundreds of strings and match them by hand to the SNES text. It does mean, however that I still need to go through and enter control codes, newlines etc by hand, as the SNES text is formatted for a smaller dialogue window. I'm really please d with the way things are going - however things might slow for a few weeks; our house has finally sold and we're in the middle of starting mortgage proceedings on our new one. I'll try and do bits and pieces (including new screenshots and commits to github) when I get the chance though!

The SNES script has been really useful so far, here's the things that it has enabled me to complete:

All NPC names
All planet names
All item/quest objective names
Missing weapon/enemy names

Those are all 100% complete now.

[megatron-uk]

Got a lot more of the text done for the first world - however an unexpected side affect is that the small expansion of the main text dialogue has pushed back the scrolling intro text and appears to have broken it. So after the cinematic opening the text that appears during the scrolling ("The story of the Swordfish so far...") section is now busted. I think it's been moved past some invisible limit (perhaps an 8k page section?).

This will need looking at, but the in-game text is a priority for me first. I may need some help off an experienced 6502 hacker to try and resolve the loader that displays the scrolling text.