The Official Emerald Dragon Translation Project

[Bonknuts]

Wow! This sounds like a done deal then. I expect to be playing some translated Emerald Dragon by summer's end

[esteban]

Damn. Yes. Indeed.

[NightWolve]

That was my suggestion as well. 6x12 works great for text-heavy games with limited screen real estate. Kil's Langrisser IV translation made use of a 6x12 font I designed. The narrower tiles leave less space around glyphs such as i, l, and j, and also around punctuation marks. It helps to mask one of the more negative effects of monospaced fonts.

This is Derrick BTW (once went by D-BOY) and yes, he shrunk it down to just D... A noteworthy fan translator of years past - his font software also helped with Ys IV BITD. Here's one of his PCE projects actually for a HuCard:

http://files.derrick.sobodash.com/translations/crestofgaia



The latest patch would be there and there are other interesting projects to check out if one is so inclined. FYI gentlemen!

[pnauts]

I'll have a look to this interesting topic.
There'll be for sure many interested to understand it !
personal opinion, I don't wait for dubbing, sub will be nice, but perhaps not the easiest way.

[shawnji]

Man, it's been quite some time since I've been here...

Just wanted to chime in because I wanted to apologize to Dave.  I had been working on finishing Sam's translation, but some major life upheavals forced me to move back to the US from Japan, at which point I basically forgot all about Emerald Dragon.  So I just wanted to say that I'm sorry, in particular for not e-mailing to let you know what was going on.  I just recently got back into the PCE scene again, and seeing this thread made me think, "Oh, geez!  I forgot all about this!"  I think it will probably go better with the original translator at the helm, anyway.  Good luck to you guys!

[SkyeWelse]

Hi everyone. I was asked to do some Falcom scans for a friend and while I was at it I decided to go ahead and scan some of the stuff from Emerald Dragon that I had from the MSX2 version. Sadly I do not own the PC-Engine version yet. Maybe one day though once the translation is released.

Edit:I just got a copy off of eBay for relatively cheap this morning. Around $16 including shipping for a complete set. Also this one seems to come with an extra disc titled "Something in Kanji - CD-ROM and BOOK (1)". No idea what that is, but I did see another auction earlier that was selling that disc alone for around $30 which I cannot seem to find anymore. In any case it might be something neat like an Omake disc that I would be happy to post more details about after it arrives if it's something unknown.



Anyhow, I thought these might come in handy in case a small-mini website is created to host the patch or if you wanted to see any supplemental materials translated such as the Prologue, World Map, or other artwork from the cover/manual.

http://retro-type.com/scans/emerald-dragon/

-Thomas

[Necromancer]

That second disc is from the mook, but I can't say what's actually on it.  Check it out and let us know. 

[Black Tiger]

I have the taikenban disc with covers, the official guide book for the PCE version and misc that I can provide media from down the road.

The taikenban is more than gameplay of  the first area and is one of the better game promos for PCE:

http://www.c-games.info/games,002,6413.html

[NightWolve]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/221424012485

Just completed my purchase of an original copy of Emerald Dragon. So, using the Make Offer feature, I tried $13.50 and he accepted (down from his BIN at $15). I guess if it's in good condition as stated, s'all good. I didn't do much research for how much it's been selling in the past, but that's fine.

I've made great progress on the project BTW. Trying to cut a short video to provide a rare inside look into the development process for such projects, but haven't been happy with results so far (Wish I had Joe Redifer's video skills!), and then other distractions came up (hint hint *cough* To*cough*bias)...

But yeah, if you noticed the other thread, I'm able to insert the first text block in the 1st town of Ulwan. I went back and used David's original version of LZSS recompression code from 2004 (as per his initial project work, he discovered the LZSS codec is 99% the same as Ys IV!) written for Ys IV that I rejected initially because I thought the blocks should be compressed exactly as the originals even though David said his version compressed better than Hudson Soft's code. Because the slider window/dictionary was global and I tried to convert his code to a DLL in a Visual C++ IDE, I caused a bug and thought his code was bad, so I asked him to rewrite it to behave exactly as Hudson Soft's did...

Anyway, long story short, I caught the issue, I just needed to zero out the window buffer per call to the DLL (yeah, a small stupid issue of initialization and I missed it!) since it happened again, but because everything fit after recompression with his 2nd Hudson Soft accurate version, I never went back to use his better tweaked version just out of paranoia... This time for ED however, I wanted to use his better version to maximize whatever improved compression results can be achieved and it's working so far! Whatever improvement will be needed since space looks tight based on Sam's translated results!

Well, stay tuned for an eventual video and more screenshots (this week maybe, if not next).

[seieienbu]

I too just purchased a copy of Emerald Dragon about a week ago; it was pretty cheap so I figured I'd like to have it for patching purposes once you get done.  I'm excited to hear that it seems to be progressing well!

[dshadoff]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/221424012485
But yeah, if you noticed the other thread, I'm able to insert the first text block in the 1st town of Ulwan. I went back and used David's original version of LZSS recompression code from 2004 (as his initial project work, he discovered the LZSS codec 99% the same!) written for Ys IV that I rejected initially because I thought the blocks should be compressed exactly as the originals even though David said his version compressed better than Hudson Soft's code.

This time for ED however, I wanted to use his better version to maximize whatever improved compression results can be achieved and it's working so far! Whatever improvement will be needed since space looks tight based on Sam's translated results!

Very cool !
I don't recall the difference in compression rate, but every little bit helps.

For some reason, I had been thinking that we rolled back to the original Falcom compress because of some actual issue... but now that I think about it, I must have tested it to restore the actual text after decompressing the entire compressed script.

Anyway, great news, and I'm glad to see that we've got a (slightly) better compressor without much effort.

-Dave

[NightWolve]

That brings me to this, do you think there's any more tweaking you could possibly do to the "check_match()" and "is_match()" functions to squeeze any further compression gains out of the codec while still working with the game's same LZSS decoder ?

[elmer]

That brings me to this, do you think there's any more tweaking you could possibly do to the "check_match()" and "is_match()" functions to squeeze any further compression gains out of the codec while still working with the game's same LZSS decoder ?

Out of sheer curiosity, because these things interest me ... can someone enlighten me as to the encoding that ED is using for the LZSS?

Is it traditional 1-bit literal/repeat, 4-bit count, 12-bit offset, or something more exotic?

[SkyeWelse]

I received my Emerald Dragon in the mail today and it did come with that extra disc which is the same as what Black Tiger referenced earlier, the Emerald Dragon Taikenban disc.



It has some fun omake content on there such as a demo of the game, (In the Center), the ability to view the Emerald Dragon FMVs (Top-Left), Play various ED themed mini-games similar to the archery game in Link to the Past and Slots (Top-Right), Listen to the game's music while looking at various artwork (Bottom-Left) and lastly some reference information where you can view info on the characters and history/prologue to the story? Not quite sure. (Bottom-Right).

I've made rips of both discs using Nightwolve's kickass TurboRip software.

-Thomas

[NightWolve]

Ah, I saw some listings with the demo disc included, but thought it wasn't worth getting - cool for what it does offer! I can live without it I think, though.