Xanadu II Translation Development Blog

[shawnji]

The good news is that this all means that it's time to write the insertion tools and start testing a chunk with some real translated text.   

Wow.  You guys are really making headway on this.  It'll be great to see it all finished; and it's fun to read through some of this and try to pretend like I know what you're talking about. XD  I wish I had a mind for this kind of thing, but I'm terrible at it.  The furthest I ever got was building a table for a Famicom game, and after that it all just got too confusing for me.

[Bonknuts]

Elmer. So when are you going to do Cosmic Fantasy 4: Chapter 2 The text is all uncompressed SJIS... just sayin

[elmer]

Elmer. So when are you going to do Cosmic Fantasy 4: Chapter 2 The text is all uncompressed SJIS... just sayin

I absolutely love the PCE ... but unless you can point me towards something of the quality of Ken Levine's System Shock 2, or System Shock, or Bio Shock ... or just get me into a party where I can finally meet him and maybe talk to Eric and Terri Brosius ...

Then I suspect that after Xanadu 2 and Xanadu 1, it'll be back to PC-FX development software and a "new" game (or 2) for me.

Despite the apparent lack of interest, I've already put my "mark" on trying to get Operation Thunderbolt, and maybe Osman ported over to the PCE. Surely that's enough! 

[esteban]

Elmer is working on a SCD upgrade of Blodia after The Xanadu.

Priorities are priorities.

[shawnji]

Elmer. So when are you going to do Cosmic Fantasy 4: Chapter 2 The text is all uncompressed SJIS... just sayin

Oh really?  Hmm... that might be something fun for me to poke at if I wanted to try and teach myself a little bit.  A friend was trying to help walk me through some processes with Blood Gear, but the text being compressed was making it more difficult for me to understand at the time.

[VenomMacbeth]

XanaDUUUUDE!  EXCELLENT!

The only think keeping me from playing this game is the language barrier, so I can't wait for this to be complete

[Bonknuts]

Elmer. So when are you going to do Cosmic Fantasy 4: Chapter 2 The text is all uncompressed SJIS... just sayin

Oh really?  Hmm... that might be something fun for me to poke at if I wanted to try and teach myself a little bit.  A friend was trying to help walk me through some processes with Blood Gear, but the text being compressed was making it more difficult for me to understand at the time.

 I made an English print routine for it, as well as an ascii single byte read support, back in 2007/2008 for Animefx. He never finished translating it. If I still have it, it's yours if you want.

[spenoza]

Wait, what about Chapter 1? You can't do Chapter 2 without Chapter 1!

[NightWolve]

Elmer. So when are you going to do Cosmic Fantasy 4: Chapter 2 The text is all uncompressed SJIS... just sayin

Oh really?  Hmm... that might be something fun for me to poke at if I wanted to try and teach myself a little bit.  A friend was trying to help walk me through some processes with Blood Gear, but the text being compressed was making it more difficult for me to understand at the time.

I made an English print routine for it, as well as an ascii single byte read support, back in 2007/2008 for Animefx. He never finished translating it. If I still have it, it's yours if you want.

Well, I'll take it, that's good to have handy just in case the desire arises years from now. Just PM it whenever you get the chance.

[Black Tiger]

Wait, what about Chapter 1? You can't do Chapter 2 without Chapter 1!

You can do both, as long as you do Chapter 2 first.

[Bonknuts]

Wait, what about Chapter 1? You can't do Chapter 2 without Chapter 1!

 I was told that Chapter 1 wasn't that good.

[elmer]

Elmer. So when are you going to do Cosmic Fantasy 4: Chapter 2 The text is all uncompressed SJIS... just sayin

Oh really?  Hmm... that might be something fun for me to poke at if I wanted to try and teach myself a little bit.  A friend was trying to help walk me through some processes with Blood Gear, but the text being compressed was making it more difficult for me to understand at the time.

I took a quick look on PC Engine Bible, and it seems like it could be a fun game ... it would be great if you decided to have a go at translating it! 

As for me ... I'm definitely not saying that I'll never do a translation again ... I'm just going to want to take a break and do something different for a while after Xanadu 1 & 2. 

[shawnji]

Elmer. So when are you going to do Cosmic Fantasy 4: Chapter 2 The text is all uncompressed SJIS... just sayin

Oh really?  Hmm... that might be something fun for me to poke at if I wanted to try and teach myself a little bit.  A friend was trying to help walk me through some processes with Blood Gear, but the text being compressed was making it more difficult for me to understand at the time.

 I made an English print routine for it, as well as an ascii single byte read support, back in 2007/2008 for Animefx. He never finished translating it. If I still have it, it's yours if you want.

Sure, I'd like to take a look at that if you don't mind.  I can't promise I'll jump right on it, though; as I translate Japanese for a living already and I get burnt out occasionally.  I'm actually kind of surprised that I've been getting the itch to poke at a game translation again.

I can also understand why most people would want part two.  If you've never played the first Cosmic Fantasy, you wouldn't be terribly interested in Yuu as a main character instead of Van.  There's also the issue that the game is supposedly unbeatable due to some bug or something.  At least, I think that's what I heard.

As a side note, if it is the case that it's actually unbeatable, I bet it would make for a fun programming challenge to see if it could be fixed.

[Necromancer]

All five CF games are beatable.

[elmer]

Anyway ... back to Xanadu 2.

There are 8 really large script-chunks that I've been concerned about, because they're nearly 8KB big, but only seemed to contain about 1KB of "script".

That immediately made me concerned that I was missing something important.

Now that I've finally been able to disassemble the whole chunk, it turns out that I wasn't missing much, and that there really is a lot of (ugly) code in those particular chunks.

They're the ones that handle the 8 different Weapon Shops in the game.

Good news ... some of that "ugly" code in the Weapon Shop chunks put me on the trail to find another 12 DATA_CHUNKS that contain a lot of text strings in "script" format.

These aren't part of the regular in-game streaming system, but instead look to be chunks that get loaded "permanently" for each of the different game-overlays (which I think are for the Main-Menu, In-Game, and major boss fights, etc).

These newly discovered chunks finally show where all the missing "menu" text has been hiding! 

Finding this "missing" text was what SamIAm originally asked me to do, back before I looked at the state of the translation and decided that it needed some serious TLC in order to get it finished.