Xanadu I and II - General Translation Project(s) Thread

[pixeljunkie]

Clean on Blue looks great for font. This is so rad

[dshadoff]

It looks like the road wasn't that long! 

Wow, that's awesome !!

I personally prefer the clean font on the blue background rather than the outlined font on the transparent background, but it's selectable from the game's pause menu.

Which version do you all like better?

Stylistically, I'm torn - they both look good.
But I would worry that some important feature could be hidden behind the panel in some obscure situation, if the blue panel is used instead of the transparent one.

...So I would opt for whichever one was used in the original game (in both cases).

-Dave

[ginoscope]

Clear on blue looks really good and fantastic work so far.  Looking forward to more progress and thanks for sharing the screenshots.

[elmer]

Wow, that's awesome !!

The Xanadu games both print text in 4-pixel-wide strips ... just like PC-FX Team Innocent.

I'm using the same trick here that I did for that. It's the same font, too ...but with some pixels moved to make it "rounder".

It makes for a nice-looking "almost-vwf". 

But I would worry that some important feature could be hidden behind the panel in some obscure situation, if the blue panel is used instead of the transparent one.

...So I would opt for whichever one was used in the original game (in both cases).

The original Xanadu game does both techniques ... you can switch between them in the game's options menu.

So we should be perfectly safe with the solid panel ... Falcom already had to make sure that nothing important was hidden.

I'm guessing that the outlined font was their "default" because dynamically making the ROM font "bold" and giving it an outline is a pretty-damned-clever programming effect (IMHO).

Does anyone know of another PCE CD game that does that with the ROM font?

[EDIT]

Hmmm ... I guess that the programming discussion of the font technique really doesn't belong here ... I'll continue it to the "blog" thread, and leave this thread for updates on the game translation itself. 

[Bonknuts]

Does anyone know of another PCE CD game that does that with the ROM font?

I seem to recall a couple of other late gen games that might have done that.

[NightWolve]

He's basically just testing insertion presently and will hack an 8x12 font or whatever down the road.

It looks like the road wasn't that long! 

It's nice to be able to get a lot more text on each "page" of the dialog.

I personally prefer the clean font on the blue background rather than the outlined font on the transparent background, but it's selectable from the game's pause menu.

Which version do you all like better?

DUDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111

You are a master of your craft like no other, no doubt about that!

Never thought I'd see that happen! Legend of Xanadu was actually the first or 2nd game I tried to hack in late 2001 when I first got started, but because all I could do was replace 16x16 Japanese S-JIS characters with English alpha characters, there was no point. The text was at least uncompressed, but that didn't matter much. So I kept searching for other RPGs I could handle, which is how I found Xak III (as a RIGG archive from a PCE pirating group) which had built-in 8x16 English font support and easy 16-bit text pointers for me to learn to adjust to pack a text block.

Anyway, congratulations man!!! We saw EsperKnight as the "great hope" once upon a time to carry the PCE fan translation torch, but that hope came and went - it's about time we got somebody else with SNES level talent to pull off low-level PCE ASM hacks for this system! This calls for a mass Like.

[elmer]

Thank you for the kind words.   :oops:

At this point ... the translation is definitely going to happen. The technical issues all seem to be solved.

It's just all going to take months of hard work.

IMHO, the worst that will happen is that we'll need the extra RAM on a TED v2 (or in Mednafen) ... but I'm still hoping that we can avoid that.

[Bardoly]

This is awesome news!

IMHO, the worst that will happen is that we'll need the extra RAM on a TED v2 (or in Mednafen) ... but I'm still hoping that we can avoid that.

Worst case, maybe you go with the translation being an Arcade Card release?  I would far rather have that happen than those other options.

[jtucci31]

IMHO, the worst that will happen is that we'll need the extra RAM on a TED v2 (or in Mednafen) ... but I'm still hoping that we can avoid that.

Worst case, maybe you go with the translation being an Arcade Card release?  I would far rather have that happen than those other options.

Same here! I have the V1 everdrive and would rather play on a real system than mess around with whatever else I may have to. If the Arcade Card is possible, I think that would be pretty damn cool.

However, whatever way this gets translated and works, I will play. Regardless of what I have to do. So honestly, you've got my attention either way. I'd just prefer what I stated earlier

[SamIAm]

The Arcade Card isn't a viable solution because all of the extra RAM that it contains sits behind a memory mapper, and therefore the system can't work with it in the way that it needs to.

Sorry.

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In happier news, I have finished translating the prologue into English and have also done a proofread of it. Now we get to see if it can be squeezed into the game as-is, or if we have to choose between axing some words to make it fit or going with an expanded memory card.

Progress is happening pretty much daily. Chapter 1, thankfully, only has about 60% as much text as the prologue, so that one should come pretty quickly.

[Opethian]

sam is the man

[stinkoman]

These games look awesome, I hope to try it once finished.

[Arjak]

Sam, did you get the email I sent you with part of my new VA audio? I never received a response, so I wasn't sure if I sent them to the right address.

I'll try to get the rest of my lines redone soon.

[SamIAm]

Thanks, Arjak.

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In other news, I finished drafting Chapter 1. I have to proofread it still, which will take some additional days, but it's close.

I also organized all the script files according to chapter, of which there are 11 plus a prologue. The average size of one chapter is about 150 KB in elmer's dump format. The prologue was 140KB, while the largest chapter (7) is 180KB. Chapter 1 was only 100 KB, and Chapter 10 is only 80. Chapter 11, thankfully, is super small. Although I don't think we have it all, it's probably 20KB or so.

Except for chapters 10 and 11, each one will take about two weeks to translate and proofread.

[SamIAm]

Chapter 1 is finished and proofread.

Chapter 2 is currently at about 60%.

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Xanadu II has a couple of scenes that you can unlock by talking to the right people at the right times. I didn't think Xanadu I had any, but now I'm thinking it might. I just played through Chapter 2 last week and am translating it now, and I ran into some text in the script that looks completely out of place. I googled the name of the extra character involved and got nothing, so it's not in any Japanese walkthrough.