The lost Sunheart translation project (Trans. beta downloadable)

[toktogul]

toktogul- good, you found the font!
Sunheart indeed uses a 1bpp font. I'm not sure what you mean by "low quality," but the font is just 8x8 tiles with 2 colors (one color for the letter, one color for the background--hence 1bpp). A lot of games use a 1bpp font.
Luckily this game already includes the full uppercase and lowercase English alphabet, so you don't really have to edit the font at all. You can eventually overwrite some of the Japanese font to add extra characters if you need them.

To make your table file(s), you'll need to look into the game to find out which byte(s) map to which letter/character. There's not necessarily a standard method that applies to all games...
one easy way to brute-force it is to find a string of English text in the game and do a Relative Search (e.g. with the WindHex hex editor) to find that string, and build your table from that information. You can always edit that string in the hex editor to test other values as you fill in the gaps of your table(s).

Make sure you keep a clean copy of the ROM around while you work so you can easily restore it after something gets broken

Yay! Great! Allright, off to Nagoya for the weekend, ill come back to it on Sunday. This is soo exciting. Ill search for the string, the title screen, and file naming screen should be easy to find, from there i should be able to easily build the table. Maybe search with relative search, enter the interval between the letters seen on title screen, and then from there find the name making screen section.

Seriously, thank you guys for taking the time to answer my questions. I know its super basic what i amasking, but it helps soo much that you are being patient. You guysare awesome

[toktogul]

Back to town, I found the credits of the game, they are all in capital letters. Looks like the alphabet letters use the ASCII hex adress. So now that I have my alphabet table, how can i build my Japanese one?

[toktogul]

I found a way for now to build it. I found the title screen menu, so now i am remplacing the start with hex and it shows kanjis. I am slowly writing them down and building a table. Might not be the most efficient but its a start hahah.

[toktogul]

I am at FF hex value, and i am far from finished with my table for japanese characters... FF is the maximum value correct? How can I find the remaining hex adresses for the remaining characters?
Up to 7F its ASCII values, then it switch to Japanese characters. i am confused. how can I find the remaining characters to complete my table?

[elmer]

I am at FF hex value, and i am far from finished with my table for japanese characters... FF is the maximum value correct?

$FF is the maximum value for a single byte, but you could easily be dealing with double-byte shift-JIS encoding.

In the meantime, what you've got looks some variant of an ANK font.

Here's the ANK font from the PC-FX ROM ...

[cabbage]

0x01 is a control code to switch between hiragana and katakana. So:

(some japanese text) 0x01 (some more japanese text) 0x01 (even more)

the first text will be in hiragana (or perhaps katakana, I forget which this game defaults to), the second japanese text will be in katakana, and the third will be back in hiragana again
at least, this should be the case according to my memory and notes... perhaps there are some other characters on each table, like switching out some kanji etc. i don't recall if english is present in both or not, but that's easy enough to check

[toktogul]

0x01 is a control code to switch between hiragana and katakana. So:

(some japanese text) 0x01 (some more japanese text) 0x01 (even more)

the first text will be in hiragana (or perhaps katakana, I forget which this game defaults to), the second japanese text will be in katakana, and the third will be back in hiragana again
at least, this should be the case according to my memory and notes... perhaps there are some other characters on each table, like switching out some kanji etc. i don't recall if english is present in both or not, but that's easy enough to check

You are correct. I found some text searching with the table i have, the hiragana and katakana share the same hex value, the only thing that changes is the 00 or 01 before the katakana word/sentence. Thats a relief! I am not dealing with 16 bits hahah thank you soo much guys!

How can/should i make my table readable in hex workshop now? I wrote it on a piece of paper, now i simply need to enter it on my computer. How should i make it so its easily importable on hexworkshop?


Edit: i am able to write down hex values for the intro text and then I check the actual value in hex work. So far my table works well. To input kanjis i have to input 02 before and after the kanji. So is it ok to see it as a "press 02(like shift click) type stuff, then release 02" it goes back to normal, and continue?"

[cabbage]

How can/should i make my table readable in hex workshop now? I wrote it on a piece of paper, now i simply need to enter it on my computer. How should i make it so its easily importable on hexworkshop?

make a .tbl file (just a regular .txt file, you can rename to .tbl extension if you prefer) with each line containing one entry:
hex=text

so, for example:
(...)
30=0
31=1
32=2
(...)
41=A
42=B
43=C
(...)
B1=あ
B2=い
B3=う
etc.

then you can load the .tbl into your hex editor to look around in the rom, use it to make a script dump and/or insert a new script, and so on.

[elmer]

0x01 is a control code to switch between hiragana and katakana.

Nice find! 

It's very interesting (for me, as a programmer) to see how you guys go about hacking a ROM without any major programming help.

[toktogul]

How can/should i make my table readable in hex workshop now? I wrote it on a piece of paper, now i simply need to enter it on my computer. How should i make it so its easily importable on hexworkshop?

make a .tbl file (just a regular .txt file, you can rename to .tbl extension if you prefer) with each line containing one entry:
hex=text

so, for example:
(...)
30=0
31=1
32=2
(...)
41=A
42=B
43=C
(...)
B1=あ
B2=い
B3=う
etc.

then you can load the .tbl into your hex editor to look around in the rom, use it to make a script dump and/or insert a new script, and so on.

Great, i made the text file already, do i need to put spaces or press enter after each entries? Do you happen to know where i can load the tbl file in hexworshop? Thank you soo much! I can finally start translating today.

[toktogul]

Update : Worked hard today, I managed to translate and insert sucessfully 5 more chapters. I think I have 3-4 to go. I am inserting as I translate, I am not sure if it's the best way of doing things, but it feels good to see the progress in game right away.

I was thinking about it, how can I make the game available to the community once I am done? I am modifying directly the rom. I think that would be against the rules of the forum to post them here right?

[Bernie]

Update : Worked hard today, I managed to translate and insert sucessfully 5 more chapters. I think I have 3-4 to go. I am inserting as I translate, I am not sure if it's the best way of doing things, but it feels good to see the progress in game right away.

I was thinking about it, how can I make the game available to the community once I am done? I am modifying directly the rom. I think that would be against the rules of the forum to post them here right?

You could upload it to DropBox, and people could PM you for the download.  If you don't use DropBox, someone....like ME...    could take care of that for you. 

Awesome work guys!  It is really cool to see so much effort going into the PCE these days.

[ginoscope]

Agree with Bernie just dropbox the rom or PM members directly.  I have an everdrive so be glad to test for you if you needed that as you get to the end of the project.

Great job on the translation it seems a lot of activity lately with people translating pc engine games which is great.  Almost makes me as a programmer of modern language interested in going low level to assembly.  Been ages since I messed with assembly.

[cabbage]

I was thinking about it, how can I make the game available to the community once I am done? I am modifying directly the rom. I think that would be against the rules of the forum to post them here right?

you can easily make a patch and just distribute that. i've only ever used lunar ips...it's extremely simple. just give it the original un-edited rom and your new, translated rom, and it will create the .ips patch for you. then you can share that anywhere without having to distribute any rom files.

[elmer]

There's usually no real problem with sharing a ROM image with collaborators/testers in order to get it all done, but for general distribution, you really should just distribute a patch ... that keeps the whole translation scene "legal".

There are various utilities to create a patch in different formats xdelta, UPS, IPS.

IMHO, IPS is a grossly outdated format and needs to die, so I'd recommend xdelta or UPS.


You can get easy-to-use utilities for all 3 on RomHacking ...

Delta Patcher (xdelta)
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/704/

Tsukuyomi UPS
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/519/

Lunar IPS
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/240/


You might even think about releasing you translation on their site.

It's a lot easier than maintaining your own website for it, and then it'll be available to anyone, and easily searchable.

You'll find a bunch of PCE translations there done by folks that hang out here.