What's playing on your PC-FX now?

[ruinatokyo]

I've been having some stupid fun with Yuna the past week.

But I'm really waiting til I have some extra time to get into Sparkling Feather.

[Necromancer]

Lately the only thing playing on my PC-FX are a few capering dust bunnies.  :oops:

[elmer]

Waiting for the Team Innocent translation so I can play it.

It might just be a very long wait. 

[deubeul]

I stopped playing TI after the first act because I learnt about the future translation..

Elmer, will you handle the hacking side of the project, or is it Esperknight?

Will the subs hack of Zeroigar be doable in TI subscenes?

[xelement5x]

Last PC-FX game I played was Zeroigar.  I need to go back and play it again now that I think aboot it.

[elmer]

Elmer, will you handle the hacking side of the project, or is it Esperknight?

It's Esperknight and Filler's project ... they started it way before I appeared.

I've already taken over 2 of Esperknight's projects and rebooted them from scratch ... I don't really want to do it again.

From my understanding, they had already got the game completely translated and were just blocked waiting for Esperknight to hack in a VWF.

After Zeroigar was finished, I did that hacking for them and also provided them with my notes on Hudson's video data storage format.

There hasn't been an update from them on the website about TI in over a year now, and I don't see any check-ins on their subversion repository.

All that I can see is that Filler has released a couple of SNES translation projects with "Dynamic Designs" in the last year.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the Esperknight would be more-than-happy to pass this on to another programmer if they showed some interest.

NightWolve ... this one might just be something that you could have fun stepping in and rescuing!

The message data is uncompressed in the ISO, and it's just stored in SJIS with some embedded control codes.

IIRC, it's all accessed with regular C pointers.

If you converted it from the awful "Atlas" format that Esperknight seemed to want to use, to your own translation tool, then you'd probably be able to fix up whatever problems are hidden by "Atlas" and get it finished-off pretty quickly.

If there were some real progress on the translation, then I'd have more of an inclination to help out with whatever video processing needs to be done.

Will the subs hack of Zeroigar be doable in TI subscenes?

Nope, not really, because TI's videos are full-screen, so you'd need to recompress the data with the subtitles embedded inside it (SamIAm knows how to do that).

Or you could use one of the PC-FX's many other video layers to display subtitles, but that would need a substantial hack to the code/data.

[NightWolve]

NightWolve ... this one might just be something that you could have fun stepping in and rescuing!

The message data is uncompressed in the ISO, and it's just stored in SJIS with some embedded control codes.

IIRC, it's all accessed with regular C pointers.

If you converted it from the awful "Atlas" format that Esperknight seemed to want to use, to your own translation tool, then you'd probably be able to fix up whatever problems are hidden by "Atlas" and get it finished-off pretty quickly.

Sounds like a basic Xak III situation, but do single-byte ANSI codes fetch English tiles or must you use S-JIS ? If it already supports a good font and ANSI, then loading the 16/32-bit text pointers and recomputing them post-translation/editing could allow for full English translations to fit as was the case with Xak III. Never had to trim anything, but Paul England was too literal a translator, not good enough post-editing (neither was I good enough) so the script wound up rough/dry, hence my least favorite.

and were just blocked waiting for Esperknight to hack in a VWF.

Doh, nevermind, you already answered the question... Yeah, that pretty much means I couldn't take the project anywhere and am more interested on at least continuing something nice like Emerald Dragon, likely next year. Hopefully before Sam loses his enthusiasm.

Bonknuts had offered me years ago to font-hack various PC Engine games ("Gulliver Boy" looks like another great RPG, besides "Anearth Fantasy Stories"), and leave them on my plate, but I didn't take him up on the offers because I didn't wanna be sucked into more projects till my personal situation had improved. ~5 years being a full time Ys fan project manager didn't work out too well for me, heh-heh.

That brings up a good point...if talented reprogrammers like you and Bonknuts targeted some of those other beautiful games like what was mentioned, left a text codec and font hack behind, so others of medium talent could extract/insert text back in and manage translators, more projects could get done in theory...

Everybody burns out at some level, and your talent/experience is very rare, so I think it'd be cool if you could target multiple high-value RPGs at once for script extraction/insertion, font hacking if needed, getting the *MOST* difficult aspect out of the way, and leaving that work behind for those of us with medium talent for the long grind of managing translators, editing, and patch production, etc.

This is kind of what David Shadoff did in Emerald Dragon's case. And boy, it wasn't child's play to achieve script extraction, that was seriously difficult work... Plus, very good fortune that the same Ys IV LZ text codec was used, so recompression of the text blocks for reinsertion happened quickly after he passed it on to me...

But yeah, just a random thought. As for picking up another NEC project besides ED, well, I've been messing with Falcom's Zwei!! lately, and lack of font hacks is what blocked me from "Startling Odyssey" (which I passed to Tru) and "Star Breaker" BITD, I just was not gonna do 16x16 system font style, so...I can't volunteer, as it appears I sorta already have 2 projects for future years (1 PC Engine, 1 PC)...

[deubeul]

Thanks for your detailed and interesting reply, Elmer  .

[elmer]

and were just blocked waiting for Esperknight to hack in a VWF.

Doh, nevermind, you already answered the question... Yeah, that pretty much means I couldn't take the project anywhere and am more interested on at least continuing something nice like Emerald Dragon, likely next year.

Errr ... not quite ... that's the point. I already did the font hack on TI.

The message text can be in 8-bit ASCII now (or 16-bit SJIS, both work), and ASCII text is displayed with my custom BWF.

http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=9927.msg420723#msg420723

From what I remember, there wasn't even going to be much of a memory problem if the strings needed to be expanded beyond the original space. The text table occurs at the end of a block, and there's plenty of memory for it to expand into.

On top of that, I already free'd up a permanent 8KB that I'm only using a small portion of for the VWF font and display code.

Seriously ... it's almost criminal that this game is sitting there already translated, and the text inserted, and it's just waiting for someone to give it some love.

I believe that there are currently some overruns because of the lousy Atlas tool, and some corruption because Esperknight missed out on a couple of the control codes (I have the complete list of codes and their meaning), but I was told that everything was there.

The big thing that it needs is to process all the translated text out of the God-awful Atlas format and into something where a normal human being can read it and edit it, and then write a custom inserter that's actually smart-enough to move around the text a little if a particular string needs a little more space.

It's more of a data-manipulation and overrun-avoidance task.

Bonknuts had offered me years ago to font-hack various PC Engine games ("Gulliver Boy" looks like another great RPG, besides "Anearth Fantasy Stories"), and leave them on my plate, but I didn't take him up on the offers because I didn't wanna be sucked into more projects till my personal situation had improved.

I don't know about Gulliver Boy, but Anearth is going to be a real PITA for whoever takes it on.

I took a quick look at it last year, and it strings together sentences from multiple different compressed-dictionaries to form each message box. That's just not going to be a pleasant system to work with.

[NightWolve]

Errr ... not quite ... that's the point. I already did the font hack on TI.

The message text can be in 8-bit ASCII now (or 16-bit SJIS, both work), and ASCII text is displayed with my custom BWF.

http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=9927.msg420723#msg420723

From what I remember, there wasn't even going to be much of a memory problem if the strings needed to be expanded beyond the original space. The text table occurs at the end of a block, and there's plenty of memory for it to expand into.

On top of that, I already free'd up a permanent 8KB that I'm only using a small portion of for the VWF font and display code.

Seriously ... it's almost criminal that this game is sitting there already translated, and the text inserted, and it's just waiting for someone to give it some love.

Oh right, I forgot about that, and I even commented in that thread, ha!

filler/Playongo keeps up with me on Twitter, I could ask and see what's going on.

[elmer]

filler/Playongo keeps up with me on Twitter, I could ask and see what's going on.

It would be good to know.

If Esperknight doesn't have the time/desire anymore, then even if you don't want to do it yourself, there may be another programmer here that would be interested in picking it up.

[ruinatokyo]

elmer, i am still working on the fx scsi translation hopefully within the year i'll get it to you.

it's been fun coming back to the pc-fx. a few really solid games among the really imho crap library.  i still feel sad that no one really used what seems like even 10% of the system's capabilities...

i may even go back to miraculum, which killed me 15 hours in through a save game in a spot that made progressing impossible lol

[Arkhan]

Its often got Team Innocent going, or Boundary Gate, but lately, Nirgends.


Except for the CD drive is tarding out so, it's more like hurrrrrrgends

[xelement5x]

But yeah, just a random thought. As for picking up another NEC project besides ED, well, I've been messing with Falcom's Zwei!! lately, and lack of font hacks is what blocked me from "Startling Odyssey" (which I passed to Tru) and "Star Breaker" BITD, I just was not gonna do 16x16 system font style, so...I can't volunteer, as it appears I sorta already have 2 projects for future years (1 PC Engine, 1 PC)...

Unrelated to like 90% of what is in this thread but I love the Zwei!! soundtrack, it's so fun.  Would love to see the game translated someday

[NightWolve]

It didn't occur to me, but maybe I might ask Sam to translate for it. I still need to improve the Japanese text presentation in my dumps (it's a hefty-sized script!!!), and maybe think more on serious translation software advances before I do, but wouldn't hurt.