Legend of Xanadu II Translation Patch announced!

[SamIAm]

The translation side of Spriggan Mark 2 is completely finished. Bonknuts's inserter is also totally finished and AFAIK he made a test version of the game that's completely in English.

However, the cutscenes are another matter. Again, the translation is finished, but the hacking is a big challenge. There's the option of doing a dub, which as you know, is quite an ordeal. Otherwise, I think he's leaning toward making subtitles. I could be wrong, but I think whether that's easy or difficult was going to depend on whether there's enough space in the main CPU RAM for a print routine and enough in the video RAM for a font. If not, some serious work would be required.

Bonknuts did have some personal things come up, and I can't blame him for putting this kind of thing aside while he takes care of what he needs to. I really hope he finishes it, though, because I know it's a game he loves.

[Burnt Lasagna]

Hm, I'm guessing Spriggan Mark 2 has most, if not all, voices as ADPCM, not Redbook? I've never looked at it so I can't say for my self. If it was all Redbook, like Xanadu II, then it might be cleaner to dub it. I would imagine hacking in a subtitling system would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

However if anyone could pull it off it would be Bonknuts, his knowledge of the inner machinations of the PCE is quite unprecedented. Though in the long run I don't know if subtitling it would be any less of an ordeal then dubbing it. I guess it's completely up to him on what he prefers and what road he wants to take with the project. 

[Arjak]

If a dub for Spriggan does happen, let me know. I'd love to try out!

[Bardoly]

Just discovered and read through this entire thread, and this looks great!  I hope that work is still progressing (even if the pace be slow).

[burn_654]

Likewise - I would definitely try out for a dub. I missed the boat for the Ys IV dub due to some life changes (moving etc.) but would love to get in on such a project.

[Arjak]

I would just like to give this thread a bump, since it's been almost two months since the last status update.

[EsperKnight]

Plenty of progress  I finally started back into it full throttle and now have a complete toolkit to insert/(fake) compress/build/insert all into the CD  With this is in hand SamIAm and I are going to start really digging in as this automates everything.  Still bugs here and there but this at least makes it a lot simpler to test and figure out things

If anyone's curious about the fake compression, it's due to Xanadu 2 using a different prefilled buffer for decompressing with for each block, meaning if I don't have that buffer or something similar enough, it decompresses wrong.  So I now I just now set it so everything is not compressed but it still conforms to the compression scheme that Xanadu 2 uses (really any and all falcom games I found out).  Way too much time to find and use all those buffers that are needed and this works good enough for at least 99% of the cases I figure. The only cases it may not are those that go beyond the allocated buffer for loading it from the CD.  It may also slow it down a bit too but really none of the blocks are that big either so I'm not anticipating any issues at this time with the compression

Edit: Clarify it's each block that has a different buffer

[Bernie]

This is awesome news. The way these things have been churned out so quickly lately is just great!!  Hopefully this one wont take too much longer. 

[roflmao]

Woo hoo!

[Burnt Lasagna]

I'm quite impressed EsperKnight 
I always think of this project as "The Little Engine that Could". Making progress, one step at a time...


Keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to playing this game for the first time!

[EsperKnight]

Nice   Yeah this one's definitely one of my PITA projects   Next up would maybe be Tengai Makyou Ziria but that one was a lot easier to automate (for the most part) than this one.  Although I do have one other that's even worse then X2 but that's cause of the amount of tediousness with tracking down stray sentences and all the asm fixes needing to be done....   Just wish there was more time in the day   Luckily though I'm getting a bit more free time to work on projects so trying to use it to my advantage   Thanks all for the encouragement!

[Bonknuts]

I remember looking at the compression scheme of some PCE CD game a number of years back (could have been this game or Seiya Monogatari, or some other high profile game. Maybe even GoT, I forget since it's been so long). The LZSS circular buffer was pre-primed with a specific set of values every time a LZSS chunk was decoded. The primed values seemed to be the same for any type of text, but you had to have it in order to decompress the chunk correctly. You could get around it on recompressing if you didn't 'reference' the buffer before anything was written. Though it's kind of silly 'cause you needed to know the primed state to begin with in order to decompress, so you'd know it upon recompressing too. It's just that most LZSS compressors don't have this feature (none that I've seen, anyway).

[SamIAm]

There's a surge of activity happening right now. Today was my day off, and I put in a good 8 hours. I know Esperknight's been rocking it, too. I hope we have some amazing news soon.

Also, here's a dude on niconico playing PCE tunes on a piano. Hats off to anyone who can name all the songs just by hearing them (esteban?).

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2037838

EDIT: In that video, he plays a Monster Maker song at 3:30ish. I checked this game out, and the music in general is impressive. I guess the game's glitchy as hell, though. Too bad.

[Bernie]

There's a surge of activity happening right now. Today was my day off, and I put in a good 8 hours. I know Esperknight's been rocking it, too. I hope we have some amazing news soon.

Also, here's a dude on niconico playing PCE tunes on a piano. Hats off to anyone who can name all the songs just by hearing them (esteban?).

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2037838

Dedication!!  Thats what Im talking about!!!

[LentFilms]

Good to hear another update! There are so many Esperknight projects I'm following I can't even count them all but "Legend of Xanadu II" is one of my most highly anticipated. I also played a minor role in the SamIAm's dub that was recorded back in 2011. I was probably the worst actor in the cast but it sure was a lot of fun and I can't wait to play the full game.