Teitoku no Ketsudan III (PTO3) English Translation Thread

hello, I've started this project because nobody else will. I've wanted to play this game for 25 years, so it's time, but I could use some help translating some of these screens.

I've successfully translated a bit and worked that into a patch, but so far it's only the button text on the main menu and save game screen. I've run into problems translating the scenario screen as OCR has failed to identify the characters. Ive tried google translate and DeepL. I've also tried to work backwards since I already know what the text is supposed to say, but this has failed as well. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Here you can see the main menu i've already converted. Pretty sure I got the first two options correct, but that third looks like it's supposed to be "biographies" according to this page. Teitoku no Ketsudan III
Main Menu(J).jpeg
Main Menu(E).jpeg


Based on the above koei fan page, these should be as follows.

The first one is a Campaign (multiple victory conditions) scenario; the rest are Short (one victory condition).

  • Brink of War
  • Attack on Pearl Harbor
  • Battle of Midway
  • Battle of Solomon
  • Great Marianas Turkey Shoot
  • Battle of Leyte Gulf
  • Operation Ten-Go
But the issue is that when I try to plug these senarios in english into a translator, it does not match the japanese text output by the translator. And with OCR failing to determine what these characters are, I'm having trouble locating the hexes for these lines in the game files.

New Game Screen.jpeg
 
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Ok, I was able to figure out that the text on this screen is not editable in the hex editor, but rather is part of an image file.
 
Well the first one looks more like US Japan Outbreak of war 日米開戦 to me. Just because the text shows up as a layer on VPD2 doesnt mean its an image file (doesnt mean its not either!)
 
Here's what i've found in crystal tile so far. This text is found at offset 2000 and 82000, making me think it's not an image file. Yet I can't find any
of the button text once you get past the first menu or two via byte search. We're talking scenarios, names of commanders in the commander managment screen. So this has me thinking there's something else going on here.

ScenarioSelectScreenVDP2.JPG
CrystalTileSS.JPG
 
so VPD2 is just grabbing all the bits and creating the "texture" , sorry I dont know all the technical terms.

When I byte searched the string for the first option, I got 4 hits in byte_search
image.png


so I changed the first character to an A (value 8260) one at a time and then patched the game until the altered file changed what showed in game.

When I changed Message.TK3
1674178171048.png


I got this:
image.png


so if you change those strings in message.tk3 you should be good to go.
 
So i've ran into more lines that have a mix of shift-jis and halfwidth katakan characters. I've created a new text file with the halfwidth characters and their hex encodings since I could not find one anywhere on the internet easily. I'm going to attach it here in case anyone else ends up needing it.
 

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I wrote up a quick script to help convert the JIS_X_0201 hex code to half-width string characters. This will help me save probably about 100 hours of manual copying and pasting two hexes at a time. You gotta run both files from the same directory for it to work. Be aware the script is in powershell.

 
Halfwidth characters are part of the Shift-JIS standard. Shift-JIS includes the earlier JIS 201 standard, and then builds on top of it, using the previously unassigned values to encode the wide characters.
 
This online tool helps with converting shift-JIS to hex and vice versa. It also supports half-width katakana: SJIS to Hex

The only bug I've found with it is that it doesn't recognize the ー character. It throws up "undefined" instead of 815B. So I've always had to replace all the "undefined" with 815B when converting text on that page. Other than that, it works well.


[edit] While I'm here, these are some other useful tools for working with Japanese and hex:

Ateam's Shift-JIS Hex Converter: Shift-JIS Hex Converter
A listing of every Shift-JIS character: https://mattsmessyroom.com/uploads/sjis.tbl
Hiragana/katakana/kanji online keyboard: Hiragana Japanese Online Keyboard LEXILOGOS
Character counter: Character Counter - WordCounter.net
 
Halfwidth characters are part of the Shift-JIS standard. Shift-JIS includes the earlier JIS 201 standard, and then builds on top of it, using the previously unassigned values to encode the wide characters.
Well, for whatever reason when I search this shift-jis table, it's not there (https://mattsmessyroom.com/uploads/sjis.tbl). For example A6 = ヲ on the half-width table I built based on this game's coding, but it's not in that linked table at all. Also, when I tried to write this script in python, it had issues with not finding the character encoding in the shift-jis table. But windows has no problem displaying the characters, despite it not being in UTF-8 either. So obviously window's has the character set somewhere. So powershell was the obvious solution since it's going to use windows' built in encodings and to delight, it worked. I should mention though that I had downloaded the japanese language pack for windows before I wrote this script, so that could explain why windows recognizes the characters.

Danthrax, thanks for posting these links.
 
Done with aircraft. Special weapons, Nations and some of the nation details. Currently found and working on city/base names.
 

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Also, enough of the menu system is done to be able to navigate and get into the game proper.
 

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Nice proyect. I didn´t know this one and i thought you were talking about Advanced World War - Last of the Millennium, another great simulator game.
Good luck with the proyect, i´ll keep an eye on it.
 
Ok, I got another one that's strange to translate. So here is a screen inside the bases menu. After you choose a base there's an option to give orders. Under orders there's combat and other. As you can see from the screenshot, under combat each button lets you choose to attack or defend. The buttons go red when you change to attack and stay white on defend. Now on the "Other" options, I get the following which has confusing translations.

戦闘準備を任せる = ? Prepare for battle ?
90ED93AC8F8094F582F0944382B982E9 = MESSAGE.TK3 1AE3

戦闘指揮を任せる = ? Command battle ?
90ED93AC8E778AF682F0944382B982E9 = MESSAGE.TK3 1AF3

戦闘指揮を任せる = ? I'll give you battle command ?
90ED93AC8E778AF6A69443BED9 = MESSAGE.TK3 1B03

戦闘指揮を執る = ? Take command of the battle ?
90ED93AC8E778AF6A68EB7D9 = MESSAGE.TK3 1B13View attachment 8265
Screenshot 2023-02-03 192919.jpg
 
任せる means to leave something in someone else's hands. These sound like options to 'delegate' (ie. put it on 'auto') or take manual control.
 
任せる means to leave something in someone else's hands. These sound like options to 'delegate' (ie. put it on 'auto') or take manual control.
I think you're right. In the previous version of the game you could choose those options in the game options screen or in the in-game options screen. Since I was having trouble with this one I decided to go ahead and spend today working on the in-game options screen and discovered that there's no option to let the ai handle airforce and land battles, it only lets you choose for naval battles and animations. This seems like a strange design choice, but I digress.
 
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