Egword 2.0 English translation

[retrodadandmodernlad]

Hey everyone, I been working on a small project to translate the menus and options in egword 2.0 for sega saturn into english. I have been inspired by the great work of people here to try a small project of my own and wanted to share my progress. I have only just showed off and announced the project as i wanted to see if i could make some progress before committing. It should be ready to release a patch fairly soon. Here is some more information about the egword software and the project:

"EGWORD is basically a word processor software CD that can be used to create, save, edit, and print documents. It was released as a Japanese exclusive and was bundled with a printer (Canon BJC-210J) and/ or printer interface cable. Some bundles also came with the Sega Saturn keyboard.

The Version of EGWORD used for the English translation is Egword version 2, which was the last version released for the Sega Saturn. There was also version 1 and version 1.2 released for the sega saturn. The Egword version 2 bundle included an upgraded printer interface, which allowed photos to be uploaded from a digital camera. These pictures could then be edited, added to documents, saved, and printed.

As well as being able to upload your own pictures from a digital camera there is also 566 images available to use that are stored on the egword software. These consist mainly of clip art images, but there are also images of Sega characters from games such as virtua fighter kids, fighting vipers, nights, and sonic to choose from.

Egword is compatible with the Sega Saturn floppy disc drive (FDD) for saving. I can confirm that people who own the" Saturn Gamer's Cartridge" from developer Cafe Alpha can also use it to save directly to the SD card. This is because the saturn gamer's cartridge is able to act as the FDD for saves.

The English translation of egword aims to translate all the menus and options in the software. The software was previously entirely in Japanese. It will also add some new Sega Saturn related images that can be added to documents. The English translation patch will be available soon for people to download and use. "

Thanks for all the great work you all do and hopefully people will have fun playing around with the egword english patch when its ready soon.

 

[Knight0fDragon]

What an interesting little project. Are you just tile swapping? Is that why print is Prt?

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

Yes, so on the main tab bars i am keeping the words the same length as the original Japanese characters. So some of the words i may use abbreviations for like prt for print. Some of the sub-menus have lots of space (00) after the original Japanese words so its easier to fit in more characters (for example the document titles). I am not very experienced in doing this sort of thing so the main objective is to make it so people can have fun with the software as i think its really interesting, but was not very accessible for non Japanese speakers. Although i am trying to keep it as close to the original text as possible.

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

What an interesting little project. Are you just tile swapping? Is that why print is Prt?

I forgot to tag you in my reply above. I have been able to extend some of the main tab bar words to make the English fit since. This video was only just released , but i made it a week or two ago. Some words like print are now in, but some others are still abbreviated to fit. I have also attached a picture of my printer interface, which i will do some videos on soon to show how to upload and edit pictures using a digital camera and other features using the egword 2.0 translation.

 

[Mr^Burns]

It would be interesting to see what's inside the camera/printer interface, maybe we can build our own or make it work with any printer/camera

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

It would be interesting to see what's inside the camera/printer interface, maybe we can build our own or make it work with any printer/camera

Yes, that would be good. In terms of compatibility for the egword 2.0 printer interface. I read a japanese sega saturn magazine preview of the software showing how it all works a while ago. The article name drops a cannon printer and the sega digio camera as examples , but also states or other printer or digital camera. In other words should work with any digital camera or printer (from the time). These would need to be ones from the 90s though with the correct connectors/ input.

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

Testing four of the 12 new sega saturn related images being added to egword english translation. Main things left to do is translate the warning messages, test the image editor menus, finalise new pictures.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Yes, that would be good. In terms of compatibility for the egword 2.0 printer interface. I read a japanese sega saturn magazine preview of the software showing how it all works a while ago. The article name drops a cannon printer and the sega digio camera as examples , but also states or other printer or digital camera. In other words should work with any digital camera or printer (from the time). These would need to be ones from the 90s though with the correct connectors/ input.

It's probably a standard parallel printer port. Most printers that have that port are able to be used as a barebones printer without any special drivers, though they only do text in that set up.

 

[Knight0fDragon]

It's probably a standard parallel printer port. Most printers that have that port are able to be used as a barebones printer without any special drivers, though they only do text in that set up.

Classic dot matrix printers. There are probably a few early Desk Jet printers that also work off of the parallel interface, but these would most likely need a driver.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Yes and no. Quite a few Inkjet printers from the 90s used the parallel port as well, our first one that was an HP in the mid 90s was one. There is just a default "Generic Printer" option you can use in most Windows set ups that will just send it standard print commands over the parallel port regardless of the printer. Just about any printer with a parallel port should work in this mode, however it will ONLY do text.

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

It's probably a standard parallel printer port. Most printers that have that port are able to be used as a barebones printer without any special drivers, though they only do text in that set up.

yes, I think you are correct. it looks like a standard one.

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

This picture shows how you set up all the accessories with the egword. I took it from a japanese sega saturn magazine preview and it also appears in the egword 2.0 manual. I have cleaned it up, removed the Japanese text, and replaced it with English text to make it nice and easy for people to understand.

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

Uploading pictures from a digital camera, testing, and translating. there are 167 frames you can add to your photos.

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

Hey, everyone. I wonder if someone could offer me some advice.

So when i decided to try and translate the egword software i started to look round the game files and downloaded tilemolester to use. I then learned that using a hex editor and swapping the language to Japanese allowed me to find in game menu words. This made things a lot easier , although it turned out there's a lot more text in the game than i imagined particularly the predetermined documents. Once i figured out how it all worked having never used one before it was mainly a case of spending ages translating.

So i have now translated all the menus, sub menus, documents, pictures, warning signs, basically everything now. There is only one thing i have not translated and it is when using a control pad to type (instead of saturn keyboard) you use an on screen keyboard (see picture). You were already allowed to change the letters on the keyboard from Japanese to English. However, if you look at the picture you will notice that the bottom two rows of the keyboard (in pink) are in Japanese text. These are functions such as space, return, caps lock etc. Now most these functions are actually assigned to controller buttons any way and if you use a real keyboard to type the onscreen one is redundant and not used, but i would like to translate it any way so its all done.

So i think the on screen keyboard is likely stored as compressed picture tiles (does that sound correct?). How do i know which software to use to decompress the files so i can see them using tilemolester ? Any help would be appreciated as once i have done this i am releasing it for people to use as everything else is translated.

Thank you

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

So if you know what the exact compressed data looks like and where to find it in a Hex Editor, you can try copying it out of the game data into it's own file and then throwing it at different common Saturn Compression utlities. Puyo Tools can handle PRS compression which is a pretty common one on Saturn, another is CMP which is an RLE type of compression that @Mr Conan has a tool to decompress. If it ends up being something different though, you'll need to reverse engineer the compression algorithm by looking at the assembly code in a debugger while it's decompressing.

@nanash1 is honestly very good at this and was a big help for these things with Grandia.

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

So if you know what the exact compressed data looks like and where to find it in a Hex Editor, you can try copying it out of the game data into it's own file and then throwing it at different common Saturn Compression utlities. Puyo Tools can handle PRS compression which is a pretty common one on Saturn, another is CMP which is an RLE type of compression that @Mr Conan has a tool to decompress. If it ends up being something different though, you'll need to reverse engineer the compression algorithm by looking at the assembly code in a debugger while it's decompressing.

@nanash1 is honestly very good at this and was a big help for these things with Grandia.

Thanks for the help/advise. No, i don't know where it is. In the hex editor and tilemolester i was able to find where the alphabet is stored in English, but the words being used under it on the in game keyboard can not be found. That's why i was thinking maybe the keyboard is compressed tile images. So if i change the letters for example i changed A TO H in tilemolester then the key board stays the same, but when i press A on the keyboard the letter that goes on the page would be H (pictures below). There isn't many files in the software to look at but there's two called kb1 and kb2.... could these be keyboard 1 and 2 not sure, but there are two versions of onscreen keyboard one with Japanese letters the other in English (apart from the bottom two rows).

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

Some good news i was able to find the code for the English keyboard by extracting files and using the hex editor. Putting it into tilemolester doesn't show much , so am presuming its compressed (does that sound right?). So i will try using some of the compression utilities suggested by @TrekkiesUnite118 .

I have attached a picture of the English keyboard. I deleted some select code from various places and imported it back into the game and as you can see the bottom left key button is now blank indicating the code i deleted was for that. Am still not exactly sure what is what with it at this point because its not as straight forward as deleting a line of code. It took deleting select bits from different lines to delete only the key area or it started deleting all the pixels from a straight line right across the keyboard.

If anyone has any suggestions or advise on how best to proceed i would appreciate it.

I will continue to try different things to see what i can do, but do feel like i have made some progress with the issue.

 

[Knight0fDragon]

It does not mean it is compressed. Doubt it is compressed either. Those are 192x101 4bpp images and they are in the ISO uncompressed, so it must be in a file.

KB1.DAT and KB2.DAT are your keyboards

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

It does not mean it is compressed. Doubt it is compressed either. Those are 192x101 4bpp images and they are in the ISO uncompressed, so it must be in a file.

KB1.DAT and KB2.DAT are your keyboards

View attachment 6070

Thanks for your reply and help. yes i was using the kb2 for the english keyboard when i change it to blank and managed to change one of the words before using hex editor. I am very new to all this so i wasn't sure whether it was compressed. You are right it is not. Can i ask how you get it to open like your pictures above. When i extracted kb2 and opened it in cystaltile2 it looked like below?

 

[retrodadandmodernlad]

It does not mean it is compressed. Doubt it is compressed either. Those are 192x101 4bpp images and they are in the ISO uncompressed, so it must be in a file.

KB1.DAT and KB2.DAT are your keyboards

View attachment 6070

Update
I have managed to get them up like you said with the information you provided.

Thank you very much for helping me