Hi, I registered just to necro this thread, but I think I have some exciting news regarding the matter
🙂
To put it shortly, I am certain that it is feasible to port the TLWiki translation to the Saturn version of YU-NO. Since reading the
article on YU-NO on hardcoregaming101.net a few weeks ago, I've been interested in the Saturn version of the game and poked around the game's files. In time, I managed to reverse-engineer all relevant file formats. Note that this has all been done without any decompilation whatsoever from my side - this has mainly been an exercise in recognizing patterns in the raw bytes of the different files.
For enabling the translation, I am writing a Python library, which is a very good exercise in OOP. As of now, the following is possible:
- Import and export all game assets from the archive files on the discs in their native, proprietary formats. This includes the sound effects and FMVs. The only exception to this are the voice files since these are stored with an added layer of compression it seems.
- Import and export of main in-game graphics to and from PNG
- Import and export of font graphics to and from PNG
- Import and export of auxiliary graphics (items, cursor, text box borders) to and from PNG
The next step is to implement in-game text import and export for the scenario files. I have found out how the text is stored and accessed, so this is mainly programming work. For those interested: Messages consist of byte sequences indexing a dictionary of string sections stored at the end of a scenario file. All strings seem to consist strictly of SJIS-encoded full-width characters with no apparent support for half-width characters. The plan is to generate font graphics for all pairs of half-width characters that occur in the translated text, replace the original font graphics and map the translated text to the original japanese character codes. The game uses 2137 different full-width characters, so this is definitely viable. Replacing the character-drawing routine to support variable-width latin font rendering would be preferable, but unfortunately this is beyond my abilities.
Some caveats apply:
- The actual message display commands are buried in a command byte stream inside the scenario files. Either a very good heuristic or finding out the format of the other commands is necessary in order to successfully isolate all message commands.
- There are some special two-byte control characters used throughout the in-game text whose meanings are unclear as of now.
- It is unknown how the game wraps text. My guess is that this is done automatically at full-width spaces, so these may have to be injected into the translated text for correct wrapping.
- Some of the game's text, mainly the main menu bits, is stored in a binary file. This imposes strict character limits on those parts and will necessitate adding some custom character font graphics in order to fit the translated text.
I will chime in again in some weeks once some progress has been made
🙂
