In 2011 TLWiki made a fan translation of Yu-No on PC98, this is a patch that may possibly be easy to use for the Saturn version.

[Mr^Burns]

The PC98 and Saturn versions are quite identical, the Saturn has a few explicit sex scenes removed.

"An English-language fan-made translation patch for the Windows version was released in September 2011 by TLWiki.

As well as the translation, it provides re-inserted voices from the Sega Saturn version, explicit sex scenes, Ryu Umemoto's original FM score and Sega Saturn CGs.

Hardcore Gaming 101 praised the patch for the quality of its translation and called it "one of the finest examples of fan efforts in video gaming"

TLWiki has removed their site but somebody thankfully backed it up on archive.org, just search for Yu-No in the root to find all the patch content:
archive.org/details/wiki-tlwiki

Recently Spazzery used TLWikis patch for the PSP Vita version Reddit Yu-No PC-98 Vita partial English translation v0.1

And for making that patch Spazzery used some python tools for extracting the text, I will attach those tools at the bottom of this post, thanks to shiningforceforever for giving me the tools.

Spazzery about the python tools:

"Yep, this was for extracting the arc tools. One you unpack the scripts with that you get a bunch of MES files, these have to be unpacked as well, and then you get .MST files which works pretty much exactly the same as .txt files"

 

[deadsnare]

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 🙂

 

[Spazzery]

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 🙂

Hi deadsnare! Well done looking into this! 😀

I created a translation port of this game for the PS Vita, so I have knowledge about scripts and how the game functions. I can offer some help, as it'd be neat seeing this game playable on the Saturn!

Regarding images: I actually had a friend create an image exporter, that can decode the images from GRAPH.ABL to BMP files. I really wanted to the Saturn version's CGs, as there are hundreds of CGs in this game and they remade all of them for Saturn. Maybe that tool could be of use to you.

Feel free to contact me on Discord: my name is also Spazzery there.

 

[deadsnare]

@Spazzery Thank You very much for the kind help! However, I think I already have everything I need to finish this project sooner or later.

For further updates, I have opened a new thread.

 

[Spazzery]

@Spazzery Thank You very much for the kind help! However, I think I already have everything I need to finish this project sooner or later.

For further updates, I have opened a new thread.

Okay! But I will add that for the game's epilogue, there's dialogue differences between the PC-98/PC JP version and Saturn JP version.

The PC Fan-TL from 2011 mixed both PC and Saturn lines. Usually they went with the Saturn lines.

[Snippet from game's pages]
#begin page138
//L04626: 01 "【\protag】ははは‥‥あのクンクン鳴くから、そう名前がついたというアレか。"
//Saturn: 【たくや】あのトカゲみたいなのが、鳴いてるだろうな‥‥ははは。
L04626: 01 "【\protag】That lizard-thing is whining all the time... hahaha."
// pc: 'Hahaha... Yu-no settled on the name Kun-kun because her whining sounds sort of like that.'
#end page138

#begin page139
//L0469E: 01 "【\protag】いつも情けない声ばかり出してる、妙なヤツなんだ。"
//Saturn: 【たくや】クンクン鳴くから、そう名前がついちまった‥‥わが娘ながら、なかなかやるぜ。
L0469E: 01 "【\protag】Yu-no settled on the name Kun-kun because his whining sounds sort of like that... I'd have expected nothing less from my daughter."
// pc: 'It's a pretty weird creature, constantly moaning so pathetically.'
#end page139```

Source:

Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO:Z53 04.MST - TLWiki

web.archive.org

If you're lucky, the TLWiki fan-translators might've also translated the Saturn exclusive lines in those archive.org files, that weren't featured in the 2011 PC Fan-TL (eg kissing scenes that replaced H-scenes in the Saturn version).

Good news is that the main game part is identical between the PC and the Saturn version. So it's only the epilogue where you might need the archive.org files. But you can double-check, of course 🙂

 

[deadsnare]

@Spazzery This is good to know! I also noticed differences between the Scenario files themselves. Some of the PC scenario files are not existent in the Saturn version, some lines belong to different files between versions etc.

In the end, there is no getting around matching the whole game script message by message between versions, automating as much as possible. I hope that this leaves only a few lines to be newly translate.

 

[Campanella]

Hello! If anyone would appreciate help on this project I would love to assist in any way possible. I'm a Japanese to English translator who's worked on a few projects and dabbled into romhacking and reverse engineering before, YU-NO is one of my favourite games and I believe I could do Saturn-exclusive scenes justice if any translations are needed. Sorry if this is out of the blue or unneeded but I was pleasantly surprised to see this thread revived, I had wanted to work on it on my own too but other things got in the way since then.