J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues - English Translation 1.00

[fire_lizard]

Bizhawk!

I may be doing something horribly wrong, but Bizhawk does not play some videos, only sound (for example, "alcoholic contest" in the Prologue).

 

[OfManNotMachine]

Hopefully 3DO game hacking improves soon. There's some interesting stuff going on, notably with the Open Lara port. There's also a fella doing a port of a very popular 2D bloody fighter from the 90's! Don't wanna say what it is in case they don't want that info out there yet, but I'm sure you can take a wild guess which one it is!

 

[Arjak]

I may be doing something horribly wrong, but Bizhawk does not play some videos, only sound (for example, "alcoholic contest" in the Prologue).

That's actually the intended behavior of the game. Only the PC and LaserActive versions contain all the video scenes. The other ports made a lot of scenes audio only with still frames in order to shrink the game size down to two discs. The PC version is on five discs in comparison.

 

[Shadowmask]

Glad this is out! Let's keep translating FMV games🙂

 

[Toppis]

Is this game now fully translated?

 

[Arjak]

Is this game now fully translated?

It is!

 

[JProctor666]

I would love to translate the other J.B. Harold titles at some point. I don't think it will be my next project, though. I need a break.

It's quite unfortunate that the FMV remake of Manhattan Requiem was not ported far and wide like Blue Chicago Blues was. If I had the time and the money, I would fly around the world, kicking emulator developers' butts until a LaserActive emulator was made. I might be able to do something with other versions, but that would require me to learn a whole new skill set.

I actually got very lucky with Blue Chicago Blues as my first translation project. There were a lot of factors that made it a good first project.

First, the existence of the English dub in an easy to manipulate format. If the PC version didn't have the video clips as simple AVI video files, I doubt that this project would've been possible. Capturing LaserActive footage would be very hard, and impossible to do on my budget.

Second, good tools that made editing the Saturn version easy to learn. Without the work done by this community, I would've probably given up long ago. At one point, I was planning to do other versions as well, starting with the 3DO, but my attempts to make changes to that version have been rocky. 3DO game hacking is still in its infancy, and the tools are just not good enough for someone of my skill level to make it happen at this time. I might take a look at the PSX version at some point, but for now, I'm done.

Third, no assembly required. Another lucky break was that all the text was stored in graphic files, making it a simple matter to edit them.

While it's not an immediate concern, I would definitely be open to coming back to J.B. Harold at some point in the future. I don't know which version I would do, but I'll try to look into it someday.

The non-FMV version is available for Switch on the Japanese eShop with full text available in English, I've just been playing it on there...

 

[Ace_of_DiscaL]

I would love to translate the other J.B. Harold titles at some point. I don't think it will be my next project, though. I need a break.

It's quite unfortunate that the FMV remake of Manhattan Requiem was not ported far and wide like Blue Chicago Blues was. If I had the time and the money, I would fly around the world, kicking emulator developers' butts until a LaserActive emulator was made. I might be able to do something with other versions, but that would require me to learn a whole new skill set.

I actually got very lucky with Blue Chicago Blues as my first translation project. There were a lot of factors that made it a good first project.

First, the existence of the English dub in an easy to manipulate format. If the PC version didn't have the video clips as simple AVI video files, I doubt that this project would've been possible. Capturing LaserActive footage would be very hard, and impossible to do on my budget.

Second, good tools that made editing the Saturn version easy to learn. Without the work done by this community, I would've probably given up long ago. At one point, I was planning to do other versions as well, starting with the 3DO, but my attempts to make changes to that version have been rocky. 3DO game hacking is still in its infancy, and the tools are just not good enough for someone of my skill level to make it happen at this time. I might take a look at the PSX version at some point, but for now, I'm done.

Third, no assembly required. Another lucky break was that all the text was stored in graphic files, making it a simple matter to edit them.

While it's not an immediate concern, I would definitely be open to coming back to J.B. Harold at some point in the future. I don't know which version I would do, but I'll try to look into it someday.

Thanks again, and all over again!

If you need any graphic editing or sound work done for your future projects, please let me know.