Let's localize Bomberman Fight!!

[malenko]

It didn't take a genius to see that I started working on this game, if you saw my other post about how to change graphics in Sega Saturn games it was pretty obvious.
Terra Phantastica is still getting chipped away at, but its a whole lot of game.

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BETA patches will be posted on Shiro's Patreon and after a few weeks the old patches will be put up here. They will also probably get the final patch for a couple days before final release. To note: I do not get any money from Shiro or from making patches I'm just trying to help them get subs and as an added bonus I get some dedicated beta-testers!

I decided to tackle this game because it is quite fun, a Japanese Saturn Exclusive, and its mostly tile work (no shift-JIS)

Alright onto the good stuff aka the pretty pictures!

These meters don't mean much if you don't know what they do:

Well, now you know!

There are 2 stats that are not shown, jump and deca-bomb


Under Player entry/player data , you can keep track of your stats and preferred bomber for battle mode:

Under sound mode its pretty limited just stereo/mono and a simple sound test

Pad type just chooses the isometric orientation

And battle mode config gives you these options:

 

[malenko]

I do have all the names on the Character select screen done. In Japan White Bomber is known as Shirobon and Black Bomber is Kurobon , I decided to truncate the name to Shiro and Kuro ; W.Bomber and B.Bomber are just too generic for a game with this much personality. The names are used for more than just the select screen, they are also used to reference each other in story mode.

Shirobon!

Kurobon!

knocked out this piece of Engrish while I was there:

I have also started what undoubtedly will take an immense amount of time....Story mode.

The scenes that show up with old tile values prior to editing them, sometimes have funny looking results.

Hulyeswoot
Suddenoue!

 

[paul_met]

I would recommend taking screenshots in the original pixel aspect ratio with integer scaling. In this case, there will be no distortion (unlike your screenshots).

 

[hotvi]

man this is beautiful!, good job man!

 

[malenko]

so a little more detail on how I'm going through and replacing text......

First I start by taking a screen grab of the text I'm trying to replace:

Then I use the method described in this post: Let's replace Sega Saturn graphics.
to find the first Japanese glyph. Then using Bytesearch I located the data in the file "HOWCHR.BIN"

Now the thing to note here is that this game does not use Shift-JIS nor ASCII encoding. It makes its own table based on the character order in HOWCHR.BIN If you look at the image of HOWCHR.BIN then the text from the demo, you can see the pattern emerging from the character order.
If you cant figure out the pattern its 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 5 8 10

Now the hard part is FINDING the pattern. I started short by trying just find the first 5 , because if you can get it down like 10 or so possible files its a lot better than hundreds or even thousands. I started by byte-searching 01 02 03 04 05 , 1 2 3 4 5 , 0 1 2 3 4 , 00 01 02 03 04 and I couldn't find anything. I was looking at raw data in the game files and noticed there was a lot of 00 padding between the data so I decided to search for 0001 0002 0003 0004 and I ended up getting a hit!

You'll notice that the 10 was 0A which is just hex for 10.

As a test I swapped the first values to 00 01 00 01 00 01 , and made a patch for testing

Knowing that this was the correct value and the correct set of tiles. The next step will be to draw English letters over the Japanese glyphs.
I will then keep a record of the tile changes and use those values to fill in all the text. The tutorial section only has 56 tiles or so; so I will need to capture all the text and figure out the best verbiage to use. I will update this post when I get to the tutorial part , right now Im getting through all of Shiro's story mode.

 

[malenko]

Haven't been updating the thread, but I have been plugging away at the localization!

All of Shiro's story scenes are done up through stage 6 (pre and post fight) and I am currently working on stage 7 ; might be done up to the stage 8 intro by the end of the day if I can stay motivated.

The endings are separate from the story tiles, so I'll be starting over with tile work there if I cant figure out the ASM side of things.

There are actually 2 sets of tiles for the endings, 1 for the ending splash screens, and another for the credit scroll. I was able to find the scroll scroll tiles and injected the game title graphics over the Japanese counter part and made sure it worked in game:

 

[Fandu]

Thanks for the updates. Very cool game to play with some friend/couple, etc. Iirc, another user was messing arround with Bomberman Wars, it will be nice to have all bomberman games translated finally.

 

[BlueMoon95]

Initially, I was playtesting and proofreading test builds of Shiro's story for Malenko's patch on original hardware, but after he had shown me the basics of where the file data was and how it's stored and everything else, I am now currently (slowly but surely) working on Kuro's story for him. Despite still learning some things in regards to this and slowly improving as work is being done, I have finished Stage 1 of Kuro's story and will resume later tonight.

 

[malenko]

and while he chips away at Kuro's story I'm going to get started on the staff credit roll which is a TON of tile work. As soon as the endings are finished being translated by @SoloNerfherder I'll start implementing them while more story is being done by @BlueMoon95.

We should have a new Shiro patreon patch up soon.

Needs a slight alignment fix but I'm doing that as I go down. Im also putting surnames first as they are shown in the credit scroll.

 

[BlueMoon95]

Stage 2 of Kuro's story is finished.

 

[BlueMoon95]

Kuro's 3rd stage is half way done now, somewhat.

 

[malenko]

While he works on that I have the encoding of the endings sorted (I can change sentence length now) and I located all the staff tiles. Kerning might be an issue though, merp