Noon English Translation (looking for testers)

[ryanm8]

This is a really cool, unique, and obscure game. It's kind of like a cross between a puzzle game and Bomberman. It even supports up to 4 players and has quite a lot of text / storyline material.

Reason I know about this game is because I imported it way back in the 90's for my Saturn. I actually still own the disc, but I always wanted to play it in English.

I spent a lot of time on this and everything is translated and working from my testing. But due to the amount of text and different characters, I would like some help testing it before I release. I also am looking for someone to test it on real hardware. I still have my Saturn somewhere, but these days I just play on an emulator.

Please let me know if you're interested! There is a Tutorial mode to help you understand how to play it.

I intentionally left a few things in Japanese:

1. The text on the Game Menu screen. The game translates the Japanese into English right below the Japanese text already, so it would make no sense to translate that and duplicate the text in English.
2. On the title screen, under the Noon logo, it says "Noon" in Japanese, so I left that.

 

[ryanm8]

Forgot to mention... I found a debug menu hidden in this game.

On the Game Menu screen, if you press Left, Right, Right, Left, Up, Down, Up, Down, B, Start within 1.5 seconds it will open up the debug menu. You can change some settings and view the endings for the characters.

 

[Danthrax]

Hi, I can test it out on real hardware via my Satiator.

So how did you end up translating this game and hacking the translation in? How long did it take you?

 

[ryanm8]

Hi, I can test it out on real hardware via my Satiator.

So how did you end up translating this game and hacking the translation in? How long did it take you?

Awesome, I will send you the xdelta.

This game was much easier to hack than Leynos 2 because the text is stored uncompressed as Shift-JIS. It also already contained 8x16 glyphs for full-width versions of A-Z, a-z, and 0-9, but I wouldn't have been able to fit a lot of characters for each line, so I re-drew the font to reduce the spacing from 9 pixels to 6. The original font would have only allowed 13 characters per line, which is fine for Japanese since it can convey more meaning than English in the same amount of space. The new font allowed me 20 characters; much better for English.

Then I had to update the instruction that sets the glyph width to account for this change.

There were several pictures that also had to be re-drawn (like the backup RAM screen, title, etc.) but 99% of the text was handled by the font I mentioned above.

One issue I had to overcome in testing was with the endings. I noticed a few endings had overlapping text (one line would start to draw while the previous line was still there). This happens when parts of the ending are skipping ahead by number of frames instead of waiting for all the characters to draw. In Japanese, it was drawing less characters, so that was fine. But with the new narrower font, I had to change the instruction to speed up how quickly the front is drawn. Don't worry, it looks completely natural with the new font and that fixed the overlapping in the endings.

I used Claude for the first draft of the translation, then cross-checked it with Gemini and hand-edited every single line so that it made sense. I left the script pretty faithful to the original. I mainly just changed the stiff or awkward sounding phrases, but honestly, Claude did pretty good in the draft. I would say I kept 80% of it. I fed it the entire context so it was able to tell that Rongo (for example) is a big, dumb guy with limited vocabulary... And K.K. speaks like a robot would. But it still had some awkward phrasing I had to fix and did get some of the names wrong... One example is it translated コロル as "Kororu" and コロレ as "Korore". But in the game they are "Color" and "Colore", so I changed it. I feel the translation is high quality.