Sakura Taisen: A newbie translation attempt

[Sixfortyfive]

I hope topics like this aren't frowned upon. I used to do a fair amount of ROM hacking back in the day for SNES/SFC games, but I'm completely new to Saturn hacking and all the information is a little overwhelming. I'm willing to learn though.

I want to translate the text in Sakura Taisen from Japanese to English. All I've really been able to figure out so far is that the game seems to use Shift-JIS encoding for the characters. Also, different font/dialogue files exist for each section of the game, which are broken down like so:

####.BIN

####FCE.BIN

####KNJ.BIN

####TBL.BIN

Cyber Warrior X briefly discusses this on his website, and he's even made a utility for messing around with this game. Unfortunately, I can't run it. I got an error message saying that I was missing ALLEG41.DLL. I searched for such a file on Google, downloaded it, and tried again, but I get the typical WinXP application crash message now.

Any help on how to approach these files or CWX's program, or even just documents on editing text in Saturn games in general, would be greatly appreciated.

 

[DBOY]

I would seriously wish you a LOT of luck in finding someone who would translate the script using a tool llike that. It's not a bad idea at all, in fact, Byuu wrote something just like it for Dragon Quest V. The problem is it's incredibly inconvenient if you need to look up a word you don't know. So unless your translator is a native speaker (rare to find one who feels like doing video games) you might have some difficulty there. When byuu sent me that tool and asked me to proofread his DQ5 translation and make sure the translations were accurate, I thought he was joking. It's a serious anal pain to go that route.

My personal recommendation would be to write an OCR like tool that would bust the images to tiles and store each tile as a byte string in an array slot, and have a corresponding array of the Shift-JIS. This way you could run the OCR on each chunk of characters used in the game and have it recognize as many as possible, then just have whoever is helping with the translation fill in the blanks. It would be a very fast and efficient way to get plain-text dumps of the script.

From someone else who has been doing translations since the SNES days (woo, FF5 in 1996) it's not a whole lot different. The biggest obstacle is bad emulation (which we dealt with then for SNES, remember SUper PASOFAMI?), the other problem is having to burna disk to test your work, though CWX's action replay method should help you save a lot of money there, if you can afford the initial ARP+CommLink investment.

I sold my Sakura Taisen when I got the Dreamcast remake, so I can't answer questions directly about that game. But if you have questions about CD-based translations, I've done some work with Saturn, Dreamcast, PSX and PC over the last 4 years, so I or someone else might be able to help you more if you can be specific and provide examples to look at.

 

[CyberWarriorX]

In all honesty, as a first project I'd suggest you do something a little less... time consuming. I managed to dump Sakura Taisen XP's script(and from what I could tell, it doesn't seem to be any different from the original saturn game) and it's somewhere around 2-2.5 megs. In contrast, Langrisser III and Snatcher both had around a 1 meg script, and it's hard enough to find a translator for those games.

Cyber Warrior X

 

[DBOY]

Langrisser doesn't have legions of anime fans orgasming over it, though. I'm sure he could find a translator for Sakura Wars, though given the fanbase of volunteers to get help from... I'd seriously call their accuracy into question.

 

[CyberWarriorX]

True, but I also question how many of these legions of fans have the work ethic to finish a >2 meg script.

Cyber Warrior X

 

[Pearl Jammzz]

do snatcher.....everybody loves snatcher .

 

[CyberWarriorX]

Except for translators.

Cyber Warrior X

 

[Alexvrb]

They love it too. Just not japanese-only versions.

 

[DBOY]

Originally posted by CyberWarriorX@Dec 26, 2003 @ 02:02 PM

True, but I also question how many of these legions of fans have the work ethic to finish a >2 meg script.

Cyber Warrior X

A single one of them, none. But I bet you could get a legion of 20 groupies to rip it apart 200KB at a time.

 

[ExCyber]

And then you'd have to reconcile all the differences in translation, or you'll end up with a whole game that looks like Final Fantasy Tactics's Tutorial mode, telling you to select verbose and nonexistent menu options.

 

[madmalkav]

... and God said: "Look for a good editor. He will made the scripts files work toghether".

 

[Alexvrb]

Originally posted by ExCyber@Jan 1, 2004 @ 03:13 PM

And then you'd have to reconcile all the differences in translation, or you'll end up with a whole game that looks like Final Fantasy Tactics's Tutorial mode, telling you to select verbose and nonexistent menu options.

LOL! Eh.. you get used to it after a while. "Activate the fight command!" later becomes "Toggle the offensive button!"