Translating Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers

[TrekkiesUnite118]

So Megaflan sent me the files he extracted from the 3DS version of the game and I've been playing around with them for the past few days. Overall this looks like it could be a fairly straight forward script conversion. The key things that work in this game's favor are the following:

• The 3DS file formats are very similar to the Saturn file formats save for some endian differences.
• The game already supports ASCII encoding and will automatically switch to an 8x16 font when it detects ASCII text.

So with those things in mind, I've had some success with converting the 3DS files over to work on the Saturn as you can see here:

As you can see the game seems fairly stable with this converted text, but there are some issues. The biggest one is that the 3DS version allows for more characters per line, and implements a Variable Width Font. The Saturn on the other hand has a fixed width font and about 3-4 less characters per line. So either we can try to rework the font system to use a VWF system, have more characters per line, or edit the script to fit with in the Saturn's technical limits.

There's still a lot to do here but overall it's looking very promising. If any other programmers want to help out on this let me know. It could probably be something to work on in between other projects to eventually get it done. This thread can effectively be the official project discussion area.

 

[mrkotfw]

This is excellent work.

I think that using the original font is the best way to go.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

With some more tinkering I have the Map screens working in a similar fashion. They still need some fine tuning but it is looking to be pretty easy to get the data working.

As you can see the same formatting issues apply, but it should be fixable.

 

[dibz]

Nice, excellent work as always guys. Looking forward to this!

 

[luis]

This is really exciting news, I'll love to test this out once It's released

 

[Ardiloso]

The timing is perfect since Soul Hackers 2 came to Gamepass and I was planning a playthrough.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Working with Mr.Conan we've been able to start work on getting a Variable Width Font system into the game which along with a few other tweaks seems to address the issues with lines not fitting in the original text boxes:

 

[savemypoorbrain]

Excellent work as always Trekkies! Excited for this one

 

[dibz]

Working with Mr.Conan we've been able to start work on getting a Variable Width Font system into the game which along with a few other tweaks seems to address the issues with lines not fitting in the original text boxes:
View attachment 8484View attachment 8485View attachment 8486View attachment 8487View attachment 8488View attachment 8489

The new VWF looks great!