Using the entire CD space...

[kool kitty89]

14 days , when I went on Holidays to VEGAS

Sorry, I meant you missed (ie hadn't joined the forum yet) one of the recently banned long-time members who was really full of himself: 17saysolderthannes http://sega-16.com/forum/member.php?u=5640

The problem is you question everything , and saying how this or that can be done better , just prove it, its so very simple . So C'mon . Translate 3X3 and show the amateurs that were WD, how its done

Actualy, no, that wouldn't fulfil what he's arguing: a better comparison would be taking one of the WD translated games and fixing the sloppy text coding/display used while keeping the actual words/translations intact.

I I understand his argument correctly, he's talking mainly about how the actual text (ie letters/characters, etc) are managed in the game compared to what he and others have done. (both homebrew and professionally)

HAhaha, that is pure gold. For anyone else, I'd chalk that up to sarcasm/joking. But for you, I'd take that at face value Hey Team Andromeda, Who's on second.

Hey, take it easy: look at his registration date and then look at 17days' banning date. He never got to *experience* 17days. (let alone TheEdge) And I doubt he's dug around old threads enough to notice that either.

I mean I didn't know about aquathehedgehog or (especially) regalsin until a good while after I joined and only then because of digging though soem old topics. (or because of honethecat getting outed, throwing a fit and then getting banned in the case of aqua)

[Team Andromeda]

Actualy, no, that wouldn't fulfil what he's arguing: a better comparison would be taking one of the WD translated games and fixing the sloppy text coding/display used while keeping the actual words/translations intact.

Fair enough, I want to know all text in question, what was in the Japanese original to what WD changed it too. So its should be quite easy for tomaitheous; He can properly translate Working Designs SEGA CD games, and just put in the correct text, instead of the parts where WD took some liberties with their text and translation.

I'll wait for the ISO's, and how it's meant to be done, with interest

Sorry, I meant you missed

I know. That's why I put in the Joke about Holidays. You know like when you come back, most people ask what I have I missed ?. But never mind

[kool kitty89]

Fair enough, I want to know all text in question, what was in the Japanese original to what WD changed it too. So its should be quite easy for tomaitheous; He can properly translate Working Designs SEGA CD games, and just put in the correct text, instead of the parts where WD took some liberties with their text and translation.

If I understand his statement correctly, the quality of the translation itself: ie spoken phrases in Japanese to English, are not the issue whatsoever, but rather more technical aspects of how the text was managed and perhaps other things like font used, color, etc.

Tomaitheous, could you elaborate on that?

I'll wait for the ISO's, and how it's meant to be done, with interest

Never going to happen, even if he was going to respond to a childish challenge like that, he already mentioned that he left that sector of the homebrew community and doesn't plan to go back.
The whole: "you do better and then come back" argument is really stupid. Hell, even if he did do better, it wouldn't be in the exact context of the time, so the point could still be argued moot: but if the only issue is proving that he indeed does have experience and know what he'd talking about, then that's a much more valid point. (the unrealistic and/or sarcastic/sardonic responses hardly seem to portray that though)

However, you could take a look at previous projects he's been a part of if you're really interested. (this thread probably isn't the place to start posting and critiquing that though... not that it's not any more off topic than most of the discussions, but more that it might be more productive somewhere else)

I know. That's why I put in the Joke about Holidays. You know like when you come back, most people ask what I have I missed ?. But never mind

Oh, you were joking, OK. I thought you meant I was implying you'd been temporarily banned or something.

[Team Andromeda]

he quality of the translation itself: ie spoken phrases in Japanese to English, are not the issue whatsoever, but rather more technical aspects of how the text was managed and perhaps other things like font used, color, etc.

I'm sorry its quite clear

WD with taking unnecessary liberties with the translations of the source material, period/dated/political jokes, etc as poor ethics for localizations.

Don't get the issues over colour or fonts . In a lot of translations fonts are changed, and colours too, not just in WD translations.

Never going to happen, even if he was going to respond to a childish challenge like that, he already mentioned that he left that sector of the homebrew community and doesn't plan to go back

How convenient, and I was so looking forward to Playing a brilliant translation of Popful, rather than Something a noob translation hacker would do. Oh well...
Translations aren't that easy, are they .

Now only if a computer could write creative prose.

[tomaitheous]

If I understand his statement correctly, the quality of the translation itself: ie spoken phrases in Japanese to English, are not the issue whatsoever, but rather more technical aspects of how the text was managed and perhaps other things like font used, color, etc.

Tomaitheous, could you elaborate on that?

Yup. You got it. Not sure why TA couldn't understand what I wrote, instead of trying to jump on my every word.

I guess I need to simply my previous points (and make clarifications on other). I do not, and never thought, WD put out poor manuals. Never said, never felt that. I also believe they were great in trying to keep the original cover and other art intact. While I didn't mention it before, they're dubbing was pretty decent too, for the time.

What I did say, was that WD early work was amateur at best for modifying the game code and print routine. Sloppy and hackish work. Not just one title, but three. Maybe he had poor coders employed. I dunno. But I do remember someone quoting Vic saying that early projects with changes to the source code were done be original company (his reasons is that they wouldn't let his company touch the source code, even though he licensed it. That smells like bullshit to me. More like he didn't have capable coders to take on the task, or at least fully).

And of the three titles that I already mentioned, it wasn't about font color. I'd need to give a lesson in print/font routines to better explain. But I won't waste me time do that - just a brief explanation. Most Japanese fonts are fairly wide, because you need the pixel detail to represent Kanji (Kana less so). This looks terrible if you keep the width/size and use Roman font letters in place. Look up the famed Terranigma translated to see what I mean. So, to circumvent this you code a whole new Roman font friendly print routine. That means storing a new font, new tilemap routine, etc. It's not as simple as just replacing the font graphics. You need a whole new display routine. That's for fixed width fonts. It gets even hairier for variable width font (VWF look it up). And yet, professional translations got new FWF and even VWF routines. WD, for Exile 2, just used all upper case fonts. Looks dated (reminiscent of 8bit era where they didn't have enough room for lowercase in the tile part of vram) and terrible (no lower case). Exile 1 uses 12x12 SJIS font, with uses the Roman characters from the set. Looks terrible and you can barely fit any words in the text box (Terranigma syndrome) - see here near the middle of the page. Cosmic Fantasy 2 uses the SJIS 16x16 font, and uses the Roman letters in that set, but scales each letter 8x16 on the fly. CF2 isn't so bad, but considering they had the source code to worth with, it comes off as amateurish still. Compared to other translated games on the same system, those non WD games looked professionally done. Yes, working with CD titles isn't easy, because ram can be tight, but the other games from the other companies manage with it just fine (plus they're other options). CD titles compared to carts. If you need more on a cart project, you just increase the size, or cut back some text, or remove some graphics - to make room for space. Cybernator is one such cart game that supposedly had the still pics of the dialog boxes remove, in order to make room for the English text and such.

I made the reference to the translation of original text as being amateur-ish too, but not by my claim nor did I see any fault in it. I don't know enough Japanese to make a qualified opinion on the matter (but I doubt TA does either, even though he's stoutly defending it). TA is just reading into shit that isn't there. And the manual with the blatantly false info; it's either MKR or Albert Odyssey (which I still own) - one of the last pages. My friend told me about it. I don't remember the details, nor did I care. But if TA is as such a gaming, and WD, and Saturn aficionado then he should have known exactly what I was talking about. Either way, there were accusations about WD doing... basically sloppy work. I couldn't, can't, really don't care to validate all these claims, but I do know of sloppy work in their earlier stuff. Because of having experience with translation work first hand.

And my credibility is in question, I guess. You want to know what I've done? Fine..

BubbleGum Crash (cart): I completely replaced the print routine, japanese font, and string reading routine. I also wrote a script inserter, to insert the new English text back into the rom. The rom wasn't big enough, so I expanded the rom and wrote a special ingame call system for 'far' text. I also rewrote the pointer table for the new text strings. Oh, and I created special fixed bitmap text for words that appear on the map box select screen - dirty but efficient. David Shadoff originally dumped the japanese script and Matt translated it.

LadySword (cart): I figured out how the original Japanese font was compressed and recompressed a new Roman font for it. I don't remember if I changed the print routine to 8x16 or if it already used it (it's been too long). The rest of the game is being done by Matt.

Makai Hakkenden Shada (cart): I located the script, figured out the pointer table and text control codes, and dumped the script. I replaced the original Japanese 8x8 font. I still have about 70% translated script before my translated said he couldn't finish it (it's in old style japanese and too difficult for him). I had another translator take a look at the script, but never heard back. I abandoned the project and gave the script and my RE notes to a french friend MooZ and to David Shadoff. Mot sure if it'll ever see completion.

Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 (CD): Script and control codes were RE'd and dumped by David Shadoff. I did the print routine and the new text string reading routine (1byte characters). There wasn't enough room for an uncompressed font, so I RLE'd 1bit 8x12 Roman font with accented characters (for the French version of the translated text). RLE required a seek function and was too slow, as the original game expected the current 'character' to be fetched fairly quick. I used up using 4bit/nibble fast accumulation pointers to speed up the seeking but without taking up too much room. The game originally used 12x12 font system. I had to complete break that and convert it to 8x12. This game was also the second game that I did a VWF routine for and so I added additional control codes to the text parser, for clearing the vwf buffer, tab spacing, carriage return, etc. There's no more free space left in ram, so the game needs special formatting to get over some text wrapping bug and another bug (don't remember off hand). David Shadoff is handling the text insertion, so I have no more to do with this game.

Spriggan Mark 2 (CD); I located the pointer table blocks and dumped the text. This one had additional control codes for ADPCM voice overs for some text. I have to recalculate the pointer system for those control codes. I changed the original 12x12 font routine to an 8x8 VWF routine. I've had numerous translators work on the script for this game, but either give up to just disappear without any word. At one point, I had about 5 versions of the first level translated. I got soo sick of flaky translators and such, that I just gave up trying anymore. If I ever do, do any more translation work - it will definitely be this game. One of my favorite Compile shmups. It's like Target Earth - lots of in game text intermissions.

Cosmic Fantasy 1 (CD); I replaced the 12x12 print routine to 8x12. I used upgraded this game from CD to SCD, and used the additional ram to store the font and new code. This is the only game, too, that I purposely made it dual font compatible. For legal SJIS text, it will display the original 12x12 fonts. But single byte legal ASCII range, it displays 8x12 (maybe 6x12, I forget now. Been too long). The reason for this, is that David Shadoff is translating the game as he goes (area by area, town by town, etc). And it's easier to spot a string of Japanese kanji/kana if you know what it says (being print onscreen). Then all he has to do to track down this stray/hidden string, is do a SJIS search in the ISO for it. No idea how far he got with this translation. He had up to the second town area translated last I played it (WIP).

Cosmic Fantasy 4 (CD) ( Both games - chapter 1 and chapter 2). AnimeFX was doing the translation for this (by hand or whatever). I did a single byte ASCII strong read routine for him. I left the font as Roman 12x12, until he got more serious. Haven't heard from his in years.

Seiya Monogatari: Anearth Fantasy Stories (CD); not much work. The text was compressed with an LZSS variant. So I RE'd the scheme and wrote a compressor for it. Funniest thing I ever saw for LZSS, is that the ring buffer is pre-primer with a fixed set of values before running the decompression routine in game. So I had to snag those in order to decompress the text correctly. Not translated related, but I was impressed with this games library of routines - so I snagged them. It's one of the later games that by-passes the system card Bios routines to read from the CD drive. It's also much faster read routine. I successfully got a disassembled source thanks to MooZ's special PCE disassembler. I reassembled the code and tested it, it works great

There were some other small things for games I did, or did research+notes for future stuff, but don't remember off hand (and I've had a lot of HD crashes since then). I think I RE'd one of the compression schemes for Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari for someone that was working on the game translation (I left a document explaining the scheme over at RHDN - romhacking.net). Anyways, that's the crap I remember.

This whole 'do this game' to prove yourself type mentality is bullshit. If anything, I can ask the same of him. His opinions defending WD mean nothing unless he proves blah-blah-blah-blah. Anyway, he's just saying that because he knows I won't take up such a stupid challenge for such a stupid reasons (and he thinks me declining that challenge will discredit me somehow). I doubt he's retarded enough to actually think someone would actually take up a request challenge like that. But then again....

[Team Andromeda]

This whole 'do this game' to prove yourself type mentality is bullshit. If anything, I can ask the same of him

I'm just a gamer mate . You're always the one coming in and saying how this or that can be done better, how this is software rotation and what not (even though the programmer of the game differ's). Then you come in with all these lovely little issues about Working Designs. They weren't perfect, but better than most

MKR or Albert Odyssey (which I still own) - one of the last pages. My friend told me about it. I don't remember the details, nor did I care. But if TA is as such a gaming, and WD, and Saturn aficionado then he should have known exactly what I was talking about. Either way, there were accusations about WD doing... basically sloppy work. I couldn't, can't, really don't care to validate all these claims, but I do know of sloppy work in their earlier stuff. Because of having experience with translation work first hand.

I'm a gamer that was just happy to play the games in English at the end of the day , I have both games , if you want I'll happy scan the translation notes in.
I'm not sure there weren't many boasts in Albert's (bar improving the loading times) , more saying what was taken out (at the last min). I do know people that weren't happy with their Shining Wisdom translation and how the Pal version is truer to the source, never heard anything about AO though .

I don't know enough Japanese to make a qualified opinion on the matter (but I doubt TA does either, even though he's stoutly defending it). TA is just reading into shit that isn't there.

I don't speak any Japanese at all , and will never claim to do so . I'm just simply saying I was more than happy with the translations by Working Designs on the Sega CD, that's all. There had been some pretty piss poor English translations in the past, not least by SEGA

Sure I know people that aren't happy with some of the liberties taken with the Lunar Towns folk talk . There again in a lot of translations, another team (usually part timers) will be drafted in to translate some of the town people dialogue& menu's) Stuff that seen as 'unimportant text', and so some times liberties will be taken , but in most cases the original Japanese dialogue will be complete interrelate to non Japanese gamers anyway, So I don't get the big outcry myself.

[kool kitty89]

And of the three titles that I already mentioned, it wasn't about font color. I'd need to give a lesson in print/font routines to better explain. But I won't waste me time do that - just a brief explanation. Most Japanese fonts are fairly wide, because you need the pixel detail to represent Kanji (Kana less so). This looks terrible if you keep the width/size and use Roman font letters in place. Look up the famed Terranigma translated to see what I mean. So, to circumvent this you code a whole new Roman font friendly print routine. That means storing a new font, new tilemap routine, etc. It's not as simple as just replacing the font graphics. You need a whole new display routine. That's for fixed width fonts. It gets even hairier for variable width font (VWF look it up). And yet, professional translations got new FWF and even VWF routines. WD, for Exile 2, just used all upper case fonts. Looks dated (reminiscent of 8bit era where they didn't have enough room for lowercase in the tile part of vram) and terrible (no lower case). Exile 1 uses 12x12 SJIS font, with uses the Roman characters from the set. Looks terrible and you can barely fit any words in the text box (Terranigma syndrome) - see here near the middle of the page. Cosmic Fantasy 2 uses the SJIS 16x16 font, and uses the Roman letters in that set, but scales each letter 8x16 on the fly. CF2 isn't so bad, but considering they had the source code to worth with, it comes off as amateurish still. Compared to other translated games on the same system, those non WD games looked professionally done. Yes, working with CD titles isn't easy, because ram can be tight, but the other games from the other companies manage with it just fine (plus they're other options). CD titles compared to carts. If you need more on a cart project, you just increase the size, or cut back some text, or remove some graphics - to make room for space. Cybernator is one such cart game that supposedly had the still pics of the dialog boxes remove, in order to make room for the English text and such.

OK, that's really interesting, and in the context of cutting things to make more room: wouldn't that make optimizing for the text characters all the more important? (especially cutting tile sizes for text characters to minimize space used -I could see 8x8 characters being reasonable in many cases, plus you'd only use 1 tile per character in that case -or 1 8x8 sprites if you used sprites for the text overlay, hell it worked for text displays on various home computers, so why not? -actual characters were often limited to 6x8 iirc to allow proper horizontal spacing between letters -and especially if mode H32 with the wider pixels being more distinct except that the letters would also tend to look a bit wide then, in any case, you shouldn't really need more than 8x16 characters at most)

I seem to recall that Phantasy Star on the SMS removed the FM music to make space for the western text. (actually that came up in a discussion with a friend last weekend and before then I hadn't considered the issue of English translations needed more space due to words using more letters compared to use of kanji)
A shame the FM got left out though... no loss for normal SMS users, but for those who had a Japanese SMS or Mk.III (or more recently a modded western SMS) and wanted to play PS in English and have the FM, they were out of luck.
I seem to recall the PSG in PS being a big turn-off to you personally: hey, any interest in going back to translations one more time to rectify that issue? ... Or has someone already done that? (the Virtual Console port still only offered FM for the Japanese release)
Actually, in that case, you shouldn't need to hack the text, but bring over the FM music code/data (given ROM space wouldn't be an issue if you were using a flash cart or emulator anyway), unless it would be easier to hack English text into the JP version than hack FM into the English version.

[Team Andromeda]

I seem to recall that Phantasy Star on the SMS removed the FM music to make space for the western text. (actually that came up in a discussion with a friend last weekend and before then I hadn't considered the issue of English translations needed more space due to words using more letters compared to use of kanji)

The Zelda III Cart on the Snes is slightly bigger than its Japanese version due to the extra text . Its also a game where some moan about the 'liberties' taken with the translation. Isn't it also true that Shinji Mikam hates the change of Biohazard title, to Resdient Evil in the west ?

[kool kitty89]

The Zelda III Cart on the Snes is slightly bigger than its Japanese version due to the extra text . Its also a game where some moan about the 'liberties' taken with the translation. Isn't it also true that Shinji Mikam hates the change of Biohazard title, to Resdient Evil in the west ?

Yeah, but that's Nintendo and there's a HUGE number of games that lost things due to censorship, that lessened later on after the rating system and such, but even then you had a lot of cases of things being altered or left out in western versions. (you even had Ocarina of Time that initially had all the blood intact -not only the gold limited edition carts but a lot of the earlier gray carts as well as I own the latter- but later versions censored it including Classic Collection and Master Quest on the GC)

As for Lint to the past being slightly bigger, how much is slightly? You have practical limititations of how you can step-up ROM sizes and you can't often just bump size up a little but have to do it by a lot. (if you used a bunch of smaller ROM chips you could have more flexible game sizes, but there's a point where that quickly becomes more costly than using a lot more ROM in a single chip)
Thus, you often have games that are padded to fill the ROMs when they don't use the full capacity. (in that sense, you have extra space to work with in such translations without detriment)

In the case of Zelda LTP, both the US and Japanese versions seem to be 1 MB (8 Mbit) and that includes the original V1.0 revision. Same for the European version. Again, if all padding was stripped out, we'd probably see something different.

[Team Andromeda]

Yeah, but that's Nintendo and there's a HUGE number of games that lost things due to censorship, that lessened later on after the rating system and such, but even then you had a lot of cases of things being altered or left out in western versions.

NCL aren't really known for thier viloent games, and its not Like SEGA doesn't sensor it own games too. Take out some of full Body shots of Dural in Fighters MegaMix, the boobs on the Vine Boss on Lunar II (seems American can't deal with boob's, isn't that right Janet Jackson) or censoring Final Fight on the Mega CD, Dark Saviour on the Saturn, Streets of Rage III onthe Mega Drive

As for Lint to the past being slightly bigger, how much is slightly? You have practical limititations of how you can step-up ROM sizes and you can't often just bump size up a little but have to do it by a lot. (if you used a bunch of smaller ROM chips you could have more flexible game sizes, but there's a point where that quickly becomes more costly than using a lot more ROM in a single chip)

Just remember a Miyamoto interview ages back, where he said they had to slightly in creases the cart size due to the Japanese text taking up nearly all the cart's Rom, and so the western version was slightly bigger

[kool kitty89]

NCL aren't really known for thier viloent games, and its not Like SEGA doesn't sensor it own games too. Take out some of full Body shots of Dural in Fighters MegaMix, the boobs on the Vine Boss on Lunar II (seems American can't deal with boob's, isn't that right Janet Jackson) or censoring Final Fight on the Mega CD, Dark Saviour on the Saturn, Streets of Rage III onthe Mega Drive

Yeah, I know, and it's not like 3rd parties don't manage their own censorship too: I don't think Sega had anything to do with SFII SCE's "whitewashed" intro and definitely didn't have anything to do with Stormlord's clothed fairy. (that was done at the discretion of the developers).

And yeah, it seems like Americans are a lot more hug up on sex, but violence is relatively OK (obviosuly that's a generalization and varies by region). Sort of the Opposite in Europe (WTH was that with renaming Bloodlines???), but I think for me at home, it was a lot more to the actual violence side by far. (well violence and general profanity, etc)

Heh, that's probably why Night Trap was so blown out of proportion too... (seems like it got more attention than Mortal Kombat) seriously that entire game would probably fit into PG rather easily for films/TV at the time. (rather ironic given the liberties being taken in shows like Animaniacs around the same time)

And Nintendo didn't censor some very early games (like Pro Wrestling -and the funny thing is, it's the perceived sexual stuff that got all the attention and not the blood/violence ).

Just remember a Miyamoto interview ages back, where he said they had to slightly in creases the cart size due to the Japanese text taking up nearly all the cart's Rom, and so the western version was slightly bigger

Hmm, that's really odd: either the ROM dumps have been padded, or that wasn't the real context of what the interview said. Ie you could easily use more space for game data due to such, but not actually have to use more ROM -again due to often wasted/unused space with stepped ROM capacities. (so the JP version had more left over space in the 1 MB ROM than the western versions)

[tomaitheous]

Found this in relation to the WD discussion: http://www.lunar-net.com/tss/tss_diff.php

Interesting, but not as crazy different as some JRPG fanatics have made it out to be. I did notice the English font routine is made up of all capitalized letters. Doesn't look too bad actually compared to WD's earlier TGCD work, but it's still a bit surprising given that the MCD had more ram room to work with and still amateurish to some extent.