11-23-2016, 04:48 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-23-2016, 04:59 PM by Notsofossil.)
I was just looking into this. I don't have much information on translations, but I have hacked ROMs before for changing things like graphics.
If you are very lucky, the game's alphabet will be uncompressed. From there you could just use a tile editor to insert an English alphabet overtop the Japanese one. The tough part is figuring out where in the game's code all the dialog is. One possible method is looking for the hex values of the Japanese text itself. It's crude and doesn't always work, but I did that for finding title screen graphics in simpler games and text counts as graphics.
I've read from other translation efforts that this is when you'd use a debugger to figure out exactly where all the dialog is, then write a program to dump everything all at once and then re-insert once you're done with the translation. This makes it easier for the translator to do his job while the hacker handles the coding half of things. Problem is, I don't think an emulator + debugger exists for WS.
One other big hurdle is many Japanese games can get away with restricted text boxes and sentences because they require fewer characters than English. In the case of Final Fantasy on WS, the fan translation just shortens English words to fit the small spaces. Ideally one would hack the game to allow wider text spaces, but without a good debugger, that's pretty hard.
In a case where a game on WS exists on another platform with an English translation, you could go the lazy route and use a combination of English and Japanese versions of that other version to determine where the Japanese text is in the WS version, then copy the pre-existing English translation using English characters you hacked in earlier.
I would love to know how the other WS translation projects were done, especially for original titles like Rockman.exe WS.
If you are very lucky, the game's alphabet will be uncompressed. From there you could just use a tile editor to insert an English alphabet overtop the Japanese one. The tough part is figuring out where in the game's code all the dialog is. One possible method is looking for the hex values of the Japanese text itself. It's crude and doesn't always work, but I did that for finding title screen graphics in simpler games and text counts as graphics.
I've read from other translation efforts that this is when you'd use a debugger to figure out exactly where all the dialog is, then write a program to dump everything all at once and then re-insert once you're done with the translation. This makes it easier for the translator to do his job while the hacker handles the coding half of things. Problem is, I don't think an emulator + debugger exists for WS.
One other big hurdle is many Japanese games can get away with restricted text boxes and sentences because they require fewer characters than English. In the case of Final Fantasy on WS, the fan translation just shortens English words to fit the small spaces. Ideally one would hack the game to allow wider text spaces, but without a good debugger, that's pretty hard.
In a case where a game on WS exists on another platform with an English translation, you could go the lazy route and use a combination of English and Japanese versions of that other version to determine where the Japanese text is in the WS version, then copy the pre-existing English translation using English characters you hacked in earlier.
I would love to know how the other WS translation projects were done, especially for original titles like Rockman.exe WS.