Front Mission (SNES) Addendum v1.02

[mziab]

Front Mission (SNES) Addendum v1.02

Project information

The purpose of this patch is to fix all known technical issues and translation mistakes in the English translation released in 2001 by Frank Hughes et al. In essence, it's a backport of the technical and textual fixes from my Polish translation made several years back. There is one new thing I made especially for this patch, though - the rewritten narration screens. While they were already (sort of) in English in the original Japanese game, their grammar left a bit to be desired and the naming conventions were also slightly off, so I wrote compression tools and rewrote the text a fair bit, taking modern spellings into account. Anyway, this is not a complete retranslation of the game by any means, but I hope it helps Front Mission fans enjoy the game just a bit more. Enjoy!

 

Changelog

v1.02 (February 20th, 2023)

- Fixed untranslated Ryuji string after the Spirit of Huffman mission

- Fixed missing spaces in a few strings and improved some of the formatting

- Replaced remnants of "Oceana" with "Oceania"

- Worked around a rare original game crash after the Fort Monus mission

v1.01 (February 4th, 2023)

- Fixed untranslated "Load error" message when trying to load an empty save slot

- Added pause to Dr. Brown's scrolling text, so it scrolls all the way through before disappearing

- Restored missing pause in a post-ending line that disappeared too quickly

v1.00 (January 20th, 2023)

- Fixed crash in Freedom City on newer emulators by properly expanding the ROM

- Fixed untranslated dialogue strings (Dr. Brown's, Natalie's and Ghetta's)

- Fixed untranslated "No units in range" message when using Acid Bomb

- Restored the content of narration text boxes after mission 17

- Fixed grammar and naming conventions in narration screens

- New dialogue font and stat icons

- Renamed Carrion Crow to Canyon Crows

- Renamed Soul of Huffman to Spirit of Huffman

- Renamed Nirvana Engine to Nirvana Institute

- Renamed Sakata to Ryuji (his first name)

- Renamed Mr. Sakata unit name to Sakata

- Renamed Master to Bartender

- Renamed Suzaland to Sutherland

- Renamed Missiler to Missileer

- Renamed Oceana to Oceania

- Renamed Longrevers Island to Longrivers Island

- Renamed Mei Fa to Meihua

- Fixed a few minor translation mistakes in the dialogue


Credits

- mziab: Tools, reprogramming, text editing

Special thanks to F.H. et al for translating the game way back in 2001!

[Oxinar]

Thank you for your efforts to improve this translation .
I found that the game crashes if you load the game without a saved game.
Example: Right after the prologue you arrive at Barinden and if you go down to the Save/Load option and choose load a save file (no data) the game will crash for 2 minutes, after that time a message appears saying
Load error and the game works normally again.

[mziab]

Thank you for your efforts to improve this translation .
I found that the game crashes if you load the game without a saved game.
Example: Right after the prologue you arrive at Barinden and if you go down to the Save/Load option and choose load a save file (no data) the game will crash for 2 minutes, after that time a message appears saying
Load error and the game works normally again.

Interesting. What emulator? Could you post the hashes for your original and patched ROMs, so we can rule out it's not a patching issue? EDIT: Okay, I've managed to replicate the bug. Looks like it's from the original game or the old translation. I'll have to look into that more closely. Nice find. I've never had the need to try and load an empty save and most of the time I use savestates anyway, so I've never experienced it in the 20+ years of playing the game, huh. Granted, this is a pretty a pretty obscure bug, but I'll look into it nonetheless. Thanks for the heads-up!

One thing to note is that the original English translation patch requires a header. SNES ROMs that are currently floating around don't usually have one. When using an headerless ROM, you need to add the header before patching it to English, then remove it from the English-patched ROM before applying the addendum. I suggest using the RHDN patcher, which allows you to add/remove headers on the fly with a single checkbox.

[Oxinar]

Yes, I followed all the described procedures to apply the translation in the rom, I can definitely say that this is a bug caused by old translation, because both the original Japanese version of the rom 1.0 and 1.1 do not have this bug. What makes me think that all translations made over the American translation will contain this bug maybe?

[mziab]

Yes, I followed all the described procedures to apply the translation in the rom, I can definitely say that this is a bug caused by old translation, because both the original Japanese version of the rom 1.0 and 1.1 do not have this bug. What makes me think that all translations made over the American translation will contain this bug maybe?

Yes, that's quite likely. All the more reason this is worth investigating and fixing.

[Felipefpl]

Why the addendum needs to be applied over a pre-patched rom? I ask because the addendums made by crackowia for the dragon quest games didnt need any of this.

Kongrats for another good work on a old translation, it's REALLY nice to see those coming.

[mziab]

Why the addendum needs to be applied over a pre-patched rom? I ask because the addendums made by crackowia for the dragon quest games didnt need any of this.

This is only because I didn't want to include the previous team's work in my patch, so as to avoid any potential drama. And the changes themselves were pretty minor, all things considered. I do agree making a patch that applies to the Japanese ROM would save people tons of hassle, but I've decided to err on the side of caution. I've done the same for Cyber Knight.

Kongrats for another good work on a old translation, it's REALLY nice to see those coming.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the new patch. I think I'm out of project ideas for now At the very least, all the fixes I've researched for my past projects have now been backported to their respective English versions.

[kindlekat]

I'd suggest Front Mission: Gun Hazard as it's buggy (failing missions has glitched text), many shortened names and a *lot* of story text was cut out (forgot what though).

[Felipefpl]

This is only because I didn't want to include the previous team's work in my patch, so as to avoid any potential drama.

Good point, i didnt think about the drama, too bad any of the guys of the old translation arent here to give you their permission though.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the new patch. I think I'm out of project ideas for now At the very least, all the fixes I've researched for my past projects have now been backported to their respective English versions.

Believe me, there are projects that would benefit from your knowledge, unfinished ones or even finished ones like Treasure Hunter G for example, reading the dialogs and seeing the font of choice for the interface it surely needs an improvement.

[mziab]

Yes, I followed all the described procedures to apply the translation in the rom, I can definitely say that this is a bug caused by old translation, because both the original Japanese version of the rom 1.0 and 1.1 do not have this bug. What makes me think that all translations made over the American translation will contain this bug maybe?

Turns out it was just an untranslated string (the "Loading failed" message) and a wrong pointer, which happened to point to blank data, thus causing an endless (or at least very long) loop. The fix was pretty simple and the result can be seen below And yes, the bug will be present in all versions of the English translation and all derivative translations, unless their respective hackers happened to spot and fix it (doubtful, seeing how obscure it is).



I'm not releasing an update yet. Still waiting for more feedback. But if someone wants to fix it themselves, the simplest way might be to open a hexeditor, and write this at 0x31f3ae in the ROM: 8C AF A1 A4  A9 AE A7 60  A6 A1 A9 AC  A5 A4 FF (basically inserting the missing string where the game expects it). An upcoming patch will have a cleaner fix (relocating the string).

[kaiisen]

It doesn't crash here on Snes 9X 1.61.

[Cavery210]

There's plenty of SNES translations that could be improved like you have with this and other projects by you:

* Many of Dynamic Designs' recent releases (Aretha II, Super Shell Monsters Story II, Shiji Hero Legend and Power of the Hired) have bugs stemming from the team downsizing and no one on the active team currently possesses the assembly and coding skills needed to fix them.
* Assault Suits Valken (the Japanese release of Cybernator) has some text display issues and the name entry screen is unusable.
* Chou Genjin 2 (Super Bonk 2) has some compressed text that could be translated.
* The options screen in Dossun Stone Battle by Aeon Genesis is untranslated.
* NoPrgress's Dragon Quest VI patch is notoriously buggy and 10% of the text is untranslated.
* Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fuurai no Shiren has some untranslated text.
* Go Go Ackman could use a variable width font.
* Nangoku Shounen Papuwa-kun has untranslated opening text and graphics.
* Romancing SaGa 3 has some untranslated text. (I'd like to see someone do a script port of the remakes of Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 to the SNES versions)
* Super Bomberman 5's stage select, the stage names and the certificate where the percentage appears are untranslated.
* Super Puyo Puyo 2 has some untranslated graphics.
* As mentioned before, Treasure Hunter G needs a few fixes.

[svenge]

Having updated patches for DQ6 and Super Bomberman 5 would be great, but obviously the latter game would be easier to "fix" than the former due to its limited amount of text.

[Oxinar]

Is there a way to fix Lloyd display name on the Status window to appear like the other characters names?

https://imgur.com/Fe15GNl
https://imgur.com/J07uEEL

Also when you go on a mission to verify the doctor's Brown involvement with the terrorists and after the battle we find out that the OCU is after him.
In the next scene he explains his involvement but the text quickly disappears after the sentence (the crime I was committing) and this should not happen, the text should continue to rise until it disappears completely.

https://imgur.com/RZ9U8rS

If you want to take a look here is the Snes9x 1.60 save state that shows the scene I'm talking about.
https://www96.zippyshare.com/v/lK8J0vcR/file.html

[mziab]

Is there a way to fix Lloyd display name on the Status window to appear like the other characters names?

https://imgur.com/Fe15GNl
https://imgur.com/J07uEEL

Did you perhaps load a savestate or srm from the Japanese version? I can't seem to replicate it (screenshot). Just to be on the safe side, could you post the hashes of your patched ROM?

Also when you go on a mission to verify the doctor's Brown involvement with the terrorists and after the battle we find out that the OCU is after him.
In the next scene he explains his involvement but the text quickly disappears after the sentence (the crime I was committing) and this should not happen, the text should continue to rise until it disappears completely.

Gotcha. This is easily fixable by inserting some pauses at the end to drag it out. Will be fixed in a future update.

[Oxinar]

Now that you mention it, it does seem to be related to the savestate.

MD5
1C994CF2A859E63130179D823615FAB4

SHA1
faab1b1553fe190b177d7846b177586b6047adb8

SHA256
35cb751b37edbf6951b822e7fc0a1d0123d87681bc4a8686584c9f9e3169f768

SHA384
cd98afbffe39ab87a469136ce0b5ed160d66ba216e6c9b92b76bd508a9bd7ce81e88675f46d10d3ebf57535af407b6eb

SHA512
47e5f707d25320723ed9a317cc73897ee9b4e88a29f67e5598eb165b74242e5aa8b6470da56330289c203da588ce25b5d4bd71694bbcd3290c1c30c1845af404

CRC32
B6A6018B

[mziab]

Yes, your savestate seems to have Lloyd's name saved as Japanese full-width Latin letters, not what the English translation (and the addendum) normally uses. Neither my old saves, nor ones from fantasyanime seem to exhibit this issue. So I'm confident this is a hold-over from a Japanese savestate and doesn't happen when playing the game with the English patch. I can also confirm your ROM has right hashes, so that rules out a patching issue.

[Oxinar]

At the end after the end credits there is a scene where Keith appears,
his speech also disappears quickly, the correct thing is to have a delay before it disappears.

https://imgur.com/qaAS9iI

savestate
https://www60.zippyshare.com/v/pJbWy74G/file.html

[mziab]

I think it was like that in the original game, but sure, I can try inserting a few pauses there.

EDIT: Seems like all the other strings in the ending have a F9 04 at the end, but Keith's line doesn't. It's present in the Japanese ROM, but not the previous translation. Anyway, it's fixed

[CrocMagnum]

This is some sweet polish, mziab.

Front Mission is one of the first fan translation I've ever played. I still love it to bits.

Thanks for the quality work. I can't wait for the next update.