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Personal Projects / Re: Princess Crown (Saturn) English Translation

« on: May 08, 2020, 06:28:47 am »

Definitely not dead. Just no particularly interesting developments in the past few months.

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Personal Projects / Re: Princess Crown (Saturn) English Translation

« on: November 14, 2019, 11:24:59 pm »

Yabause works just fine with Princess Crown. It's what I used during my last pass of the game, and the graphics are all 100%.

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Personal Projects / Re: Princess Crown (Saturn) English Translation

« on: November 13, 2019, 12:03:52 am »

I saw this link otherday wondered if it might be useful

https://kotaku.com/want-to-play-princess-crown-in-english-heres-how-642695362

I would not encourage people to use that at this point.

I mean, if you absolutely must play Princess Crown right now and want to see some English by any means possible, then go ahead, I guess. But what CyberWarriorX and I have made is a fully original translation that is both more accurate and that displays properly in the game itself. With all due respect to the person/people who made the translation in that link, I'm confident that once we're finished with our version, nobody is going to use that again.

If you were wondering if there is something in there that might serve as a resource to us, then thank you for trying to help, but there simply isn't. Our script is fully translated and very near its final evolution in the editing process. As the translator, I deliberately avoided looking at that other version because I wanted my work to be truly original. However, I did check just a few spots for comparison at one point, and from what I saw, it's less like they took some liberties and more like they rewrote the whole thing however they wanted. Also, in the intro, the main translator admits that his Japanese isn't that good, and from what I saw, it showed. There might be some lines in there that are clever in their own right, but the tone is drastically altered overall. In a way, I think it would be a pity for someone's perception of Princess Crown to be colored by something so different from the original Japanese game.

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Personal Projects / Re: Princess Crown (Saturn) English Translation

« on: October 12, 2019, 06:40:53 am »

Major progress has been happening on this in the last year. Today we reached a major milestone: I've now completed a thorough playthrough of the translation in an emulator with the finalized print routine in place. The script has undergone heavy editing and only needs one last light pass to call it finished. Many critical bugs have been squished, and the remaining bugs have been clearly save-stated and cataloged.

There are certain pieces of text that exist as graphics, and tackling them will be our last big hurdle. That's what I plan to look at next.

Real life is very busy for both CyberWarriorX and myself, so it's impossible to give an ETA at this point. In addition to the graphical text, there are several other minor issues to take care of, and who knows how all that will play out. Regardless, the project is ready to move into another phase. We'll keep you posted! Thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm. 

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Personal Projects / Re: Panorama Cotton In English

« on: February 05, 2019, 12:26:39 pm »

Sorry, my friend, I'm the one holding up the process. Malias is letting me do the final editing on the script, but this past month has been especially crazy; my wife just had another baby.

We're pretty much at the point where it's all silly nit-picky stuff anyway, but I do hope to keep polishing it just a little more.

Thanks for waiting! 

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Personal Projects / Re: Castlevania 3 - Linear Version

« on: November 17, 2018, 05:25:13 am »

Just piping up to say that while I am looking forward to giving linear CV3 shot, I would absolutely LOVE a linear Rondo of Blood. Not only would it be great to play all of the levels in one go, but one thing that always bugged me about the original's design is that it's impossible to rescue all four girls in a single pass of the game.

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Personal Projects / Re: Panorama Cotton In English

« on: October 17, 2018, 01:11:41 am »

Woo hoo! I freakin' love this game. Seriously, it's in my all-time top ten. It's exciting to see an English version coming together!

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Personal Projects / Re: Panorama Cotton In English

« on: October 16, 2018, 12:56:46 am »

Hi! I'm the guy who made the translation guide and walkthrough for this game on gamefaqs.com.

If you used my translation as a base, cool. If you didn't, that's cool too. I'm not particularly concerned with credit. However, if you did use my translation as a base, please allow me to look through your script. My Japanese has gotten WAY better in the 11 years since I made that guide...primarily because I've spent nearly all of that time living in Japan...and frankly, I'd be surprised if there wasn't something off in there. If your translation is original, I'd also be happy to give it a check if you'd like.

I know this game like the back of my hand, and would have zero trouble playing it through repeatedly on any difficulty. I've got an Everdrive to test it on real hardware, too.

PM me if you're interested! I'd love to help!

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Personal Projects / Re: The Legend of Xanadu Dub Project - Auditions Wanted

« on: May 12, 2017, 10:46:08 am »

There is only one week left before we close auditions. It's now or never!

We've had many great people give us submissions, and this is shaping up to be a great dub. In fact, we've had so many people try out that elmer and I are a bit overwhelmed. We've decided that although we will keep the May 19th deadline for initial submissions, we would like to keep working with people for another ten days or so after that time so that everyone has a chance to make revisions based on feedback. We hope to have casting decided by the start of June, and all principle recording done during that month.

Many thanks to everyone who has auditioned so far!

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Personal Projects / Re: The Legend of Xanadu Dub Project - Auditions Wanted

« on: April 19, 2017, 09:47:19 pm »

Cool!

By the way, was anyone here interesting in trying out for Sophia but found the time limit impossible?

We just learned that we made a mistake on the webpage. The target time for her first audition line is 12.4 seconds, not 7.0 seconds. We'll be updating this as soon as possible. Sorry for the confusion!

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Personal Projects / Re: The Legend of Xanadu Dub Project - Auditions Wanted

« on: April 18, 2017, 07:01:03 pm »

It's been 10 days, and we've had a lot of very good auditions. I only wish I had more time to write feedback for everyone a little more quickly!

I've actually been trying to give people additional direction through feedback, and encouraging them to do retakes. When they do it, the improvements are sometimes quite drastic, and more than a few people have bumped themselves from the pool of back-ups to the pool of prime candidates.

If anyone is thinking about submitting an audition, I'd encourage you to do it early in order to be able to go through this feedback process more fully. If I get a wave of auditions one day before the deadline, I'll very likely need to rush to make judgement so that people can start recording for the dub itself.

Anyway, it's all going great. Thanks to everyone who has auditioned so far!

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Personal Projects / Re: The Legend of Xanadu Dub Project - Auditions Wanted

« on: April 07, 2017, 11:57:06 pm »

This is all fantastic. Auditions are already rolling in!

There are definitely a lot of parts to fill, though. If anyone is at all inclined to try out for this, please do so!

I shared this topic on Facebook for you, I have lots of friends on my side who are into voice acting. 

Thank you very much! 

Being among one of the few who's still been following this project since being cast in the Xanadu II dub years ago, I'll try to get an audition in and let a handful of my voice acting contacts know about this as well.

Wonderful!

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Personal Projects / The Legend of Xanadu Dub Project - Auditions Wanted

« on: April 07, 2017, 10:53:01 am »

You might not know it if you haven’t been hanging around the PCEFX forums, but following our translation of the PC-FX's Zeroigar, elmer and I have been hard at work over the past year on simultaneously translating two PC Engine CD ARPGs by Nihon Falcom, The Legend of Xanadu and The Legend of Xanadu II.
 
Well, there is exciting news: we're essentially finished. All of the hacking, translating, editing and graphical work is done, and it looks great. There is one more big task that remains, however, and that’s making an English dub for the voiced parts (Japanese versions on youtube here and here).

Would you be interested in lending your voice to these fantastic games? Do you know anyone else who might be? Please have a look at our character list page, where you'll find everything you need to audition. There are roughly fifty parts to fill, some large, some small, and we’re going to need a broad cast of actors to pull this off. When we do, though, it’s going to be something really special.

Links:

The character list

An introduction to The Legend of Xanadu

Screenshots of the translations

A basic intro for non-gamers, to show to your Great Aunt Formaldehyde to convince her to audition

The dub-scripts are 100% finished, and the audio project files are completely set up with BGM, sound effects, and every clip-position marked. Literally the only thing left to do is copy and paste a few hundred clips after people get them recorded and sent to us.

The initial casting period will end May 19th. Feel free to ask any questions. We hope to hear from you soon!

(Oh, and subtitles are impossible due to hardware resource constraints, by the way. The tentative plan is to also release the scripts in case people don’t want to use the dub.)

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Personal Projects / Re: Tengai Makyou Zero translation project

« on: January 20, 2017, 08:48:19 pm »

Wow, I'm sad to hear that Esperknight shipped along my WIP script without giving me a heads up. The only reason I haven't pushed forward with it more at this point is that his plate was already full, so I was afraid of it sitting unhacked. I still have every intention of translating Ziria. It's not all that big of a script, so it's certainly doable.

While I'd hate for this to needlessly turn into drama, I should point out in Esperknight's defense that he at least told me that he tried to contact you about this. He didn't take passing along someone else's script lightly, that's for sure. Anyway, please don't let this sour your relationship with him.

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Personal Projects / Re: Tengai Makyou Zero translation project

« on: January 20, 2017, 04:15:12 am »

I suppose that would depend on your definition of "major".

Big budget? Big cart size? Big sales? Big reputation?

Tengai Makyou Zero might be at the top of the list in one or all of these categories, but it's definitely not the only one in any of them. Daikaijuu Monogatari 2 and Bakumatsu Korinden Oni 1 and 2 come to mind pretty quickly. I'm sure there are plenty more.

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Personal Projects / Re: Tengai Makyou Zero translation project

« on: January 20, 2017, 02:45:57 am »

Hi Tom. I hope your TM Zero translation is going well.

I didn't get a significant percentage of the Ziria script done. When I picked it up, I was mostly just hoping to breathe a little life into the PCE translation scene, but then elmer came along to help with other PCE (and PC-FX) projects that were a higher priority for me. If and when the time comes that you feel like doing it, I think the best thing would be for you to pick up right where you left off and forget about anything I did.

By all means, be the Tengai Makyou guy. While I would actually be interested in doing Manjimaru if there's a hacker that's up for it and you're not available, I've got plenty of other interesting things to look at. If one person translated the entire series, well, that would be very cool indeed. 

I've poked SamIAm (the translator on that project), and he'll respond here if he wishes to.

But my personal take on it is (which you should take with a grain-of-salt) ... EsperKnight is too busy working in real-life to do translations anymore, and SamIAm passed all of the work that he'd done to Tom ages ago, deciding that Tom has a much-greater passion for this particular series of games, and is the better guy to work on them (as most folks here know, this kind of translation takes a lot of hard work, and a passion for the game in order to sustain the desire to do that work).

Ah...you seem to be a little confused. 

Tom was the original translator of Ziria, and it was actually his partially completed script that Esperknight sent to me. I think this was during a time when Tom was at-large and a translator was needed. Now that Tom is back, though, Ziria is all his if he wants it, as is all of the translation credit.

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Personal Projects / Re: Un-Worked Designs: Working Designs minus bullshit difficulty

« on: January 20, 2017, 02:23:05 am »

I've played both versions of Sega CD Popful Mail several times.

On the subject of difficulty, I think that Working Designs was sort of on the right track, even if they were more motivated by sales than by good design principles. The original Japanese game is so easy that you could literally beat it in a single afternoon. That's not to say the gameplay is somehow bland or monotonous, because jumping around and swatting enemies is still a lot of fun, but to have paid ~$50 for this and have it be over so quickly would have been at least a little disappointing.

The problem is that Working Designs did not adjust the difficultly smartly. When you have full HP in the original game, it will generally take ten to twenty hits to kill you, while in the US version, it only takes three to five. The trouble with this is that the original game was designed for you to have to sustain a hit or two even when you're playing moderately well, and the post-hit invincibility period was kept very short because the original designers were expecting that the player could easily withstand two or three hits in a row.

The US version isn't really challenging so much as it's tedious. You have to save at every turn and reload practically anytime you get hit since the HP loss is so severe. Enemies can corner and kill you in less than two seconds because of the short invincibility period. The fast and somewhat unpredictable boss fights can be maddening because sometimes it's almost impossible to avoid getting hit, and the bosses are especially good at hitting you in quick succession. None of this is a problem in the original game.

If you ask me, the smarter way to make the difficulty higher would have been to make it take six to ten hits to kill you, lengthen the invincibility period enough to make it easier to retreat after one hit, and maybe restrict saving to certain areas only.

The translation is a whole other can of worms. On one hand, you might be surprised at how many of the jokes actually weren't from Working Designs. NPC guards being inept, Gaw being a fish-junkie, dwarf beards being the "old look", Venuncio's crazy-long name, the elder-dwarf falling asleep mid-sentence...the original game had plenty of jokes. On the other hand, even though they added a lot of questionable material on their own, I think there is something to be said for the way Working Designs got across the wacky, don't-take-this-seriously spirit of the original, which may not have happened if they had done a really straight translation.

No translation is perfect, just like no map-projection is perfect, but for what Popful Mail is in terms of story, I think Working Designs's translation is an example of a successful attempt at this particular kind of approach.

Now, if anybody ever wants to take care of the hacking for a relatively straight retranslation, whether for the Sega CD version or one of the others, I would be first to volunteer to help with the translation itself. I've been working on the Legend of Xanadu games on PC Engine, which are by the same director (well, the first one, anyway), and I absolutely love Popful Mail's old-school Falcom charm.

Anyway, good on the OP for making this patch. 

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Personal Projects / Re: Princess Crown (Saturn) English Translation

« on: October 11, 2016, 09:23:59 pm »

Of course, this is only if having someone testing can be of help. If you don't need help, I can understand no problem.

At this stage, it's too early to be asking people for help, but thank you. 

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Personal Projects / Re: Princess Crown (Saturn) English Translation

« on: October 01, 2016, 01:15:38 am »

Hi. I'm the Japanese-to-English language translator for this project.

It is not finished yet. What you see is not intended for play.

The project files are shared by CyberWarriorX to make it easy for people to help him with the hacking side.

If you think you can do that, by all means, take a look and get in touch.

If not, there really is nothing to do but wait. Please do not attempt to play the game as it is. Besides it being against our wishes, you'll find that it crashes after the 2nd boss, and in many other places.

The English script is completed in draft form and partially edited, and it is playable in-game, but there remain a number of hurdles to clear before we are finished.

Thanks for your interest. 

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Kaze No Densetsu Xanadu II (PCE-CD) - Announced!

« on: March 21, 2016, 02:35:33 am »

I am amazed at the progress you and Sam are making but i have to ask are you planning to release both games at the same time?

Affirmative. 

-Both games have complete first draft translations of all in-game text with no missing strings.
-Both games have complete draft scripts for an English dub project* .
-Both games have fully working print routines with a variable width, kerned font, including a black outline in the first game and drop-shadow in the second.
-Both games have working English menus.

In addition to polishing the scripts and casting/recording/mixing a dub, there is only to replace graphical text, insert ADPCM clips, and make sure the weapon shops in Xanadu 2 are working.

*Yes, we will release a text version of the script in case you want to hear the original Japanese voices. No, we cannot get subtitles to work, because the games don't leave enough resources open to do this.