Screenshots

[irvgotti452]

Now implementing something like a VWF.

That is looking real good. There aren't many Sega Saturn romhackers out there so this is exciting.

[Gemini]

Another shot at FF4 Prettified:


I finally took a shot at internal proportional rendering and it turned out quite fast for names, which are now also expanded to 8 characters. I made sure to support old sram data, so whenever it detects an old save file it converts it to the new format with names stored separately into a separate region of memory (support also includes dropped Japanese characters in menus, Namingway won't allow using them tho).

Just to get an idea of how crammed VRAM looks like right now:

Basically prerendered tiles for static strings are dumped into a bunch of bitmaps like this above. Just to make sure everything fits, identical tiles are recycled.

[Nightcrawler]

What did you use to generate the pre-rendering of items?

[Gemini]

I made some code with my image library. That uses a font as a base and draws a whole txt of strings to a canvas. Here's the code for it: https://pastebin.com/TyMcaaFg
This is the code that generates code for static strings in menus, which uses xml text as a base because it needs more information due to how assembly strings are handled: https://pastebin.com/W5rmCfyT

[Nightcrawler]

I think it would be a great thing if something like that were bundled up into a public library with example project. Or even better, a utility with some basic functionality like this. No such tools exist at present that I am aware of. I think it would help make these techniques more common place.

[Gemini]

I was working on some sort of utility that did what you're talking about, but it turned out to be too complicated for specific needs. A library would be definitively better and I plan on releasing full sources to this hack.

Meanwhile, I got Namingway to work with expanded names:

Real time rendering seems fast enough to deal with redrawing a whole name per frame.

[yugisokubodai]

Working on this.

[Supper]

Been working on the Mega Drive Sailor Moon beat-'em-up for a couple weeks. Technical work is done as of today, so it's just a matter of redrawing the graphics (oh, and finding a translator). I've done VWF hacks before, but this was my first time doing it on a lower-level system where it takes more than just tweaking the character spacing as you print. I really didn't appreciate the intricacies of source/destination pattern alignment until I actually sat down to code this...

Also, this game's scripting system is hilariously lazy. 4 bytes per character, no compression, why not? Gotta fill up that 2 meg cart somehow.

[Vehek]

I once looked into that game. For each text character, it was something like the offset into the font graphics, and the delay, right? Just so everyone knows, the story's different than the SNES one.

[Supper]

Yep, 2 bytes for the pattern data offset and 2 for the delay, for every single individual character in the script. Guess the programmer really didn't want to deal with non-word-aligned opcode arguments and managed to get away with it. Made it a bit of a trick to get text rips that preserve all the speed data while remaining readable.

If this project goes through, I might take a look at the SNES version. Pretty wacky that it made it to France but nowhere else.

[cccmar]

Yep, 2 bytes for the pattern data offset and 2 for the delay, for every single individual character in the script. Guess the programmer really didn't want to deal with non-word-aligned opcode arguments and managed to get away with it. Made it a bit of a trick to get text rips that preserve all the speed data while remaining readable.

If this project goes through, I might take a look at the SNES version. Pretty wacky that it made it to France but nowhere else.

Alex of NintendoComplete did a longplay of the Genesis SM game with subs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsNUtsqKbus. I suggest you ask him about that, maybe he still has the script lying around somewhere. Good luck with the project.

[Almagest]

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[Sanedan56]

Yep, 2 bytes for the pattern data offset and 2 for the delay, for every single individual character in the script. Guess the programmer really didn't want to deal with non-word-aligned opcode arguments and managed to get away with it. Made it a bit of a trick to get text rips that preserve all the speed data while remaining readable.

If this project goes through, I might take a look at the SNES version. Pretty wacky that it made it to France but nowhere else.

I guess Kanji to supposed to be added the script, but as you said, the programmer got lazy.

Anyways, I wish you the best of luck with this translation.

[Supper]

Alex of NintendoComplete did a longplay of the Genesis SM game with subs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsNUtsqKbus. I suggest you ask him about that, maybe he still has the script lying around somewhere. Good luck with the project.

Thanks, I'll look into that!

I guess Kanji to supposed to be added the script, but as you said, the programmer got lazy.

Anyways, I wish you the best of luck with this translation.

Don't know if they planned it or not, but it sure would've helped. The dialogue window is absurdly cramped (2 lines of 8 characters each, kana only), forcing the Japanese lines to be split up into tiny fragments. With VWF, the English dialogue may actually end up being more screen-space-efficient than the original.

And thanks for the support, everyone, though there's no guarantee this will actually get completed. Hoping for the best, though. In the meantime, here's what I've got for the title screen so far:



I tried to combine the modern English logo for the series with the existing title's aesthetics. Hope it looks OK.

[filler]

And thanks for the support, everyone, though there's no guarantee this will actually get completed. Hoping for the best, though.

That title screen looks amazing!

BTW: Would you be interested in a little quid pro quo? I'm just about finished translating the script for Battle Golfer Yui, but I have no technical support on that project. I'd be happy to translate the Sailor Moon script in return, if you're interested in taking a look at YUI.

EDIT: FYI: It looks like Guest made some tools for this. I haven't tried them, and don't know what they do, but the bulk of the work may be taken care of if the tools are usable. http://www.romhacking.net/abandoned/

[Gemini]

Why not Pretty Guardian instead of Bishoujo Senshi? That has been the international title for about 3 years now.

[Midna]

The "Pretty Guardian" title has been in use ever since the live-action series dropped waaaay back in 2003, although to my understanding, even the faithful Viz redub of the series drops that part from the title. That said, a lot of fans just call them "senshi" because the history of the term is, um, complicated (another valid translation of senshi is "Soldier", and in fact if you listen to the BGM during the transformations, that's just what the singers are saying), and they want a common term everyone can agree on, something that can't possibly be inaccurate.

[Supper]

That title screen looks amazing!

BTW: Would you be interested in a little quid pro quo? I'm just about finished translating the script for Battle Golfer Yui, but I have no technical support on that project. I'd be happy to translate the Sailor Moon script in return, if you're interested in taking a look at YUI.

EDIT: FYI: It looks like Guest made some tools for this. I haven't tried them, and don't know what they do, but the bulk of the work may be taken care of if the tools are usable. http://www.romhacking.net/abandoned/

It's really not much more than a trace, but thanks.

Getting a project finished in exchange for getting to work on a project that'll get finished sounds like an excellent deal to me I took a look at the game and it seems more than quirky enough to be up my alley, so I'd be happy to help out with that. A bit disappointing that most of the interesting stuff seems to be done already, but what can you do. Give me a few days to come up with some appreciable work on that, and then I'll send you the SM script.

Why not Pretty Guardian instead of Bishoujo Senshi? That has been the international title for about 3 years now.

It's pretty arbitrary, but as a general rule I prefer to include the Japanese title on fan-translated title screens since, strictly speaking, that's what the game is called. It's certainly not the name an official translation would have used, but it's what you can type into Google to find out about it, as opposed to a translated title that may or may not be in common use. In other cases, I might put both the transliteration and the translation or just the translation, depending on space restrictions and other factors, but for a well-known series like Sailor Moon it's not really necessary. Plus what Midna said -- as an example of how all-over-the-place things have been with the term, the arcade game that was released internationally uses the English title "Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon".

[Gemini]

That said, a lot of fans just call them "senshi" because the history of the term is, um, complicated (another valid translation of senshi is "Soldier", and in fact if you listen to the BGM during the transformations, that's just what the singers are saying), and they want a common term everyone can agree on, something that can't possibly be inaccurate.

As far as I'm aware, "senshi" just by itself is translated in dialog as Soldier and derivatives in many western releases, while the title consistently says Pretty Guardian because "Naoko Takeuchi said so otherwise no release for you. That's my conditions". The Italian dub for Crystal does so, not sure if there was ever a North American dub for Crystal, but I guess they would be have to follow the same rules the author dictated. It's more or less similar to what Kurumada did with Saint Seiya, even if the kanji name calls them "Seitōshi" instead of Saints.

[filler]

Getting a project finished in exchange for getting to work on a project that'll get finished sounds like an excellent deal to me I took a look at the game and it seems more than quirky enough to be up my alley, so I'd be happy to help out with that.

Sweet! FYI: This prompted me to actually take a look a Guest's tools. I got the script insertion working with the built-in font (plus a couple tweeks). I'm currently writing-up and inserting the script using those tools.

(Note: You need to add two copies of the dumped ROM, one called specifically "Copy of Battle Golfer Yui (J) [c][!].bin", and the other "Battle Golfer Yui (J) [c][!].bin". I also had to make one of the directories manually. "text" I think? It should give you an error, and you just need to make the dir.)

I wasn't able to figure out much with dumping images though. I tried what it said, but I didn't get anything I could figure out how to work with.

I'm also not sure about the menu text. There's a menu table file but I'm not sure if the text dumps with the script or not.

EDIT: Also here's my table file and notes: http://mattsmessyroom.com/uploads/wip_battle_golfer_yui.7z

Here are some screens so far: