Screenshots

[FlamePurge]

As a Sailor Moon superfan, if I may weigh on the discussion...

On Viz's DVDs/Blu-rays for their new English dub of the 90's anime, you can see the logo doesn't include any translation of the Bishojo Senshi title. In the actual episodes' opening sequences, though, the logo is still in Japanese. The logo used here is the standard logo used worldwide, and can be seen on Italian merchandise made starting in 2011, for example.
https://i.imgur.com/Q2YJc9l.png

However, Usagi's new English voice actress consistently calls the series "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon" in the next-episode previews.

Further, Kodansha's manga re-release uses a different logo, which includes Pretty Guardian.
https://i.imgur.com/eGffTWR.jpg

And Sailor Moon Crystal's English dub uses this logo in its opening, as well as on its English Blu-rays. This included the Pretty Guardian part.
https://i.imgur.com/w0KX4W6.png

For comparison, the English and Mexican dubs from the 90's used this logo, which of course never included the Bishojo Senshi part of the title.
https://i.imgur.com/FizWGND.png

I think just dropping the "Bishojo Senshi" part, while using the newer logo, would probably be the best compromise between what an official localization from the 90's would use, and the more modern take on the logo. But that's just my two cents.

In the end though, I really have no issue with such a minor detail like the title screen. I'm happy for more Sailor Moon games in English, period! As long as it's not written god-awfully like the Another Story translation.

On a somewhat related note, this does beg the question--why did none of the Sailor Moon video games ever come to Western shores in an official capacity? I think the arcade game and Sailor Moon Drops are the only ones.

[KingMike]

I would either translate or remove the Japanese text. Leaving Japanese text in a game that's not Japanese in setting just looks bad.

One of the SFC games got an official France-only localization (as well as the DBZ fighting games).
Not sure about Sailor Moon, but I know DB was probably at least a few years away from becoming mainstream in the US market.

[Sanedan56]

I've seen many translations of "Senshi" as warrior or fighter.

On a somewhat related note, this does beg the question--why did none of the Sailor Moon video games ever come to Western shores in an official capacity? I think the arcade game and Sailor Moon Drops are the only ones.

One reason I can think of is the original DiC dub didn't come out until 1995. By then, Sailor Moon Another Story had been released, and it would probably would be difficult to release a game that featured characters that were not featured until later in the series, especially with the naming differences. Also, it most likely wouldn't be very profitable to release the Genesis or Snes games because of their age, or the other games because none of them take place during the first season.

The title screen looks great. I can't wait to see more.

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:

This is looking great. Keep up the good work.

[Midna]

Leaving Japanese text in a game that's not Japanese in setting just looks bad.

...Sailor Moon is set smack in the middle of Tokyo.

[VicVergil]

...Sailor Moon is set smack in the middle of Tokyo.

Whoever translated the French version begs to differ.


And yes, the other names are similarly horrible.
EDIT: Apparently Bandai France just used the same names as the then-airing local dub.

[Midna]

The French translators are dirty liars and should be ignored.

[4ph]

Power Soukoban NP French translation. https://imgur.com/HNeJNmg

[nesrocks]

Here's a screenshot

http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=24333.60

[irvgotti452]

Here's a screenshot

http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=24333.60

"Are you a God?"

lol

[Pennywise]

A little something I spent a few hours on. Hopefully knocked off the bulk of ASM work. Most of the work will probably be graphic design.

[RadioTails]

Been figuring out how to add options in Mean Bean Machine.  Slowly getting there.

[KingMike]

I see you meant to post a link but it doesn't work.

[RadioTails]

I see you meant to post a link but it doesn't work.

I copied the "Image link" instead of the "Image URL".  That has been fixed.

[paul_met]

Widescreen for Grandia (SS)

[Supper]

I've been fooling around with adding subtitles to Yumimi Mix for a while and finally got everything more or less working today. It doesn't look like much, but I had to reverse engineer pretty much the entire cutscene format (which is basically all the game is) to do this. This is from the Mega CD version, but the Saturn port is virtually identical right down to the VM the scripts run on, so it would be pretty trivial to handle that version too.

This isn't likely to turn into an actual translation project, since getting someone to translate an hour of unsubtitled audio for a Mega CD game that no one cares about is a bit of a hard sell, but it was fun to do. Plus Lunar Eternal Blue uses a souped-up version of this game's cutscene format, so it feeds back nicely into that other project I've been putting off for a while now...

[Pennywise]

Just out of curiosity, how are you handling the subtitles?

I would discount the possibility of not finding someone interested in translating the game. You might be surprised. Cool work, nonetheless!

[Supper]

The same way the game displays everything else. The tools let you extract all the resources for a scene, including a decompiled version of the script that runs it, and you can add in additional objects and display commands before recompiling. Objects are turned into sprite overlays, so add a graphic with some text and you're theoretically good to go. For these test images I just did the work manually, but for a real translation I'd add script directives that would automate the subtitle generation.

One of the gotchas with this method is the text will be positioned in terms of the "game camera", meaning that if the screen is scrolling, you have to manually account for it in the script or the subtitles will scroll with the screen. I would have preferred to add a special opcode to display subtitles in a fixed location for a set time, but that's not probably not feasible due to the game's very unorthodox VRAM usage.

Of course, some scenes may use too many sprites for this to work without causing flicker or other issues. That would have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis for the game's 904 different scenes, though.

If anyone's really curious, I put the editing tools and my notes on Github.

And thanks! This game is definitely at the low end of the viability spectrum, but it's a fun project anyways.

[Pennywise]

It's not every day that you see someone go above and beyond like that even if it's a primer for another project. As a fellow hacker, I applaud you and I also enjoyed reading your post (thinking that's so cool).

Honestly, it'd be a shame for it not to be translated now, but it is what it is. Anyhow, impressive work.

[Lentfilms]

I've been fooling around with adding subtitles to Yumimi Mix for a while and finally got everything more or less working today. It doesn't look like much, but I had to reverse engineer pretty much the entire cutscene format (which is basically all the game is) to do this. This is from the Mega CD version, but the Saturn port is virtually identical right down to the VM the scripts run on, so it would be pretty trivial to handle that version too.

This isn't likely to turn into an actual translation project, since getting someone to translate an hour of unsubtitled audio for a Mega CD game that no one cares about is a bit of a hard sell, but it was fun to do. Plus Lunar Eternal Blue uses a souped-up version of this game's cutscene format, so it feeds back nicely into that other project I've been putting off for a while now...

Wow, I'm not a technically minded person but I've heard for years from other hackers that getting subtitles to work in a Sega CD or PC-Engine CD title is incredibly difficult. Congratulations on getting all that to work. I don't know how many English speaking fans there are for Yumimi Mix specifically but I know that Izumi Takemoto, the illustrator for the game, certainly has his fans. I hope this does turn into a translation project but even if it doesn't it is still a very impressive hack.

[Supper]

Wow, I'm not a technically minded person but I've heard for years from other hackers that getting subtitles to work in a Sega CD or PC-Engine CD title is incredibly difficult. Congratulations on getting all that to work. I don't know how many English speaking fans there are for Yumimi Mix specifically but I know that Izumi Takemoto, the illustrator for the game, certainly has his fans. I hope this does turn into a translation project but even if it doesn't it is still a very impressive hack.

This game is probably one of the easier ones to deal with, since all the logic runs on a relatively straightforward virtual machine -- I haven't modified the actual game code at all. (Took a lot of disassembly to get this far, though.) Also, this is probably the easier part of a hypothetical project; actually getting all the scenes to display correctly would take a lot of careful work and testing, and in some cases, hardware limitations may make it flat-out impossible to overlay subtitles without removing other parts of the scene.

Anyway, thanks for the encouragement. If anyone out there is actually willing to do the translation, I'm more than up for getting it into the game.

Actually, I really only know Takemoto as "that guy ZUN stole a character from that time". When I checked a while back, it seemed like not much of his work was available in English, officially or otherwise. Interesting style, though...