Knight Rider Special (PC Engine) - full English translation

[Psyklax]

Hello all! In the breaks between doing Detective Conan and Hyper Iria, I've translated a PC Engine game!

Knight Rider Special is a cross between Chase HQ and RoadBlasters, with a famous American licence. I was amazed that such an American game never got either an American release nor a translation, so I took it upon myself to do it.



http://www.4shared.com/zip/U-YcTr8J/kr-v10.html

Have a go, and let me know what you think. Read the text in the zip for more info.

EDIT: Damn it, I just remembered: this MUST be applied on a headerless ROM! I had to remove the header on mine. Think I may have to change the zip text file to make that clear. It's easy to delete the header: just stick it in a hex editor and remove the first 200 hex bytes (from $000 to $1FF). Do you guys think I should just change the patch to work on a headered ROM? It's not so difficult to do.

[wyndcrosser]

As always, very impressive. Make sure you put it in the database.

Thanks

[patuli]

To much space between letters.
I t  r e a d s  l i k e  t h i s.

[Psyklax]

To much space between letters.
I t  r e a d s  l i k e  t h i s.

Indeed it does. You may have noticed I made the names into special chunks to save screen space, but I couldn't do that with everything. 16x16 tiles are awfully big, and unless I either made the font way bigger or got into some ASM hacking, there's not much I can do. I didn't want to make the font any bigger, though, mainly because of those names. It doesn't look good, but I'm stuck with it. 

[RadioTails]

To much space between letters.
I t  r e a d s  l i k e  t h i s.

To be fair, Alex Kidd for the Mega Drive did just that. They just left the tiles as 16 x 16 and placed English characters in and it looks terrible. Plus the game is bad itself.

Indeed it does. You may have noticed I made the names into special chunks to save screen space, but I couldn't do that with everything. 16x16 tiles are awfully big, and unless I either made the font way bigger or got into some ASM hacking, there's not much I can do. I didn't want to make the font any bigger, though, mainly because of those names. It doesn't look good, but I'm stuck with it. 

The easiest way is to make the tiles 8 x 16. Would require debugging, but the text will be so much nicer to read. You could even use this font: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/109/

[Psyklax]

The easiest way is to make the tiles 8 x 16. Would require debugging, but the text will be so much nicer to read.

Trust me, I would LOVE to have 8x16 tiles in this. But that 'would require debugging' bit is where I fall down. I don't know the first thing about searching in the ROM for where it decides on which tiles to use, and them being 8x8, 8x16 or 16x16 or whatever. If it just uses a pointer for each letter or something, I suppose I could figure it out, but I doubt it's so simple. I'll have a look though, but any advice would be appreciated as usual.

[Pennywise]

I´m all for new blood, but that translation looks pretty awful from an aesthetic standpoint. I would seriously recommend learning how to use debugging tools if you are serious. Mednafen is very useful even if it can be cryptic when first starting out.

In the world of romhacking, anything is possible and we have the tools and knowledge that the original devs possibly never had.

[Psyklax]

Well, it looks like there wasn't much point in bothering with this game, then.

And the documentation is so poor for Mednafen that I can't figure out how to just set a break point to see when the CPU deals with the text. I'd ask for advice but I get the feeling I'm wasting my time anyway.

[wyndcrosser]

It's your translation, it's your project, so create it however you want.

I think you're doing fine, please continue. If someone in the future wants to modify it, or you get the knowledge down the line, than definitely update the font, etc. Don't think anyone is hating against your work, there's some individuals who currently have those skills, and want others to learn them as well. Please continue.

Wynd

[KingMike]

It's easy to delete the header: just stick it in a hex editor and remove the first 200 hex bytes (from $000 to $1FF).

Or use SNESTool, since the header is the same size. (or any other SNES header deletion tool, temporarily rename the file if you have to)

[Zynk]

Well, it looks like there wasn't much point in bothering with this game, then.

And the documentation is so poor for Mednafen that I can't figure out how to just set a break point to see when the CPU deals with the text. I'd ask for advice but I get the feeling I'm wasting my time anyway.

Like wyndcrosser said. And don't let limited ROM hacking knowledge keep you from translating games. Even though from the looks of it, the game itself looks bad. But, still, just don't quit on this one. Btw, what language does this game have?

[Psyklax]

It appears I jumped the gun anyway, because thanks to the cheats in Mednafen (and I didn't even know Mednafen existed), I've discovered that there's a single screen that I didn't translate (it's just 4 characters, so you can understand why I missed it. Also, one piece of dialogue is half a character too long on one line, but if I can figure out how to make it 8x16 (and it would help if someone could point me in the right direction instead of merely criticising) then it'll all need replacing anyway.

And the game isn't that good either. First level's okay but it's a bit samey and far too difficult, hence the need for cheating. But it has very little text and it's an American licence, so I chose it to translate.

[Pennywise]

Converting an 16x16 font to 8x16 is a different subject in itself. Usually its not too complicated and involves NOPing some instructions. You need to find out how the text is written to the screen and modify the routine so it does what you want it to. I would recommend reading up on some PCE techincal docs and visiting Mednafens IRC channel.