[PS1]Emulator plugin for subtitle rendering question

[DragonSpikeXIII]

I have a project where we're translating a PS1 game, things are going fine but I noticed there are two sections where characters speak but no subtitles of any kind are present, unlike 99% of the game. Is a subtitle-rendering plugin for an emulator, say ePSXe, feasible?

Here's an excerpt from a message we got last year from someone who was interested in helping out but had no time and we never heard from him again. His suggestion though was pretty worthwhile.

"Figuring out when to display what subtitle would be the hard part. For
that different methods could be used:
-Monitoring memory with the cheat code module
-Monitoring (parts of) the window/OCS, probably works best for menus
-Monitoring access of certain resources like sound files or images of
the game
-Timers
-Tracking user input"

I know something like this has been achieved already for a Gamecube fan-translation, but no such thing exists for PS1.

[FAST6191]

Are these sections FMV by any chance? It is where we often see such things, and consoles right down to the PSP and DS have seen hacks to do things here. Depending upon how it goes if it is FMV you might even be able to add subs to the video and burn them in.

I am not aware of the gamecube example though. However given you are asking for plugins and the methods you list it sounds like a texture replacement type thing which is fairly popular in those circles.

The methods you list could probably be made to work, most of them strike me more as reverse engineering methods that could be turned towards your goal here. Me talking down upon using crude techniques is a bit rich though so I will leave that there. Personally, assuming it is not FMV anyway, I would probably look at the text engine and go from there -- by this point the text engine is almost certain a function and you can probably treat it accordingly.

Offhand I am not aware of any plugins that will do exactly what you want, however there has been some work in texturing PS1 games (not as much as the N64 but some) so you might be able to twist something there.

Alternative. Might it be possible to "recap" the scene in the next text event? "[previously untranslated speech] you say, how interesting.... [normal text start]" being the basic idea.

[Scio]

He's talking about the SRW GC translation. They use the texture replacement option of the emulator to input the translation.

[DragonSpikeXIII]

Thank you for your replies

the two occasions where this happens are different.

One is infact an FMV, here's the link where you can see right at the end the section I'm talking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DYBx3ZlVMs, as you can see the game usually does use TIMs to store its text, which we have cracked, but then the game goes from in-game to FMV and since it's a "true ending", having the final bits untranslated would be a bummer.

The other time this occurs is during a mission ("Archnemesis" for those interested) where there's about a minute of dialogue, which is important to the plot of that path. This happens during gameplay, which usually has subtitles for spoken dialogue/chatter but not here, for plot-related reasons. One good thing that might help soft-sub this section is that the dialogue has fixed timing, the player doesn't matter and the real mission doesnt even start until the characters are done speaking so it's not random at all, which should help with the starting point and timing of soft-subs.

Sadly it isn't possible to recap what is said here because by this point (end-game) TIM text usage is very sparse, and the space is limited as it is. It's either soft-subs or a separate text file for this part.

[Pennywise]

Gemini has source code for his softsub routines and from what I hear, it's not that hard to implement on the PSX for some technical reason. Ask Esperknight to implement a softsub in the game and that'll at least take care of the FMV. He's got other projects where he needs to do the same thing and it'll give him a reason to do it.

[DragonSpikeXIII]

Gemini has source code for his softsub routines and from what I hear, it's not that hard to implement on the PSX for some technical reason. Ask Esperknight to implement a softsub in the game and that'll at least take care of the FMV. He's got other projects where he needs to do the same thing and it'll give him a reason to do it.

Ah, if esperknight knows about this then I'll get around to ask for his help somewhere down the line. He's still working on a few of AC3's TIMs as of this writing so I wouldn't want to overload him with stuff.