[Vanya]

Cool stuff. Interesting how a game mechanic had influence on the text in this game.

[Rodimus Primal]

The game's word learning mechanic was one of the things I really liked about the game. Great work so far. How has the DTE helped with space?

[Rand]

It has been neat to read about this project thus far. Thank you for your efforts!

I will be happy to run this through a test run when done, or sooner if you need it-- I am off work next week, coincidentally.

Thank you, and good luck!

[Chaos Rush]

Finally had some time to work on it, it's been a busy past couple weeks for me.

How has the DTE helped with space?

Well when I first started this I blanked out the three main dialogue text banks with FF bytes, so the space I had from the start was from 0x18217-0x1BEE7, 0x28611-0x2A749, and 0x347FE-0x35803 (there are a couple more banks but those three are the ones used for dialogue). So far I have used up to 0x19951, 0x29477, and 0x34B46, respectively. Let's pray that I won't run out of space. If I do end up running out of space for one of the banks, then I'll probably end up developing a new tool that will let me compile all the text at once and check for free space before compiling (If I go on to do Final Fantasy III, that's how I'll approach it anyway). It won't be a huge deal since I write down all of the dialogue in a separate word file (that also labels what bank and what message ID it has, and I'll provide that document with the release so people can use it to translate it into other languages). I'm being very careful to make sure I always use the built-in namecode feature to save space, something that the Demiforce translation didn't consistently do.

It has been neat to read about this project thus far. Thank you for your efforts!

I will be happy to run this through a test run when done, or sooner if you need it-- I am off work next week, coincidentally.

Thank you, and good luck!

Thank you for your support.

I think when I get to the part where you meet Leila is when I'll let people try it out for feedback and suggestions.

[Rodimus Primal]

Finally had some time to work on it, it's been a busy past couple weeks for me.

Looking good so far. Glad you're back at it.

I'm being very careful to make sure I always use the built-in namecode feature to save space, something that the Demiforce translation didn't consistently do.

That was something that really bothered me when I tried editing the script too with character names. If they had just used the nametag, calling the white mage Minwu would have been easier to change instead of Minh.

This game needs this retranslation so I'm really hoping that everything goes smoothly for you.

[Chaos Rush]

That was something that really bothered me when I tried editing the script too with character names. If they had just used the nametag, calling the white mage Minwu would have been easier to change instead of Minh.

This game needs this retranslation so I'm really hoping that everything goes smoothly for you.

Minwu doesn't have a name code, but there is a name code for whoever is currently the 4th member of your party, so during the parts when Minwu is with you, that name code is used.

Anyhow, I thought it would be interesting to post some direct comparison screenshots. Left is the Neo Demiforce translation, and right is FFII: Refurbished.

[Vanya]

Nice work. I'll finally have a good NES version of this to play once you're done.

[Chaos Rush]

Guys, which font do you think looks better? Left is the font I've been using (from Tomato's Mother 1 translation), right is the font from Final Fantasy IV. Ultimately I'd like to pick one that looks best on a CRT.

(I could just provide two patches though, one for the thin font, and one for the FFIV font)

[SunGodPortal]

I like the one on the left and think it looks better than just about any font that I remember being used in any NES game. It looks so clean and to me is easier on the eyes.

Not sure which one would look better on a CRT but it may be worth noting that I own Powerpaks and pretty much refuse to play NES and SNES games on anything but a CRT. Maybe I could test it some time.

[Rodimus Primal]

I like the thicker font. Making the games consistent is always a plus IMO. I do like the idea of a choice of font, personally but I think the thicker font would look better on a CRT.

[MegaManJuno]

I think the thicker font would look better on a CRT.

He's probably right there. It's been a while since I used a CRT, but I do recall some thin fonts being much harder to read on some games on my old CRT.

[Chaos Rush]

I think I've grown to prefer the thicker font, and I like how it looks on a CRT.

On a different subject, I've said before that if I run out of space in any of the text banks then I would develop a more efficient text tool that compiles all the text at once. Even though I haven't yet run out of space yet, I'm pretty sure I will, as the way I'm going about this is not very convenient for space optimization if I wanted to go back and change a few things. There are some things I did that I shouldn't have, such as spaces after commas and colons, since the comma tile and colon tile already look like they have a 'space' in them. The current tool that I'm using that I developed specifically for this project was also a bit half-assed (it was my first ROM hacking tool). So I'm going to develop a new tool that will let me compile all the text at once and will simply recompile it if I make changes to it, and that should maximize free space efficiency, ultimately with the goal of making sure this project is of the highest quality, in addition to continue transcripting the rest of the game. I do have a bit more programming experience now (due to college), so I'll design the new text editor with user-friendliness in mind so people can make their own-language translations as well.

[Vanya]

I kinda like the left font better, and I'm never going to play this on a CRT.
I would even use it in other re-translations of FF1 & FF3 to replace their fonts in my personal copies.
That said, I'd be appreciative if both fonts were available as separate, extra patches since my tastes in font can be a bit fickle.

[Chaos Rush]

Here's a preview of the new text editor I'm working on:

First of all, this will be a lot more stable than the previous editor, and no information will be lost between byte-text conversions (as the table files I'm including with the program accounts for EVERY byte). You will also be able to export an entire text bank to a separate .txt file, and you are free to make changes as you see fit and import it back into the text editor (this will be useful for short messages, such as enemy names). You can compile a single message at the offset that its message slot is already assigned to, or you can recompile the entire selected text bank and it will place all of the messages right next to one another in the ROM, which will maximize free space efficiency (and of course all pointers will be recalculated accordingly). There are also checks in place to prevent you from compiling if there is not enough space in the current bank. This is a powerful tool, and completely blows my previous one out of the water. I will release it when the translation is complete, and hope that others will use it for their own translations. (It's coded in Java because the only coding languages I know are Java and VB; I'll learn C++ someday I promise...)

Also I plan on making a text viewer for Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls as well. When that is finished, it should significantly speed up progress for this translation.

I kinda like the left font better, and I'm never going to play this on a CRT.
I would even use it in other re-translations of FF1 & FF3 to replace their fonts in my personal copies.
That said, I'd be appreciative if both fonts were available as separate, extra patches since my tastes in font can be a bit fickle.

The FFIV font will be the "main" one since I've grown to like it most, but I will still provide patches for other fonts so that everyone will be happy.

[Panzer88]

I agree that for CRT play the wider font is best, so that gets my vote.

[Chaos Rush]

Merry Christmas everyone!

My new text editor is now working as fully intended. This has enabled me to make some formatting changes in order to save space. Take a look:

Thanks to my new tool, I am now free to make text changes to any string I want without having to worry about offsets, as my new tool will automatically recompile the entire text bank. The new formatting style that I've adopted is modeled after vivify93's Final Fantasy IV hack, which doesn't have any 'space' bytes after periods, colons, and commas.

Also the 'HP' and 'MP' text has also been changed to what it looks like in FFIV:


And lastly I'd like to talk about icons:

The icon graphics were taken from the English prototype of Final Fantasy II, as those are as 'official' as you can get (as opposed to the Demiforce ones). And yes, there will be a visual difference between Cuirass items and Armor items.

Next up I am going to start working on a text decrypter for FFI&II GBA, that way I can view any of the text from the remake so I don't have to copy the script by hand.

EDIT: lmao, I'm looking into FF Dawn of Souls right now (since I'm a GBA hacking veteran), and the way the text is stored, at least in the FFII portion, is rather hilarious. Each line of text has its own pointer. I don't mean paragraph, I mean a single freaking line of text has its own pointer, even if it stops mid-sentence!

EDIT: So it turns out that the text in FFDoS is stored in a really really ridiculous way. First of all, as mentioned before, each single line of text has its own pointer, and they're stored in reverse-alphabetical order in a lookup table. And then there's ANOTHER table that the game uses to look up which "line ID", but this table isn't really a true table, more like a list that the game looks through and it even has its own text separate from the other text table, which controls keywords. At this point I'm getting sick of reverse-engineering FFDoS's ASM code so I decided I'm just going to continue transcripting by hand as before.

[Rodimus Primal]

That's awesome work. Maximizing the space for text is ingenious. I wish there was a way to do that with FF4kster, the tool used to edit Final Fantasy IV. Merry Christmas!

[vivify93]

It's looking pretty good, Chaos Rush. I got the idea from Neill Corlett et al's FFIII (NES) translation. They did a really great job on saving space, to be honest.

[Chaos Rush]

Good news! Even though I just said that I'm giving up on trying to dump FF2GBA's text, I decided to suck it up and managed to (mostly) decrypt it anyway, and now I have a full text dump of Final Fantasy II GBA! (It's not a perfect dump, but it'll do)



This should make my work a lot easier!
December 28, 2015, 04:42:21 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)Today's progress!



The more I work on this, I see that the Demiforce translation isn't really that good at all. There's a lot of lines that a clearly misinterpreted, and a lot that also seems like the translator couldn't figure out what the text meant so they just made up a new line. Seriously, the Prototype ROM is more accurate than the Demiforce translation (but the Prototype ROM has terrible grammar. I think the Prototype was translated by someone with Japanese as their first language, while Demiforce was most likely English as their first language).

Here's another example to show that, I'm not just trimming down the GBA script, but I'm taking special care to make sure that the script content is identical to the original Famicom version, which in some cases means that I have to do my own translating (as I know enough Japanese to translate simple lines; I understand Japanese sentence structure and I double and triple check with any words I don't know to find out the correct meaning in the given context). When you rescue Hilda from the Dreadnought, this is what she says in the GBA version:

Obviously that's really wordy and definitely not part of the original dialogue. Here's the original:

Which is clearly a lot shorter than what she says in the GBA version (to clarify, the Japanese GBA version is what added all the fluff, and the US GBA version simply translated it). A super-duper literal translation would be, "Let's escape really fast!" (はやく means "hurry/fast/really quick", while にげる means "escape/run away", while ましょう is a verb ending)

This is what I'm phrasing that line as:

(I added the "Hilda:" bit for consistency with the rest of her dialogue.)

But wanna know what the Demiforce translation says? Well:

Like wtf!?!? That's a completely made up line! So yeah, don't ever play the Demiforce translation again.

[Rodimus Primal]

Awesome work Chaos Rush! I'm really excited to see this game translated properly.