46 OkuMen - PC-98 Translations

[mikeprado30]

It looks really NICE!

Just a little suggestion: I'd change the name of the YouTube channel into 46 OkuMen

[kuoushi]

The channel is more my personal channel. We didn't know for sure if we'd be making more specific videos for our romhacks. Who makes trailers for fan translations anyway? That being said, we'd make a whole new channel if we cared enough about it. For now though, my channel's as good a place as any.

We also started our general playtesting for Rusty the other night. So that's still moving along pretty nicely.

[mikeprado30]

Excellent news!  We'll be awaiting this new patch 

[WildWolf21]

Ever since YouTuber LukeMorse1 showed off game-play of Rusty, i've been hoping that someone would translate the game into English. Now that the project is finally in beta, i'm looking forward to it more than the new Castlevania fangame coming out at the end of the month, Lecarde Chronicles 2.

Keep up the awesome work!!

[kuoushi]

Some good news and some bad news. The bad news first.

There was an incident involving water and a laptop. No data was lost but the laptop's motherboard was fried and the company doesn't let you buy new ones anymore since it's a somewhat older laptop. A new one is in the process of being purchased, and once that's done progress will resume on Rusty (which was unfortunately very close to being done before this incident). Such is life.

The good news, depending on how interested you are in retro PCs, which I'll assume you are somewhat since you're reading this thread.

SkyeWelse recently held a booth/exhibit at the Vintage Computer Festival South East in Georgia. He had both Rusty and EVO on display there, running them on actual PC-98 hardware (Rusty on a PC-9821Ce2 and EVO on a PC-9801DO). Pretty neat. We posted a few pictures on our site, and his Twitter has a bunch more, showing off a bunch of the other retro computers they had at his booth. Check 'em out.

46 OkuMen Site Blog Post with some pictures.
SkyeWelse's Twitter

Also, now for the really secret good news that I didn't even mention at the beginning of the post.

RadicalR dropped a message to one of the former developers for Glodia, which we've mentioned a few times further up in the thread, and apparently that developer is a pretty fucking cool dude. He provided us with not only the source code, but also a build environment to build the game from scratch for Different Realm - Kuon no Kenja. That's pretty unbelievable news, to be quite honest. I've been digging through it and it's well documented and everything looks fucking great. Once hollowaytape gets his new computer in we'll be looking to report a bit more on what the possibilities are for that game in the future. For now though, fucking neat.

We'll keep you guys posted on our progress as we know more.

[Starscream]

That's amazing.  Is it the guy who runs the Glodia memorial and did the the Java transfer of RagnarΦkkr a while ago? I thought that was already remarkable. I mean, there aren't many of these Japanese developers around who still keep doing that kind of work with their old stuff, or are there?

Is it known how much similarity there is code-wise between Glodia games, I was guessing before that Bible Master/RagnarΦkkr/Etemible kinda use the same engine, and their overhead RPG games another.

[kuoushi]

Yep, that's the same guy. Hoee Quwata, or QuarterDev. (This is his site for those wondering.) Not only did he do a source port of RagnarΦkkr to Java, he also ported it to Unity (C#) and showed it off running on a PS4. Not that the interface or controls worked or anything, but it was running. There really aren't a lot of developers like him still around that are so easily approachable and also enthusiastic about their old projects. I'm glad he's still around and active.

As to how similar the systems are, a lot of their later PC-98 titles use some pretty similar engine parts. Their text is compressed the same way at the very least as far as I can remember. I'll have to get back to you on just how similar since I haven't checked the others in a while. The only difference was whether or not they compressed the files further using DIET.EXE or not I believe.

[hollowaytape]

We just released our Rusty translation!

We hope you enjoy it. Let us know if anything unusual happens.

I just submitted it into the RHDN queue as well.

[mikeprado30]

Excellent!  Congrats for the release! 

Now awaiting for the next one 

[Magma MK-II]

Patcher isn't working.



I guess it's saying it is incompatible with my system (I use Win7 32bit).

[hollowaytape]

Patcher isn't working.

(img)

I guess it's saying it is incompatible with my system (I use Win7 32bit).

Yeah, looks like there is a problem with 32 bit systems at the moment. Let me send you a PM with an updated version to try out.

[Hemlock]

We are slowly, but surely getting into the final frontier of gaming.

[Recapnation]

Probably a good idea to show the list of games we've already looked at for possible future projects as well as what we're looking for/at.

In no particular order:
Insiders (Both) (1: refuge.tokyo, 2: refuge.tokyo)
Libros de Chilam Balam (refuge.tokyo)
XZR 1 (refuge.tokyo)
Void Vanity Fleet (pc98.org)
Paracelsus no Maken (refuge.tokyo)
Fifth Element (refuge.tokyo)
Farland Story 7 (refuge.tokyo)
Power Singer (refuge.tokyo)
La Valeur (refuge.tokyo)
Kuro no Ken (refuge.tokyo)
AIZA: New Generation (refuge.tokyo)
Illusion City (refuge.tokyo)
Elmknight (refuge.tokyo)
DAIVA Story 7 (refuge.tokyo)
Armored Flagship Atragon (refuge.tokyo)
Mission (refuge.tokyo)
Free Will: Knight of Argent (refuge.tokyo)
Super Dog World (refuge.tokyo)
Tamashi no Mon (refuge.tokyo)
Totsugeki! Mix (refuge.tokyo)
CRW 2 (refuge.tokyo)
Different Realm - Kuon no Kenja (refuge.tokyo)

And now a couple of notes about this list and what a game being on it means. Basically, we looked at these games and thought that they had some pretty cool things going for them and that they'd be worthwhile to translate. For each of the games here we've looked into their file structures at a very basic level and tried to see what it'd take for us to hack and translate them, things like whether or not they have proprietary image formats (increases the difficulty quite a bit), whether their text is in the executables or separate files, whether said text is compressed/encrypted or plaintext, whether ASCII characters will show up without any modifications, and a bunch of other things. Another thing about this list is that we might actually do the games on it in the future (which I guess should be obvious).

Don't see a game on the list that you think would be worthwhile for us to translate in the future? Go ahead and suggest it! We're not particularly focused on any one kind of game or genre (though our list is pretty RPG heavy at the moment), but there are a few things that we look for before we put games into our candidates sheet and give them a more thorough look.

First, and this will probably annoy a number of people, no eroge (adult games). Things that push the boundaries of that a little are okay, so long as it doesn't go too far (e.g. Rusty).
Second, PC-98 exclusives are preferred. Or at the very least, the PC-98 version of the game is the definitive version out of all the different ports and versions of the game.

Those are really the main two things we're looking at. Other things we tend to steer clear of are Visual Novels or Adventure games, but that's mostly just a personal preference for us. If a game from those genres is phenomenal we will of course consider it, but we probably won't be doing a lot of those.

Cool project. Always wondered why it was taking so long to get fan translators interested in old PCs. So thanks for filling the void. Especially for your interest in Glodia. They started on the PC-88 Mk-II SR, actually (after leaving Telenet, no less), but these people were really something else. There's a couple of similar companies I'd suggest you to check -- Anjin and Fuga System:

http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/screen/Anjin.html

http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/screen/Fuga%20System.html

You can't go wrong with almost any of their games.

Your list is nice enough, but, besides the aforementioned Fuga System and Anjin games, misses some key titles which fit your prerrogative fairly well. Xak series, fr instance. Whereas the first Xak has a hi-res version on the X-68000 and Xak III, a CD version on the FM Towns, Xak II and Gazzel no Tou's PC98 versions are pretty much the best ones. Or different enough to the others to deserve some attention.

Along with these (and Tokyo Twlight Busters, as someone else suggested):

USAGI-NA PANIC
USAGI-NA PANIC 2
KIGEN --KAGAYAKI NO HASHA--
DRAGON HALF (mild erotism)
MAGICREMENT
STAR STRIDERS
RYUUKI DENSHOU --DRAGOON--
LEGAM

(I think you can find most of those here: http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/screen/entitle.html )

...you'd have pretty much the best games under your conditions. For what seems a pretty special adventure game, add this:

http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/screen/G2703.html

Tamashii no Mon had an FMT version in CD format, by the way. Not sure, but I'd expect it to have music tracks against the original version, being Koei and whatnot. Hopefully it doesn't prevent you from starting a translation, though. The FMT version doesn't seem to be available anywhere.


Edit:

Just checked it and Xak II also had a CD-ROM version for the FMT (as well as a floppy-based one for the X68 which seems to sound better than the PC98 version), so well, there's that.

[hollowaytape]

Thanks Recapnation, that is a really excellent list. I'll spend some time checking these out. Last Guardian (Anjin) and Dead Force (Fuga System) were on our radar before, but I see some other games by those publishers that are more immediately tempting.

Since the time of kuoushi's post, we've learned of someone working on Tamashii no Mon, so we're not likely to work on that.

[kuoushi]

Now that Rusty's out, work has switched gears over to CRW. We've got some screenshots of the draft in game. (None of this text is FINAL, but some of it may make it into the release version.)



We've got some more over at our project page for CRW if you're interested in seeing where we're at. Still a decent amount to go, but it's already pretty far along.

[Magma MK-II]

By the way, the x86 patcher you sent me seems to be working fine. I'll see if I can find a different rom to test it out just in case.

EDIT: Just tested out with another rom, it's working fine!

[kuoushi]

We just released v1.0.1 which fixes the few issues that have been reported so far with the patching process (adding more informative error messages), as well as translating the GDC Clock error message before the game launches if the clock is set to 5MHz instead of 2.5MHz. Not a huge update or anything, but our patching process is getting more robust and useful hopefully.

In CRW news, I'm working on revisions and hollowaytape is working on getting things reinserted. It's look pretty good so far, and seeing everything in English is pretty fun as usual.

[Gamerhenky]

Gameplay Video of Rusty (PC-98): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdYgXKxlLX8
I'll be next time doing for CRW Metal Jacket someday after the group finished with it. 

[hollowaytape]

Here's a trailer for CRW Metal Jacket, courtesy of kuoushi.

I just finished my first full playthrough of it in English, and I really enjoyed it. Definitely a nice little surprise to find in the PC-98 game catalog.

[mikeprado30]

So then this one is near!!!