[Timbo]

I'm doing a simple text edit of Secret of Mana. It's a relocalization/update of the game's nomenclature (ie. Characters, Locations, Spells, Equipment, etc.) I would like to reflect these changes in the game's intro text. Specifically, where it mentions the names the Sword of Mana has held throughout history.


About my little project...

As much as I love Ted Woosley's localization efforts, I have to admit, this one feel's a little dated. Enemies like Buffy, Terminator, and LA Funk have all seen updates in the recent remake for good reason, they are no longer relevant. The HD Remake also updated other assets. The Claymore for example has gone back to it's unlocalized form, Orichalcum Blade.

However, there are still some missed opportunities. For example, the Herald Sword was relocalized simply as the Herald's Sword. Despite the fact that it's original name Kusanagi, has become far more well known in the west because of its continued use in video games and anime.

My plan is to update, uncensor, and relocalize the game's assets according to what I think works best. I'm using Windhex32 to edit the game and FuSoYa's VWF and Vifify93's Proper-caser patches as a base. I will not be updating the script to the HD Remake version of the game since I neither have it or a Script Dump of it.

I'd love to hear any suggestions.

[yetisyny]

I'm using ... FuSoYa's VWF and Vifify93's Proper-caser patches as a base.

Since that is how I play the game, with those 2 patches, that is a very good base to start out with, I agree 100% with that decision. Very smart, you start out with a variable-width font and everything in the correct case, but without any hacks that change things from the way the game originally was designed.

Your idea sounds pretty good. I would refer you to this unfinished project attempting a retranslation: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=19920.0 Some of the people who worked on that project might the text of their unfinished retranslation or some tools to recommend that they used, and they might be able to help you out. Apparently RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero worked on this. Also Hiei- worked on it too but it seems his/her work was separate and not really coordinated with RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero, from that thread. It seems RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero never finished their project but Hiei- DID pretty much finish an English translation but never put it out because Hiei-’s work got dismissed by Thanatos-Zero because Thanatos-Zero and RedScorpion were doing their own translation, look at http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=19920.msg285004#msg285004 as well as the comment immediately following it.

My point is that Hiei- already retranslated this entire game but it kinda got discarded since it was submitted to another project that didn’t really accept it and was trying to do things differently, but you could totally use Hiei-’s work, Hiei-’s profile is here: http://www.romhacking.net/community/1586/ Maybe Hiei- still has their translation of this on their computer. My point with mentioning this is, after I discovered this while reading through the forums, I thought, well, this unreleased retranslation would be very very useful especially since its creator says it is 100% complete. Too bad it never got released as a patch.

You aren’t actually planning on doing a retranslation from what you said, only uncensoring and updating and relocalizing it, but, Hiei-’s unreleased work translates everything including the parts that were censored or left out of Ted Woolsey’s version, so if you are reinserting those parts it would come in handy.

As far as names I think generally the 3D Remake versions released earlier in 2018 for PS4, PS Vita, and MS Windows of Secret of Mana would generally have the best names for most things although I agree, you might want to keep older names for other things, I trust your judgment on this. You don’t really need a copy of the game to find names of things, you can find things like lists of weapons, armor, accessories, characters, game locations, etc. online and see what has changed between the SNES release in English and the 3D Remake in English.

EDITED: There is a Secret of Mana Editor by Moppy you can use. I updated Romhacking dot net’s version, at http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/985/, from the outdated version 0204 to the latest version 0213 that is at its official site, http://somedit.blogspot.com/, so now, either site you get it from, you get the latest version. Anyway this editor may be helpful to you although from what I have read it does still have some bugs and is not entirely perfect so I would be careful with it. (Originally I posted this before Romhacking.net had the latest version approved, I edited it now that everything is up-to-date.)

[mziab]

Do note that FuSoYa encrypted the dialogue in his VWF patch and added a CRC check to prevent tampering with the code. It's actually a similar setup to his Sailor Moon Another Story patch. Anyway, I'm not sure any publicly available editor will be able to handle it. But I've actually cracked this encryption scheme for RedScorpion for his retranslation project. If you're serious about this, I could try to dig out my notes or something. But yeah, this is gonna be a bit more involved than your entry-level hack.

[KingMike]

Honestly if FuSoYa didn't want us messing with his work and went to that extent, it would probably be easier to make another VWF patch to use as a base, using the original script (let his rewrites remain as his work). There's far more people doing SNES ASM hacks these days than there was back then.

[Timbo]

Wow. There's so much to take in here. I had no idea that these guys got so ambitious that they bit off more than they could chew and dropped their project altogether. It's a crying shame that Hiel translated an entire script for them, that they never bothered to implement.

As far as FuSoYa's VWF code goes... It's hard to say if borrowing it is any more unethical than hacking my own script. That said, I don't really feel comfortable "stealing" someone else's code.

Unfortunately, Moppy's editor isn't compatible with FuSoYa's VWF code. So, I would have to sacrifice one to implement the other. Ultimately, the script is SoM's biggest problem and FuSoYa's patch is the only thing currently on the market that addresses that. As nice as it would be to be able to drop in the HD Remake's updated script and rearrange the Sword Upgrades So you can use the Dragon Buster in the Pure Land and the Excalibur against the Lich, it's not really possible.


Now, just to be clear. I'm not trying to promise the moon here. My hacking skills are limited at best. I will not be relocalizing the game's script. I'm just relocalizing some of it's nomenclature. Which, without a proper editor, limits what I can do in scope. Each of the entries for the game's various names and descriptions have a control byte before and after each one, represented by "00". Unfortunately, I can't move these bytes as they are called by other parts of the game's code that I don't understand.

This mean's that I can edit any of these text entries so long as I don't increase the amount of characters used in any single entry. Thankfully, the tbl file has a fair amount of DTE (Dual-Tile Encoding) characters, which allows me to rename some things with a little compromise. The table can be found here http://www.datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/Secret_of_Mana:TBL. For Example the "Doom Axe" was originally called the "Devil Axe" but it was censored during localization because of it's religious nature. Unfortunately, there are no compatible DTE tiles to squash any of the letters together in "Devil Axe" However, there were DTE tiles for "at" "an" and "s " So, I was able to relocalize it to "Satan's Axe" Which if you ask me is a far more epic and accurate localization than "Doom Axe" for one of the game's ultimate weapons.

Another Note. I was able to find and correct the "Weapon Skil" bug.

Since this post is running long I'm going to end it here. A little later today, I'll be adding a list of the changes I'm making.

[Hiei-]

Since that is how I play the game, with those 2 patches, that is a very good base to start out with, I agree 100% with that decision. Very smart, you start out with a variable-width font and everything in the correct case, but without any hacks that change things from the way the game originally was designed.

Your idea sounds pretty good. I would refer you to this unfinished project attempting a retranslation: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=19920.0 Some of the people who worked on that project might the text of their unfinished retranslation or some tools to recommend that they used, and they might be able to help you out. Apparently RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero worked on this. Also Hiei- worked on it too but it seems his/her work was separate and not really coordinated with RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero, from that thread. It seems RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero never finished their project but Hiei- DID pretty much finish an English translation but never put it out because Hiei-’s work got dismissed by Thanatos-Zero because Thanatos-Zero and RedScorpion were doing their own translation, look at http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=19920.msg285004#msg285004 as well as the comment immediately following it.

My point is that Hiei- already retranslated this entire game but it kinda got discarded since it was submitted to another project that didn’t really accept it and was trying to do things differently, but you could totally use Hiei-’s work, Hiei-’s profile is here: http://www.romhacking.net/community/1586/ Maybe Hiei- still has their translation of this on their computer. My point with mentioning this is, after I discovered this while reading through the forums, I thought, well, this unreleased retranslation would be very very useful especially since its creator says it is 100% complete. Too bad it never got released as a patch.

You aren’t actually planning on doing a retranslation from what you said, only uncensoring and updating and relocalizing it, but, Hiei-’s unreleased work translates everything including the parts that were censored or left out of Ted Woolsey’s version, so if you are reinserting those parts it would come in handy.

As far as names I think generally the 3D Remake versions released earlier in 2018 for PS4, PS Vita, and MS Windows of Secret of Mana would generally have the best names for most things although I agree, you might want to keep older names for other things, I trust your judgment on this. You don’t really need a copy of the game to find names of things, you can find things like lists of weapons, armor, accessories, characters, game locations, etc. online and see what has changed between the SNES release in English and the 3D Remake in English.

There is a Secret of Mana Editor by Moppy you can use. Unfortunately Romhacking dot net doesn’t have the latest version 0213 which is at http://somedit.blogspot.com/, instead they have the older version 0204, so since I just noticed this I submitted an update to Romhacking dot net’s currently outdated page about that editor here: http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/985/ That page should be updated to the latest version in a few days assuming my submission is approved. Anyway this editor may be helpful to you although from what I have read it does still have some bugs and is not entirely perfect so I would be careful with it.

No, I never retranslated the game in english. The best I did in english was just to make an uncensored version (restored the boss with the chainsaw and some other stuffs) with the original english translation, that I never published because it required some polishing (basically, to redo the line-break as the actual hack use a VWF (not FuSoYa one, Magno's) and as you said, someone else was planning to retranslate it so it seemed useless to publish it.

Secret of Mana (Uncensored+VWF-USA-100%)_banks_fixed_Misc_inserted_Battle_inserted_splash_screen_disabled.sfc

DarknessSavior had offered to translate the game from scratch, so I sent him the japanese dump and planned to take care of the hack (already done for the french retranslation) but I never heard about him since then, so he probably just gave up.

Edit : If it can help you, Timbo : http://www.hiei-tf.fr/Secret_of_Mana_(U)_-_Scripts.rar (if you modify those scripts, I'll be able to reinsert them back in a rom with a VWF and all the uncensored stuffs. Note that you won't have any length limitations for the main script, you can make it twice bigger if you want).

Here's how look the actual hack (IPS Patch) : http://www.hiei-tf.fr/Secret%20of%20Mana%20(Uncensored+VWF-USA-100%)_banks_fixed_Misc_inserted_Battle_inserted_splash_screen_disabled.rar

The IPS patch has to be applied on the "Secret of Mana (USA).sfc" rom (from no-intro set).*

Note that the intro, the title screen, the entry-name screen and some menus are still in french because I was lazy to modify them as the hack was never released (but I can modify them pretty easily). And you can sometimes see some texts overlay (because of the length of the characters name. In my french hack, I made a test with long names for all characters to fix the line-breaks to avoid that).

Modifications are explained here (too bad, the images links are dead) : http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=15854.msg235828#msg235828

Edit 2 : https://tcrf.net/Secret_of_Mana_(SNES)#Unused_Sprites (modifications can be found here, for the boss and the earthquake graphic)

Basically, the modifications are :

- Reinserted an unused text in the rom.
- Reinserted the original boss with chainsaws.
- Reinserted the original earthquake graphic.

[KingMike]

make an uncensored version (restored the boss with the chainsaw and some other stuffs)

A robot named Killroy, was it?
Thinking about it, I wonder if that boss was a Woolseyism, a reference to Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto?

[Hiei-]

Death Machine in japanese, if I remember right.

[RedScorpion]

Do note that FuSoYa encrypted the dialogue in his VWF patch and added a CRC check to prevent tampering with the code. It's actually a similar setup to his Sailor Moon Another Story patch. Anyway, I'm not sure any publicly available editor will be able to handle it. But I've actually cracked this encryption scheme for RedScorpion for his retranslation project. If you're serious about this, I could try to dig out my notes or something. But yeah, this is gonna be a bit more involved than your entry-level hack.

hi guys,

further mziab wrote a python xls to rom converter. I have a xls file with the japanese, english, vwf english and german version of the script and could easy compare the differents. If you want, i could share the files.

Thanks

red

[yetisyny]

No, I never retranslated the game in english. The best I did in english was just to make an uncensored version (restored the boss with the chainsaw and some other stuffs) with the original english translation, that I never published because it required some polishing (basically, to redo the line-break as the actual hack use a VWF (not FuSoYa one, Magno's) and as you said, someone else was planning to retranslate it so it seemed useless to publish it.

Ah, yeah, that makes more sense. It appears I misinterpreted your comments in that thread Hiei-, you were saying that you had translated a patch that you had done for a French version of the game into English, NOT that you had translated the entire Japanese script of the game into English like I thought. Makes more sense in retrospect because according to your profile you know French and English but not Japanese, and also, that would have been very fast to translate an entire JRPG from Japanese into English. Although admittedly Ted Woolsey translated it very fast originally so it is definitely possible to do.

Sorry about my confusion and reading comprehension problems. It is a shame RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero’s awesome retranslation project never got finished. I guess it was a very ambitious project that required a lot of work, and, probably much more work would need to be done to get it into a finished state. The last comment in that thread is from 2016, only 2 years ago, it might still exist on their hard drives, but probably needs more work or else obviously they would have put it out if it was done. OK not necessarily, I mean I have made hacks that are not on this site, but that is for different reasons, because of submission guidelines and not having screenshots and stuff ready yet and only recently creating an account here, my hacks are on another site but unfortunately it is offline now so I will try and get that fixed.

Anyway so, FuSoYa has his game protected with some kind of CRC check huh? Well then the proper-caser patch by vivify93 and the other patches that are compatible with FuSoYa’s patch must have gotten around this somehow. Also its description for the proper-caser patch at https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1105/ says that FuSoYa “vehemently advocates combining the two patches”. So I interpret this to mean FuSoYa is totally fine with basing other patches on his work.

I would assume the purpose of the CRC check, then, is to make sure that the IPS patching process went successfully. Since with the whole headered vs. unheadered ROM thing and other differences between ROMs, the CRC check FuSoYa built in is almost certainly just a mechanism to make sure you used the correct ROM and patched it correctly, to keep players from encountering bugs in the game later. FuSoYa is the author of Lunar IPS after all, so it would make sense that FuSoYa’s concern here would be whether the patch was applied correctly or not. IPSWin after all has bugs in it. This type of thing is probably the reason for FuSoYa putting that check in there, namely, protecting ordinary gamers who just want to apply patches and play the game from having bugs from accidentally patching things the wrong way. NOT wanting to stop other ROM hackers from doing ROM hacks.

So I would encourage the original poster of this thread (Timbo) and others such as RedScorpion, Hiei-, etc. to continue doing ROM hacks. Sorry for misinterpreting a comment on that other thread! It was an honest mistake. But, I think people like KingMike are probably misinterpreting FuSoYa’s intentions for including a CRC check, it is not aimed at stopping ROM hackers in my opinion, it is aimed at making it obvious to ordinary users if they have a corrupted ROM, at least that is what I think. Then again I have been wrong about other things so I guess you should think for yourselves instead of just accepting my interpretation of why FuSoYa put in the CRC check. Also as far as the encryption I think, back then in the early days of ROM hacking, someone could easily claim credit for someone else’s work and FuSoYa didn’t want anyone else lying and saying they were responsible for his work and not giving him credit, very understandable, I think in the early days of fan translations in the late 90s translation groups probably stole each others’ work without credit sometimes and there was not really any way to document it back then. But I really doubt that would be a problem nowadays because nowadays everyone respects FuSoYa and gives him credit for all of his work.

[mziab]

Anyway so, FuSoYa has his game protected with some kind of CRC check huh? Well then the proper-caser patch by vivify93 and the other patches that are compatible with FuSoYa’s patch must have gotten around this somehow. Also its description for the proper-caser patch at https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1105/ says that FuSoYa “vehemently advocates combining the two patches”. So I interpret this to mean FuSoYa is totally fine with basing other patches on his work.

I've since dug out my old notes, so please allow me to correct some misconceptions. Firstly, the encryption and CRC check in FuSoYa's patch only touch the dialogue. This is how other patches are compatible, so as long as they don't try to fiddle with the dialogue itself.

Moreover, the sentence you're referring to ("FuSoYa’s Variable Width Edition of Secret of Mana didn’t even touch the menu text, as far as the author knows, so he vehemently advocates combining the two patches") is just vivify93 adhering to the RHDN rule of "avoid writing in the first person". "The author" and the subsequent "he" refer to vivify93 himself. Granted, in this case this makes the end of the sentence a bit ambiguous, but I'm positive that the intended meaning is that vivify93 recommends combining his proper-caser with the VWF patch and NOT that he has FuSoYa's blessing.

I would assume the purpose of the CRC check, then, is to make sure that the IPS patching process went successfully. Since with the whole headered vs. unheadered ROM thing and other differences between ROMs, the CRC check FuSoYa built in is almost certainly just a mechanism to make sure you used the correct ROM and patched it correctly, to keep players from encountering bugs in the game later. FuSoYa is the author of Lunar IPS after all, so it would make sense that FuSoYa’s concern here would be whether the patch was applied correctly or not. IPSWin after all has bugs in it. This type of thing is probably the reason for FuSoYa putting that check in there, namely, protecting ordinary gamers who just want to apply patches and play the game from having bugs from accidentally patching things the wrong way. NOT wanting to stop other ROM hackers from doing ROM hacks.

The CRC routine only checks the dialogue bank and more specifically, the encrypted pointer-table. It's clearly a anti-tampering measure, especially since the checksum check is tightly coupled with the routine which handles the encrypted dialogue. Moreover, if it fails, it just blanks out the screen. And if this wasn't enough, Sailor Moon Another Story, another hack by FuSoYa with a similar encryption (developed first), had a message to keep wannabe hackers away, which you could see in a tile editor. So I think it's pretty conclusive what the intentions were. And truth be told, in the climate those hacks were created, it is very understandable why FuSoYa would want to protect his hacks this way.

[Timbo]

This changes everything. It was easy to keep this project small when it's limitations were simple enough to keep it small. My inclination is to say "Let's do it!", but I'm going to take some time and make a decision if I want to go forward with implementing a full translation.

I should have my hands on an english dump of the hd remake by the end of the night to compare as well.

[Hiei-]

Ah, yeah, that makes more sense. It appears I misinterpreted your comments in that thread Hiei-, you were saying that you had translated a patch that you had done for a French version of the game into English, NOT that you had translated the entire Japanese script of the game into English like I thought. Makes more sense in retrospect because according to your profile you know French and English but not Japanese, and also, that would have been very fast to translate an entire JRPG from Japanese into English. Although admittedly Ted Woolsey translated it very fast originally so it is definitely possible to do.

I know Japanese, I'm not the one who created my profile so maybe the guy who created it just didn't know. If not, I would not have been able to translate "Phantasy Star Generation 2" (french version was released a lot of time ahead the english release), same for "Crystal Beans : From Dungeon Explorer" (SNES) and the last scripts of "Dragon Ball Z Gokuuden". All the games I translated or anime episodes I translate are done from japanese (in France, I'm known as a guy who subtitle Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters episodes in french since 2005, far before Crunchyroll start to translate them in english).

But yeah, I don't translate games with big scripts in english as it's not my native language. There are already lots of good english translators here.

As I said, I can offer a full hack of the game (the hack is already done) so it just require someone to translate the script (or maybe the Steam version has a faithful translation, did someone checked it?). That's how I did for the french version. First, we wanted to retranslate the game then we saw the french script of the iPhone version was pretty well translated (translated from japanese when the original french version was translated from the english version) so we just used the script of the iPhone version (it would have been pretty useless to translate it again as it was already translated pretty well).

[RedScorpion]

Hi guys,

regarding the IOS version of the som1, only the french and spanish version got a full new retranslation from SE. The english and german translation was almost the same "shit" like in the snes version with some changes/fixes in names for npcs, items and armor.

My plan was to use the german script for the retranslation of som1 with the vwf from magno. I was also in contact with Hiei, and he sent me his asm changes.

Last year, the som1 remastered was released, but i cant find any informations about the translation. Could anyone say something about the translation? Was it made from scratch or has SE used agian the same bullshit like in the ios for english and german?

I dumped the german script some days before from the remastered, but has until now no time to review.

Thanks

red

[Timbo]

I just dumped the official English script from the Steam version. Is be happy to rearrange and inject it myself if I had the tools.

[mziab]

I just dumped the official English script from the Steam version. Is be happy to rearrange and inject it myself if I had the tools.

As RedScorpion mentioned, I have a tool for inserting an Excel spreadsheet into a ROM with FuSoYa's VWF hack. It's just a command-line Python script, but it's been tested and it works. As a bonus, this makes it easier to compare different versions.

You could also take Hiei- up on his offer and use that hack, which might be slightly less dubious, since you don't need to work around any CRC checks and encryption. And you could still use FuSoYa's script for reference, I have it dumped. Then again, from what I understand, his isn't exactly a retranslation, but more of a rewrite.

[Timbo]

I haven't had a chance to read the Hiel-'s translation yet. Without having seen it, I think the official English retranslation is worth the extra effort on my part to implement.

That said, I would at least like to look at Hiel-'s script before making any decisions.

[mziab]

Hiei- hasn't translated SoM to English. He was going to translate the script from Japanese to French, but it turns out the new official French script from the mobile version is pretty good, so he used that instead, combined with magno's assembly hacks. Another script may be inserted in that hacked version and that's what his offer was about. That's the gist of it, unless I'm mistaken

[KingMike]

Then again, from what I understand, his isn't exactly a retranslation, but more of a rewrite.

I recall he explicitly stated as such on his site, it isn't a retranslation.

[Timbo]

Sorry about the confusion. Trying to sneak peeks at my phone at work is usually a bad idea. Doing so while sick, doubly so.