[USC]

Hey everyone! This is a project I've been working on and off for a *very* long time. It's basically tracked my improvement as a programmer - from knowing nothing, to now knowing slightly more than nothing. Now that I've strategically applied duct tape to an old editor I built entirely out of duct tape, I can once again work on this translation without corrupting the entire file!

This post is mostly to force me to finish the game this time, but I'm hoping for some useful feedback too if anyone can spare some.

What's been done so far?
-Storyline and Post-Game cutscenes
(Script provided to me long ago for this part, mostly)
-Digimon names
-Items and descriptions
-Attacks and descriptions
-Menus
-Battle and System text
-Dungeon and Village NPCs
-Graphic Compression/Decompression algorithm
-Credits
-DigiCode hints
-WonderWave instructions


What's left to do?
-Credits
-DigiCode hints*
-House A & B dialogue, the last of the NPCs: 27%
-Shop dialogue: 85%
(Mostly the link cable arenas and commentary on Digimon fusion/Jogress)
-Compressed Graphics: 90%
(Just the title screen, which admittedly is a doozy)
-Digimon Bios: 76%
-WonderWave and link cable specific text

*Translated but not yet put into the game


How can I help?
Aww, thanks for asking!

1. Critique my in-progress title screen!

--Putting this into the game's going to be a real pain, so I want to make it look right before going through the hassle. I'm not an artist (as anyone who read the Megaman & Bass thread saw), so the English logo is traced from a larger source.



2. Recommend a good beginners tutorial on debuggers and breakpoints!
--There's a few issues with formatting that I need to fix, and I don't know where to look in the file. I've heard Mednafen has a good WonderSwan debugger, so I'm hoping I can learn how to use it to solve the problems. If you're curious...

Spoiler:

This picture highlights the two biggest issues.



I need to move Digimon names further to the left to fit on-screen (since the longest one is now 16 characters as opposed to 10 in the JPN version). Also, it looks like the data storage is hard-coded to start at certain points, so it overwrites the longer English works. E.g. The start of the HP data is overwriting the last part of "Vacc.", and "Mega" is overwriting the last part of "Magnadramon". Different status screens have different text cut-off points, so I assume there's a definition somewhere in the ROM that I could hex edit to shift the write points over.

[NH579]

I'm so excited someone is actually translating this!

As for feedback, is there any chance you would be willing to use the Japanese character names instead of the ones from the English anime dubs.
Some of those names are themselves bad translations Saban did back in the 90s and some like Magnadramon (instead of Holydramon) are censored.
It's a small thing, but it's always really bugged me.

Good luck with the project regardless!

[USC]

@NH579: I knew this question was coming. Short Answer: Dub translation will come out first, then original names maybe.
(I use to have a separate file with JPN names and altered dialogue to fit the 18 character line limits (E.g. Taichi is longer than Tai), but it got corrupted and I don't have a recent back-up of it. Once I've released the dub version, I'll try to go back and make an edit with the original names.)

As for current progress, I've started working on the Digimon Bios and the last of the NPC dialogues in House A and House B:

There are 229 Digimon in-game and I've done... 4 bios so far? This'll take a bit.

[Lazermutt4]

The logo could use some work. I think I found a better logo to trace here:
https://fanart.tv/series/72241/digimon-digital-monsters/
(First entry, second row, the one that says "Digimon Adventure 02", just click "Download", no account needed)

I also made a mockup to expand the shield frame in the logo which should help fit the English text in better.

Feel free to use it or not

[USC]

@Lazermutt4: Wow, that's an exact fit for the Japanese title screen - thanks! I'll reach out to the original artist to see if it's cool to use it, but it looks great. Now to start tracing...

Oh, and here's the first screen from the credits that I've starting adding in:


Not the most exciting screenshot, but it actually causes a fun glitch. I'm debating solving it the proper way versus the cop-out way - we'll see which one wins out.
Explanation:

Spoiler:

The game has a "DigiCode" font that correlates with the cut-scene font (so the hiragana 'a' matches the Digicode 'a', and so forth). There's a built in English font, but its hex values are larger than the DigiCode font's limit, so it produces garbage output. The credits start as DigiCode and then fades to English, so the first few seconds of the credits display static. The proper way to fix it would be to change the offset so it maps to the English font... OR I could just overwrite the hiragana with English and have the credit font point to that instead of the standard font.

[USC]

It's been a busy few months for me, but I've got some time over the holidays to get back to work on this.
At the moment I'm plugging away at the Digimon Analyzer Bios, and the fusion messages from Digitamamon (which fortunately is usually the same message with the Digimon's name changed out, so it's tedious but easy).

I also had a brief flashed of insight and hacked a save state so I could add Gold BITs to my file. These could only be earned via Link-Cable battles, making them rather difficult to get now. Here are some screenshots from the stores that only accept Gold BITs as money:
   

Interesting note: The game allocates four bytes to store the value, but only displays up to 999 when the store owner tells you your total. I wonder if that was the limit in the actual game (outside of save state hacking).

[Iredc]

I started working on the Brave Tamer game recently (translated up to the first boss, attacks, some items and the like...). It's awesome to find now that you're working on this game and have almost finished!!
I dont know if it will be useful for you at this point, but theres a German translation of Tag Tamers: http://www.snes-projects.de/filebase/index.php?page=Entry&entryID=486

Theres also this debugging tutorial which I found moderately easy (though I havent accomplished much yet in the debugging department):https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BHYjxsDROn4

By the way, how did you translate the menus text? At least in Brave Tamer they're nowhere to be found. Guess its in compressed images?

Anyway, good luck with this project! 

[USC]

Iredc: Hey, thanks for the links! Yeah, the German translation has been around for a while, and it only covers the intro and some miscellaneous graphics and text. You can understand the battles, but that's about it.

I dug through Brave Tamers at one point, and I think it's the same as Tag and D1 Tamers: Uncompressed graphics followed by an image map, so it knows what order to put the text in. I believe if you open up a graphics editor that supports WonderSwan Color (or Sega Master System/Game Gear, which has the same encoding) and look starting at 20282, you'll find your menus.

Good luck on Brave Tamer as well!

[Iredc]

You were right about the graphics. The menu text was at offset 20200. Its just that it looks quite displaced and unintelligible, so I missed it.
Thank you very much! This saved me a big headache.