[Fray]

I'm totally with you!

indeed! While the remake looks spiffy, I'm all for the NES original.  Hope this translation project gets a boost from the remake rather than remaining unfinished.

[FCandChill]

I was looking into this game. Here's a video of some text inserted into the game...

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/267170507705679872/837557947529560084/famicom_detective_club.mp4

I'm not part of the translation team, but I wanted to show you what would be involved to translate this game.

What you see in the video was the result of me manually locating almost every pointer in AREA-L01's scripting language data. I did some guess work by combing through the game's script language for stuff that looked like pointers. During the setup, I misidentified something as a pointer initially which resulted in a crash when selecting a certain menu option.

You'll sometimes have pointers that point to different files. For the most part "AREA-L01" references itself, however, I found 4 instances where it references a file called "COM.PRG". I didn't play the game much to confirm, but it looks like this contains the guts of the game's code, judging by the filename and file size, so it will always stay in memory. Because of this, it looks like commonly reused text are shoved into this file.

However, there could be cases where a scene files reference other files that aren't always in memory and you have no idea what is loaded into memory at the moment, but this is just speculation. In any case, this exercise gave me the chance to adjust my script inserter / dumper to have more features and fix some bugs.

Basically what I'm say is, translating this game is a tedious task. Having pointers in a scripting language is something Tokimeki Memorial SFC (yes, that one) and Arle no Bouken: Mahou no Jewel do, and those took multiple failed translation attempts to get translated. Given the lack of response from OP and the complexity of this project, consider it dead. I would suggest buying the Switch version instead, which shows Nintendo your support for the series.

Also for future reference, when starting a project, I would suggest showing work off until significant progress is made: in other words, dumping uncompressed text isn't an involved process. Show that text can be inserted into the game and be repointed like my video.

[DonPatchi]

Amazing work FCandChill.
I doubt someone tackles this after the remake.
Better let it rest in peace.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

I'm hoping the opposite. With an official, English translation of all the text now on Switch, it should actually be easier to reverse engineer the dialogue back in, since the translation work is already done.