[cj iwakura]

We already have Kohtaro Stage 1's dialogue translated, and par for the course, there's little to no background at all.

It basically amounts to

-Those bastards are murdering women! I'll go stop them!


-You! You're bad! I'm going to punish you for being bad because I'm a detective that punishes bad people!


So yeah. This isn't exactly going to be difficult. Shikigami's one of those games where all the backstory is in the background. You have to piece it together from the sparse text, and good luck with that.


And hey, translating the PS2 version isn't in the realm of impossibility. If we find it's possible and/or easier, we will try that too.


Also, question for you translation vets:

is Kohtaro preferable for this kind of thing, or Kohtarou?

[Paul Jensen]

Just in case you want to translate the name of the game itself, you could call it:

"Castle of the Divination God(s)"

It might not be 100% accurate, but it's the best concise rendering I can think of. A shikigami (式神) is apparently a spirit called upon by priests of the Yin-Yang sect of Buddhism(?) during divination ceremonies. According to believers, the spirit has the power to look into people's souls and examine/divine their balance of good and evil.

Good luck. HTH.

[BRPXQZME]

We already have Kohtaro Stage 1's dialogue translated, and par for the course, there's little to no background at all.

...

So yeah. This isn't exactly going to be difficult. Shikigami's one of those games where all the backstory is in the background. You have to piece it together from the sparse text, and good luck with that.

Then I doubt you understood what I meant at all. The sparse text, informal speech that does not translate well, indirectly piecing together background... these things are precisely what makes it painful. Without attentive care paid to these sorts of details, you may as well... well, “babelfish the damn thing” as it has been eloquently put. There will be little to no difference in the end result.

No seriously, I stay away from Touhou translation patches because I can only read a limited number of awkward translations at a time.

is Kohtaro preferable for this kind of thing, or Kohtarou?

Neither. That would be switching convention in the middle of a word. Kōtarō or Koutarou would be preferred. The “oh” convention has gone by the wayside, actually, in part because it has been applied so inconsistently even within words and names with two おう sounds.

[cj iwakura]

Everything I know about SnS1's story, I learned from the official websites and by scouring the internet.
(See HG101 writeup)


The game tells just about nothing. TL;DR: female victims have been found murdered by electrocution.

A freelance group of psychic operatives have been called upon to solve the case.

This is pretty much the story of every Shikigami game, except it's New World Order lead by Kohtaro's undead brother in the second and a group lead by Kohtaro's undead girlfriend in the third.


Everything always revolves around that idiot for some reason.



Shikigami 3 has the best localization, if you want to see the game handled by people who know how to translate.

He's delightfully idiotic.


And no, we're not calling it anything but Castle Shikigami/Shikigami no Shiro.

It'd be like localizing SMT II as True Goddess Metampsychosis 2.


Yeah, I know all about the Touhou fantranslations. They're painfully vague.

Though I kind of like a couple of them.

[Auryn]

@cj iwakura: can u tell us at what point u are on the work??
Did the infos i posted about the .har files usefull??
Did u already know about those things??
Do u have a window/dos version of a LZSS de/compressor u can give me??
I lack in programming skills so i can't make one by myself.

I just fixed my PS2 so I can try to see where are the differences are and maybe try to translate the parts I find on the executable but I belive that there is mostly menu only things in it even if I have seen a part that look suspicious on the exe.

Let me / us know what u know about the technical stuff in this games...all the translations details and name, can be discussed after when we have found the text :p

[cj iwakura]

Sadly, our only hacker is tied up on the Megami Tensei project, but he is still working with this on the side.


So,uh...

Hacking progress: 0%

Translation progress: 7%

[Auryn]

This means u still not have any program (especially that LZSS decompressor) and no informations what so ever about the technical stuff on this game??

I was checking the PS2 executable..there are menu stuff, memory card stuff, option screen stuff, maybe debug stuff too and the staff roll on it. No signs of the text (at least not in shift-jis and not compressed).

The PC executable don't show anything with ResourceHacker apart some configurations screens.

[cj iwakura]

I don't, Esper might.

[Auryn]

Umm...now i have to find out who Esper is :p
Anyway, be ready for a long post heheh
I had some spare time burning some DVD and looking at the progress bar wasn't funny so I turned on my ps2, took some pics of the parts in japanese, opened up google translator, my hex editor with the ps2 executable and here it comes:
the first part of the menu text translated.
Please check the names  ( I belive u can do that :p) and I'm open for corrections on those translations, i "cleaned" those up a but to fit the way they will appear in the game (most are exactly the opposite as in screen in other hand, this list is like they appear in the executable).
Can u tell me more about the "wait" option?? Do u have an advanced savegame for the ps2 and pc version??
Especially with the "extra options" and freeplay open.
Because I got this far, I decided to make at least a partial translation of both versions.

Please check the menu text for errors especially help me out where u see "???"...thanks
Menu text
(Moderation edit: Moved the large amount of text to an external site.)

Just some cheat/tricks for all player of this game.
-On the demostration screen (tested on the ps2 version and both screeens: the full screen screen and the "sidebar" screen) press Right, right, left, left, up, down, up, down to see 2 lines of debug.
-To play as Chibi Fumiko (young Fumiko): on the character selector, press right 2 times when she is highlighted.
-For each hour of gameplay, u will get a credit more and when u reach 6 hours, u will get "free play" and "extra options".
Have fun

[cj iwakura]

EsperKnyte, the hacker who volunteered to help me out.


And uh, that's all good and fine, but that's from Shikigami no Shiro 2. Could help for reference material though, maybe.

[Auryn]

Part 1 was only partially successfull:
-overwriting in ASCII (one byte) over the Japanese (2bytes) didn't created big problems, only the letter q is missing (and maybe some others unused from my experience with FF7I).
-usually there is plenty of space to write
-the text get truncated on screen, I still have to check out why it is so but i belive there is a pointer / length pair (a pointer to tell where the text start and length for tell how many characters to read or how many characters to write on screen).





This part is tested and working in emu and real hardware.

PS: Sorry to the moderator, i didn't know that and saddly like this, only a view will notice that part

[9inchsamurai]

Hey there! I'm dropping by to let everyone know that I'm a volunteer translator currently working on this project. So far I've only got 3 sets of dialog for Kuga translated, but the text is really simple and sparse so it isn't that time-consuming. I'm using the text dump cjiwakura linked to earlier, which isn't actually the entire text but does contain a large chunk of dialog for all the playable characters. I figure it would behoove me to officially make my presence known instead of staying at the periphery.

[Auryn]

Hi there,
good that somebody is working on the translation but for the moment it's looking like nobody really is interested on it.
I'm working on SnS2 for PS2 and PC and cj iwakura seems fixed with SnS1.
I didn't realize that SnS Ex is a port of SnS1 and this week there will probably not be any progress because I'm busy with RL.
Anyway your work will come handy if cj iwakura&co or me have some success in finding the ingame text.
I belive that the 2 games are so similar that if we crack one, we crack all the serie.

[cj iwakura]

Only thing is, you're working on hacking SnS2PS2, and we're (trying to) hack SnSPC.

But if it turns out to be easier, what the hell, we'll switch gears.

I assume this board doesn't care one way or another. PS2 emulation isn't that difficult.

By that I mean burning to a DVDR.

[BRPXQZME]

That... that’s not emulation! That’s using the actual system! D:

[cj iwakura]

Bonus!


Uh, I don't even know if PS2 emulation exists. I just know that's how I played the (admittedly mediocre) Namco X Capcom fantranslation.

[KingMike]

There is, but it needs a rather powerful system.
I've used PCSX2. I was able to play FFX:I, oddly getting almost full-speed gameplay but like 60% speed cutscenes. Then again, that might be because it's because it's been heavily used for testing, or so I hear. (Athlon X2, 1 GB RAM (I think), 1 GB video card)
(using an ISO I ripped from an original disc, because I don't want to modchip my actual console just to play the few JPN games I bought)

[Auryn]

OOOPPPSSS, I did it again!
I lost 2 hours of sleep and spend them in front of the PC

Anyway...

OMG cj iwakura: if u don't even know if PS2 emulation exist, I ask me how u want to "switch gears" and hack the PS2 version.
What u apparently don't get is that the files / files system on the pc version and PS2 are almost identical.
If u read back on my posts, u maybe noticed when i was talking about the har files and the taito screen that isn't in that version because in the various versions, they just modified what they need to make the game run on that system and let inside even inused things:


There are many way to test the PS version:
-emulation ("play" the game on pc)
-HD Advance Server (send the modified ISO to the HDD of the real PS2)
-CD-RW/DVD-RW ( i heared that somebody got that to work in some real PS2)
-CD-R/DVD-R (like i have done with the first part translation because i'm waiting to get the right cable for HD Advance).

So, now for my lost sleep:
I found the text in SnS Ex but don't get to excited...it's still a long way to go.
There seem to be 4 bytes that tell the dimentions of the text and i doubled the size in one and cut to half in the other screenshot.

Original first sentence of Kuga:


The doubled size:


And the one cut in half:


By running some numbers (bxh) u get 1176bytes but there are only 800byte of before the next sentece start.
This means there is some compression on the game.

[cj iwakura]

Hey, we're new to this stuff, give us time.

[esperknight]

Good to see progress on this game   I haven't had much time to look at it in a long while.  I'm curious how you found the text though as I know there compressed graphics but couldn't exactly track them down (I think I did find them at one point though...  And graphics hacking is definitely not one of my strong points).  If I'm right there compressed using LZSS and somewhere I have a backup that contains the code for decompressing them if that helps.