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Topic: Columbus: Ougon no Yoake (J) (NES) (Read 2 times)
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aishsha
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« on: January 11, 2008, 11:28:49 am » |
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Guys, has anyone ever looked through this thingy? Decided to translate that for training (my 1st project): fonts were located and replaced for English, battle menu, items, system menus text and map text were successfully recovered. The only problem is the main dialog text - can't locate that no matter what although pretty sure the tables were made in a right way. Relative search does not work. The only way I was able to see that - via PPU-mode in FCEU Hex editor... Can anybody at least show the direction to move? Thanks in advance  |
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InVerse
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« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2008, 12:41:22 pm » |
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I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to recall hearing that the text is compressed. Again, I could be wrong, but there have been a couple of translation projects that were started for this game and soon stalled. You might try using the X Translations patch (hosted here) to see if any of the main dialogue was translated. If so, you might be able to find the dialogue in the hacked ROM. (Glancing at the ROM, it looks like the graphics are wholly uncompressed, so I would be surprised if the text was compressed. Maybe it just uses some strange storage scheme or something.)
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Ryusui
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« Reply #2 on: January 11, 2008, 02:15:25 pm » |
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As for a title: "Columbus: Golden Dawn" sounds just about right. ^_^
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aishsha
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« Reply #3 on: January 11, 2008, 02:23:00 pm » |
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I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to recall hearing that the text is compressed. Again, I could be wrong, but there have been a couple of translation projects that were started for this game and soon stalled. You might try using the X Translations patch (hosted here) to see if any of the main dialogue was translated. If so, you might be able to find the dialogue in the hacked ROM. (Glancing at the ROM, it looks like the graphics are wholly uncompressed, so I would be surprised if the text was compressed. Maybe it just uses some strange storage scheme or something.)
Update - I looked through the patched rom and still can't see the dialogue - maybe they used slightly different table or sth... The game does use separate tables for the map, battle meny and system menus - just 2 different fonts there - I noticed that...
That's the point - X translation somehow managed to find the dialogue text - I don't know how - and yes, the game seems to be uncompressed - it shows my Cave English instead of original language - so I have no clue here. And I did not use ready made patch for that - I inserted own font and my translation has some differences comparing to that... As for a title: "Columbus: Golden Dawn" sounds just about right. ^_^ Well, since it's still untranslated, I used original name |
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DaMarsMan
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« Reply #4 on: January 11, 2008, 02:24:03 pm » |
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How about porting it to SNES and then translating.
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aishsha
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« Reply #5 on: January 11, 2008, 02:26:19 pm » |
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How about porting it to SNES and then translating.
How could it be done? Sorry if it is noobish but I said that I'm new in this field :huh: |
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DaMarsMan
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« Reply #6 on: January 11, 2008, 02:41:25 pm » |
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People have done it before. It's complex but if your asking about how then you may be best off with just trying to translate. I personally hate translating for NES just because it's a slow system and the sprites look nasty. Not to mention the lack of space for text in a lot of games.
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Gideon Zhi
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« Reply #7 on: January 11, 2008, 02:42:03 pm » |
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I seem to recall that Columbus used the dictionary method of script encoding - really simple stuff, but not exactly straight beginner. However, if you've come this far, I've no doubt that you can figure out dictionary. It's the logical next step!
Surprisingly, there are no documents on dictionary compression in the database. Not that you really need one, but...
Okay, essentially? If you have a normal table like this:
10=a
11=b
12=c
and so on, with dictionary you'll have something like this:
80=the
81=it
82=this
83=Columbus
or...
1000=the
1001=this
1002=Columbus
...and so on. The point is to replace common words with a shorter series of bytes, either one or two depending on how many words you need. This can unfortunately make real text sort of difficult to locate using "traditional" methods, but I'm sure you'll figure it out from here.
Edit: Also, DaMarsMan, -when- has it been done before? I think you're just trying to string our poor newb along :p
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aishsha
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« Reply #8 on: January 11, 2008, 03:03:15 pm » |
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Yeah, I know of dictionary compression - only hoped it was not used here - it makes all much more complicating  Then they probably used compression for dialogue and with jap it's pretty difficult to define - well, thanks - I'll try to figure it out - maybe they used DTE for some letter-strings. People have done it before. It's complex but if your asking about how then you may be best off with just trying to translate. I personally hate translating for NES just because it's a slow system and the sprites look nasty. Not to mention the lack of space for text in a lot of games.
Well, I just liked the game when playing it on NES - sea, ships and stuff And as for the lack of space - there's an interesting thing in this game - it uses separate tiles for " or . - in letters like ãŒ, ã½ etc. - it means sometimes you have an almost empty upper row to input your text - so it gives some variants |
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« Last Edit: January 11, 2008, 03:08:49 pm by aishsha »
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DaMarsMan
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« Reply #9 on: January 11, 2008, 03:04:58 pm » |
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I could be wrong but I thought these were.
Arkanoid NES - Converted by POPC0RN (NES Hack)
10 Yard Fight (A&S NES Hack)
Antarctic Adventure (A&S NES Hack)
Baseball (A&S NES Hack)
Burger Time (A&S NES Hack)
Circus Charlie (A&S NES Hack)
Donkey Kong (A&S NES Hack)
Donkey Kong 3 (A&S NES Hack)
Donkey Kong Jr. (A&S NES Hack)
Dough Boy (A&S NES Hack)
Elevator Action (A&S NES Hack)
Exerion (A&S NES Hack)
Galaga (A&S NES Hack)
Galg (A&S NES Hack)
Golf (A&S NES Hack)
Golf (A&S NES Hack)
Lode Runner (A&S NES Hack)
Lode Runner (A&S NES Hack)
Mappy (A&S NES Hack)
Mappy (A&S NES Hack)
Mario Bros. (A&S NES Hack)
Mario Bros. (A&S NES Hack)
Millipede (A&S NES Hack)
Nuts & Milk (A&S NES Hack)
Nuts & Milk (A&S NES Hack)
Pac-Man (A&S NES Hack)
Pac-Man (A&S NES Hack)
Pinball (A&S NES Hack)
Pinball (A&S NES Hack)
Pooyan (A&S NES Hack)
Popeye (A&S NES Hack)
Road Fighter (A&S NES Hack)
Sky Destroyer (A&S NES Hack)
Star Force (A&S NES Hack)
Super Mario Land 3 (NES Hack)
Tennis (A&S NES Hack)
Volguard 2 (A&S NES Hack)
Warpman (A&S NES Hack)
Yie Ar Kung Fu (A&S NES Hack)
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Gideon Zhi
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« Reply #10 on: January 11, 2008, 03:10:37 pm » |
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Those aren't exactly ports; they're mapper zero conversions, and none of them have any audio. It'd be a whole lot harder to do the same to something that -isn't- mapper zero, not to mention to retain the audio. It's pretty unrealistic to suggest such a thing, especially to someone who's just learning.
Your other point does have merit, though - NES titles are notorious for requiring a massive space crunch on the part of the romhacker.
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Ryusui
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« Reply #11 on: January 11, 2008, 03:18:41 pm » |
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You might want to check with RedComet about that. He implemented a Huffman scheme on NES that I recreated for my attempted Patlabor translation...mind you, it broke the game (Interbec's fault, not mine), but it worked nicely when it wasn't getting its teeth handed to it by the rest of the game's code.
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aishsha
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« Reply #12 on: January 11, 2008, 07:42:28 pm » |
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OK, got some progress thanks to MegamanX from XTranslation info The game uses strange system for addressing where the same letters may be defined by totally different hex values and not exactly in the tile order. Already found some dialogue text so I have sth to work with Still have not found a dictionary but any start is a start - thanks to everybody who helped me here but probably I will return soon |
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Guadozoku
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« Reply #13 on: January 12, 2008, 09:48:01 am » |
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Dictionary isn't too hard. When you've got a basic hiragana & katakana table, just play the game while looking at a script dump and replace the missing strings that way.
Just be warned that some games (Vitamina Oukoku Monogatari) use different dictionary compression for different areas of the game, so you may need several tables (Vitamina needed 7-8 iirc)
Though I'd assume many games (liek Maka Maka) just use one scheme. That one mixes kanji in with its dictionary, buy for a nes game, I doubt you're going to need to worry about kanji.
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aishsha
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« Reply #14 on: January 12, 2008, 10:56:18 am » |
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Yeah, I know the basics of dic-finding But it seems that Columbus still uses sth different (well, at least for now). After a hint I looked through the rom and it seems it just uses TOTALLY different table for dialogue and a strange system of pointers. You see, katakana is totally unavailable for this part of text (covered by graphic tiles) so they write all words in katakana using a separate "jump-byte" as I called that for addressing at correct letters. I still did not figure out how to put the text in the empty upper lines as it worked out with Item menu but I'll try. Again thanks everyone who helped :beer: |
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