As some of you are blissfully aware there exists a wonderfully cyberpunk meets magic pen and paper RPG called Shadowrun which has been made into several video games including the most recent FPS by Microsoft.

Well let me also tell you they made both an SNES game and a more action oriented Genesis game which I've played endlessly because I love this series so much.

Now imagine my horror when a good while back I stumbled upon a Mega CD (Sega CD) version of the game which is entirely unplayable by me due to its menu system and the regretful fact that this poor fool cannot speak Japanese.....

So this begs the question to those of you here... could someone here manage an English translation of the Sega CD version of Shadowrun in less time than it would take me to learn to read Japanese fluently?


[edit]

oooooo ooooo I'm stupid...

Ah, in my haste to get this translated I missed the Translation request topic but I'll change this to a question about translations.. considering I've only the general concept of this sort of thing, I'll instead ask regarding this Shadowrun game on the Sega CD, is it much harder to do a CD game and a game for the newer systems when it comes to translations? meaning is it any harder to go in and fix the text on this as opposed to say the Phantasy Star retranslation project (obviously the more actual text the harder/longer it will be but I'm just talking the coding)

that question posed i will go through the proper channels to request this now. thanks for not pouncing on this guys hope to have fun here after all

I think you meant Sega CD.

It's not on the Abandoned Projects page.
But I have it, so I'll submit it.
(I'm almost positive it's from Guest, and he said all the packs released on Gideon's board were for the public.)

1. Become a Sega CD hacking god.

2. Become fluent in Japanese.

Just these two would let you not only resurrect this project from the dead, but cure its zombiehood and promote it to Archangel in one fell swoop. It'd also be helpful if you can write, that is, not just crank out a translation, but render it into something euphonious in English. That, FYI, is the difference between Phoenix Wright and Breath of Fire 2.

It helps to know at least some Japanese, even if you're not fluent enough to translate. Katakana first and foremost: you can identify a lot of loanwords this way. Hiragana second; sometimes these are used instead of katakana in older titles (Pennywise can attest to this with his work on Mirai Shinwa Jarvas), and you should also learn some of the common kanji as well. (Even Sylvanian Families has about 10 kanji in its font.)

I'm a (german) freelance translator for manga and anime (meaning I actually do japanese-german translations for money) and recently started playing Shadowrun for Sega CD. The game is really, really good and in my opinion well written, too. I'm well into the 3rd run at this moment and haven't had any real trouble understanding the japanese text. I am so impressed indeed that I'm interested in doing a translation for the game. I am quite able to translate the text but I don't know the first thing about hacking roms, so technical help would be required. I thought about posting this as a help wanted ad but decided not to, since I haven't actually done anything so far.

All I can say about the technical part right now is, the best point to start are probably a bunch of files named kanji0X.k - probably the fonts - and a bunch of files containing the letters msg - probably for message - ending with .k. Don't know if they are compressed. Maybe someone interested in playing this game in english and in possession of the proper knowledge might at least take a quick look at it.

Thx ^^ I took a brief look at the stuff and I don't get it... So technical help is definitely needed. The first step would be some help to create the proper tables to dump the text in readable files. If someone could tell me how to do that I'd be obliged. Right now I hardly know what I'm looking at or looking for. But if I had a graphic file with a table of ingame kanji I could use that to build a conversion table for script dumping, I presume.

...

A bit later and I noticed I had to rename the iso file to extract the font files. I have them now. A bunch of them actually. One is said to be of import so I'll concentrate on that one for now. My problem right now is, I don't know how to view the font files correctly. I only get a halfway decent picture if I use 2bbp GB mode, but then two tiles make up one letter / kana / kanji and the height seems somewhat off, as if every second line was missing, making the kanji hard or even impossible to read.

...

Yet a bit later... I managed to build up the first part of the table for script dumping and the kana now seem to be all in order. I'll have to add the kanji now, but they seem to be in alphabetical order which makes identifying them easier than I had originally anticipated. This means that with a little effort I'll have the scripts ripped out of the game to edit. And that means I can actually translate the darn thing. That'll take a long time and hopefully sometime in between someone will help me put it all together in the game itself.

...

Time flies by... I'm done with the first two dumping tables and the first 5 scripts are completely dumped and ready for translation. All that's left to do (except translating and everything that comes thereafter...) is creating at least another 8 or so dumping tables full of hundreds of kanji and dump the rest of the 50+ scripts, because those bastards who programmed the game thought it best to use 30 or 40 different font files. Hopefully I won't need all of them... I haven't even taken a look yet at how reassembling of the game and creating patch files is done. I also expect to run into trouble once I start integrating the translated scripts into the game. But dumping and translating should keep me occupied for a very long time before I get there.

That's really cool. I'm tackling Illusion City right now and it's a total bitch to reinsert english text into a game that uses dual byte encoding if you can't find the pointers.