This is it for the English community. Quite a few romhackers have their own boards, but few are really active above the immediate project support stuff. AGTP has one and I think Gemini's board has a few regulars. Then there is Transcorp which is mostly dead except for when RHDN is down ( ) and the Dejap section on the zsnes board. This board here is really the most active and central community hub. As far as popular groups go, I think Kingcom and mine's pretty popular *shameless ad* http://kaioshin.romhacking.net/  We don't have a forum though, community interaction happens only through comments.

(There are way too many forums out there as it is, and 99% cover the same topics as the rest. Who should visit them all?)

Thanks KaioShin. IST, I'll just give you a big:    Actually though, I just found out about that when RH.net put out a front page announcement to the effect that Dejap.com had been overtaken by some kind of PS3 spam site. I hadn't paid much attention to the translation scene until I found out literally days ago how doable this project will be on the technical side, and how much work had already been completed by Sandslice and Sixfortyfive --I'd just feel bad to ask Sandslice to take up the job of translating the rest of the text singlehandedly.

Since this is the most happenin' place, I'll submit a help wanted ad for kicks. Just to clarify, I'll repost what's on the Youtube video description:

Help needed in the following areas:

*Translators (high Japanese/English translation skills needed)

*Modders experienced in implementing VWF routines and/or implementing new text fonts.

*Anyone interested in completing the graphic design end of scanlations once written material has been translated.

Saturn stuff is pretty tough, I tried to tackle Dungeon Master Nexus but couldn't figure anything out. You should try the Shining Force Central message board (there's a sub-board for the SF3 translation), the guy who figured out how to hack Shining Force III hangs out there and he's the only guy I know of who for sure can handle Saturn programming.

Also, I just watched that video you put on youtube and it looks great. Not even close to a hack job, that's some seriously nice work so far!

Oh man, this. We really lucked out that Yabause could play just enough of Dragon Force II to look at the dictionary table used for compressed dialogue in RAM. I think it loads the vs. screen taunts if not the battles, so if the graphics are compressed we should be able to get that compression routine using Yabause too.

Edited the recruitment/demo video with the ASM modding request. We should definitely reach out to the Shining Force III translation group per kingofcrusher's advice, as well as SegaXtreme.

Six has doubts that a VWF routine is really necessary for Dragon Force II, and after playing the game a bit with the preliminary translations completed so far, I tend to agree. But before we abandon this as a potential project goal, what are the typical advantages of a variable width font versus a normal font? Is there any rule of thumb that VWFs always turn out nicer than fixed width fonts?

About the font goals...

What you see in the Youtube video was Sixfortyfive literally using ASCII code to reinsert text translated by Sandslice. This can be done because Shift-JIS is basically "ASCII plus a million kana and kanji" as I like to describe it, and the result is really good -- but the catch is, the text was uncompressed to begin with in these cases.

The challenge comes in reinserting the storyline dialogue (the kind of text you saw in the first half of the video), which is compressed. The compression is really easy -- it's just uncompressed Shift-JIS with one-byte codes interspersed referring to commonly used values stored in a simple 256-entry dictionary. So when, say, an exclamation point is called, the game engine gets to use one byte as opposed to two every time the script needs that punctuation (the Shift-JIS exclamation consists of two bytes, whereas the ASCII exclamation point is just one).

But we can't simply use ASCII values to re-insert the translated text for the story dialogue on account of the game engine using one-byte codes to refer into the dictionary by default. The dictionary, of course, has to contain two-byte and therefore non-ASCII values -- we couldn't find any operators to pair up with ASCII values that would just produce a letter without an extra space or something. Also, I believe Six has played around with the idea of replacing dictionary values with the two-byte Roman alphabet characters stored in Shift-JIS (was it half-width or full width? I keep forgetting), and the result just looked awful.

One hypothetical solution to the problem is to simply NOP out the ASM routine for the dictionary compression, and assign the uncompressed text display routine to display the story dialogue as well. The downside is neither Six nor I are used to tracing ASM code (though I assume NOP'ing out the decompression routine would be easily accomplished in an appropriate dissassembler -- if one exists for Saturn ASM). I'm not sure how to go about finding it since ASM routines seem kind of nebulous to the uninitiated, whereas graphics and text values give you something concrete to stare at in RAM. So that's an area where help will be needed.

Failing that, I've hypothesized that we should be able to find the font graphics sheet (and decompress it if needed) and strategically overwrite appropriate kana and kanji images with our own stylized Roman alphabet font. Store two-byte values in the compression dictionary pointing to the spiffy Roman alphabet images on the sheet, and budda-bing, just write the English text in straight ASCII. The game engine will still treat the values as dictionary references, but each ASCII value circuitously points to its letter on the sheet if the ruse works well. However, there may be some kind of half-width/full-width issues Six might wish to bring up if we had to turn to a solution like this.

Wow I searched last week for news on translating this game, and now I find this thread. I am far from an experienced hacker and all my experience is with PSX and Final Fantasy Tactics, but I would be on board. If you have some graphics you need worked on I should be able to produce something and I have experience with changing window sizes.

Well I know the theory behind finding that kind of stuff with ASM, but to be honest I have had more success doing it manually. I spend lots of time looking at the hex searching screen positions and finding patterns in the hex. Much more time consuming but I find it builds a better understanding of the actual code. Is this possible with this game because I heard that much of it was compressed, or was that just the text?