filler wrote:
The project page on RHDN attributes it to "Technos Samurai Translation Project" of whom this is it's sole project. I think as long as individuals who worked on it are still credited it makes sense given what you've described. However, you may want to think of it this way, if Jim Price and Faraday appeared today would they be a part of DD now? If that's the feeling then I think it's appropriate. If it's done it may be nice to have the name of the group at the time preserved in the readme somewhere for historical purposes.
This reminds me about my project to credit individuals who worked on DD projects over at RHDN. I won't go into the details. Suffice to say it's the only other post in this sub forum.
Anyway, I did a pretty crappy job of this so far. I think I hit two projects. I'll start plugging away at this again.
Both Jim and Faraday would be aboard D-D right now if they caught the bug again, found us, and requested to come aboard again under our newest name, especially Faraday.
Jim was a laid back, easy-going fellow who never uttered a cross word or strong opinion about anything. Faraday, on the other hand, was actually opposed to the CTC at first because he thought it would place demands on him to be at the beck and call of a hundred hackers and writers. He feared that projects would be more or less assigned to him within a large organization, but that's why the first C in CTC stood for "Confederated" - to preserve everyone's independence. For example, Musashi was a CTC founder, but he worked, mainly, out of his own group, Gaijin Productions. Musashi started the translation for
Little Master-III as a CTC-Gaijin Production work. When he departed, Dackr at ST Trans picked it up, and now it's back to us, almost full circle. When we complete
LM-III, we should probably dedicate it to Musashi and Dackr.
Anyway, Faraday preferred working in nuclear groups, not out of the larger CTC, so we drew the charter that way. We assured Faraday he could continue picking his projects, as he preferred and almost insisted, and he continued to work with ad hoc project teams (like in the case of TS-DS), as well as larger translation groups involved in several works, not based on who they were or what they called themselves, but the charm of the proposed game. Akujin worked in much the same way, and I believe this is the best approach for the most prolific translators, because it affords them the highest level of personal satisfaction in the hobby.
Jim, on the other hand, was happy to crack just one game, TS-DS, and prove to himself he could finish a quality translation. When he saw that
DoaE-II went well beyond what he could learn in the time he had available (it went well beyond most people's abilities at the time except Taskforce's (Gizmo)and Jair's (cracked the routine that displayed Chinese Ideographs for warlords and generals)), Jim realized he was just finishing school, going to work, etc., and decided to move on to other pursuits, as many did in the early days. Had Jim stayed around, I'm sure we would have worked on more projects together, and he would have evolved with the changing group names.
Much of what we did with organizations in those days was experimentation for the best possible approach to the end-goal of enhanced productivity. The vast majority of us cared far more for the games than fiddling around with complicated web sites and creating internet personalities for ourselves. Jim fit into the majority. He maintained a rudimentary TS-DS page for a while, just for a place to organize his work and distribute the patch, but all of those links are dead now, and the boards we announced the patch on are also gone forever. There's no way to contact any team member now, based on the readme, because all of the addresses are invalid.
But I would still keep the documentation intact, mostly, updating only the contact info to D-D and explaining why we're listing it at this site. That way, the patch is still supported should a player discover something we missed in 1998. Perhaps a dedicated forum for TS-DS(e) is a bit much, but I believe it deserves it's own page and being placed on the "Completed Project" list to draw real interest and exposure again.
I know you have a ton on your plate, Matt, but I'm highly appreciative of you taking the time to address these issues in the larger community out there. I'm also pleased, sometimes, that the folks who run other web sites such as Zophar's Domain try to maintain archives, descriptions, and critiques of other people's work, but I don't believe any entity will give a specific project such tender loving care as those venues populated by members who were intimately involved in that English game's creation. Reading the review on TS-DS(e) at one of the other web sites has only reinforced my conviction.
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