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Post subject: Re: Translation request if possible
PostPosted: Thu Sep 03, 2020 6:46 am 
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There's no need to worry about Verne World. Since Tom came back into the translation business, I've asked him if he's still planning to translate Verne World and he said yes. :) I'm thinking about playing the Shell Monster Story games. I'm hoping that you guys eventually decide whenever or not to release part 2.


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Post subject: Re: Translation request if possible
PostPosted: Mon Sep 07, 2020 1:03 am 
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Sorry to shoot your idea in the foot but making an auto-translator for an emulator would be highly difficult if not absolutely impossible. The reason it works on PC is there is a standardized encoding scheme for text. Shift-JIS or UTF-8 or something. That does not exist on consoles of this era. Maybe it exists on some newer 32 and 64 bit machines but not these older 8 bit, 16 bit and most 32 bit ones. All text in a game is just a byte or two which is used to point to a graphic in the game. Computers also generally work somewhat similar but the encoding is mostly standardized to a specific scheme. However on consoles, these graphics while usually stored in the same general layout for English are almost never exactly the same and they almost never are in a specific order for Japanese, especially if it has kanji. The emulator has no way of knowing what graphics are where or how a program chooses to point to those graphics. Is it 8 bit or 16 bit. Even if you know that you still do not know what corresponds to what letter. Sure if you have the graphics the layout will likely be in order of the code but that code can still be pretty much anything. Maybe your graphics start with a reference of byte 20, or maybe they start at byte 80. Point is, you can't be sure. An emulator would have to OCR those graphics, figure out what order they're in and then run a translation on them. And that is assuming the game isn't using even more trickery for things like DTE or such. Even if you hooked onto video memory to bypass thos tricks assuming something in there is going to be standard uncompressed text, you still have to work out what that something is. That isn't likely to ever happen. That is one of the reasons why auto-translators also don't work for every PC game. Not all of them use standard encoding. When they don't, that text hooker just won't work.


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Post subject: Re: Translation request if possible
PostPosted: Wed Sep 09, 2020 4:49 pm 
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taskforce wrote:
Sorry to shoot your idea in the foot but making an auto-translator for an emulator would be highly difficult if not absolutely impossible. The reason it works on PC is there is a standardized encoding scheme for text. Shift-JIS or UTF-8 or something. That does not exist on consoles of this era. Maybe it exists on some newer 32 and 64 bit machines but not these older 8 bit, 16 bit and most 32 bit ones. All text in a game is just a byte or two which is used to point to a graphic in the game. Computers also generally work somewhat similar but the encoding is mostly standardized to a specific scheme. However on consoles, these graphics while usually stored in the same general layout for English are almost never exactly the same and they almost never are in a specific order for Japanese, especially if it has kanji. The emulator has no way of knowing what graphics are where or how a program chooses to point to those graphics. Is it 8 bit or 16 bit. Even if you know that you still do not know what corresponds to what letter. Sure if you have the graphics the layout will likely be in order of the code but that code can still be pretty much anything. Maybe your graphics start with a reference of byte 20, or maybe they start at byte 80. Point is, you can't be sure. An emulator would have to OCR those graphics, figure out what order they're in and then run a translation on them. And that is assuming the game isn't using even more trickery for things like DTE or such. Even if you hooked onto video memory to bypass thos tricks assuming something in there is going to be standard uncompressed text, you still have to work out what that something is. That isn't likely to ever happen. That is one of the reasons why auto-translators also don't work for every PC game. Not all of them use standard encoding. When they don't, that text hooker just won't work.


Sorry, long post ahead:

Well, in fact my idea didn't consist on going that deep into how the game is programmed (what you've explained is needed only if you want to actually modify the rom itself to insert the translation). My idea was something much more simple (and limited, but it does the trick), similar to this proof of concept I did with Jungle Wars 2 using Wanderbar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UWST-PPOZM

Wanderbar is basically a modified snes9x emulator glued to an html browser window (when you launch the emu, so does the browser). The only thing I did, (using a LUA script that wanderbar's creator already provided for me) is capture the line ID of every dialog in the game and then I create an html file, with the corresponding line ID, but with the dialog translated into English. What Wanderbar does is:

- every time a dialog bubble opens in the game (when you talk to an npc, etc), it captures the line ID of that dialog.

- then it accesses the html file and looks for the translated dialog that has that same lineID, and writes it on the browser window as html.

My point is that emulators could be somewhat modified to do exactly the same, but showing the translated text on an overlay layer(*) on top of the emulator screen instead of in an adjacent window as it currently does.

(*) think for instance when in an emulator you do a savestate and the emu shows a message saying "state saved in slot 1". I suppose it uses an overlay to show that message. The translation could be shown in the same way.

I know it's much more limited than hacking the rom itself, but it's also easier and in the end it's just an alternative way to translate the most important part of an rpg (the script dialogs) without having to modify anything in the rom. The only thing the romhacker would have to do is find out how a game identifies every line of text, which is much less complicated than modifying the rom, with all the complications it entails (dealing with compressed fonts, not enough space in the rom to put the English text, unexpected bugs). After that, a person with enough knowledge of Japanese can translate the whole game's dialogs without having to know a single technical aspect of romhacking.

Also, as tcaud had already stated before, the game could only be played on an emulator supporting this feature, so we would get rid of the pirate repro sellers problem, which have already made some people quit translating (aishsha, for instance, said something about considering quitting because of that). And regarding the purists that would complain for not being able to play the game on real hardware... well, if you like the game enough, you'd be willing to do a compromise and play it on an emu. I've played almost all my favourite snes translations on PC and I've enjoyed them practically the same as if I'd played them on its original hardware.


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Post subject: Re: Translation request if possible
PostPosted: Mon Sep 14, 2020 10:03 pm 
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akualung wrote:
taskforce wrote:
Sorry to shoot your idea in the foot but making an auto-translator for an emulator would be highly difficult if not absolutely impossible. The reason it works on PC is there is a standardized encoding scheme for text. Shift-JIS or UTF-8 or something. That does not exist on consoles of this era. Maybe it exists on some newer 32 and 64 bit machines but not these older 8 bit, 16 bit and most 32 bit ones. All text in a game is just a byte or two which is used to point to a graphic in the game. Computers also generally work somewhat similar but the encoding is mostly standardized to a specific scheme. However on consoles, these graphics while usually stored in the same general layout for English are almost never exactly the same and they almost never are in a specific order for Japanese, especially if it has kanji. The emulator has no way of knowing what graphics are where or how a program chooses to point to those graphics. Is it 8 bit or 16 bit. Even if you know that you still do not know what corresponds to what letter. Sure if you have the graphics the layout will likely be in order of the code but that code can still be pretty much anything. Maybe your graphics start with a reference of byte 20, or maybe they start at byte 80. Point is, you can't be sure. An emulator would have to OCR those graphics, figure out what order they're in and then run a translation on them. And that is assuming the game isn't using even more trickery for things like DTE or such. Even if you hooked onto video memory to bypass thos tricks assuming something in there is going to be standard uncompressed text, you still have to work out what that something is. That isn't likely to ever happen. That is one of the reasons why auto-translators also don't work for every PC game. Not all of them use standard encoding. When they don't, that text hooker just won't work.


Sorry, long post ahead:

Well, in fact my idea didn't consist on going that deep into how the game is programmed (what you've explained is needed only if you want to actually modify the rom itself to insert the translation). My idea was something much more simple (and limited, but it does the trick), similar to this proof of concept I did with Jungle Wars 2 using Wanderbar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UWST-PPOZM

Wanderbar is basically a modified snes9x emulator glued to an html browser window (when you launch the emu, so does the browser). The only thing I did, (using a LUA script that wanderbar's creator already provided for me) is capture the line ID of every dialog in the game and then I create an html file, with the corresponding line ID, but with the dialog translated into English. What Wanderbar does is:

- every time a dialog bubble opens in the game (when you talk to an npc, etc), it captures the line ID of that dialog.

- then it accesses the html file and looks for the translated dialog that has that same lineID, and writes it on the browser window as html.

My point is that emulators could be somewhat modified to do exactly the same, but showing the translated text on an overlay layer(*) on top of the emulator screen instead of in an adjacent window as it currently does.

(*) think for instance when in an emulator you do a savestate and the emu shows a message saying "state saved in slot 1". I suppose it uses an overlay to show that message. The translation could be shown in the same way.

I know it's much more limited than hacking the rom itself, but it's also easier and in the end it's just an alternative way to translate the most important part of an rpg (the script dialogs) without having to modify anything in the rom. The only thing the romhacker would have to do is find out how a game identifies every line of text, which is much less complicated than modifying the rom, with all the complications it entails (dealing with compressed fonts, not enough space in the rom to put the English text, unexpected bugs). After that, a person with enough knowledge of Japanese can translate the whole game's dialogs without having to know a single technical aspect of romhacking.

Also, as tcaud had already stated before, the game could only be played on an emulator supporting this feature, so we would get rid of the pirate repro sellers problem, which have already made some people quit translating (aishsha, for instance, said something about considering quitting because of that). And regarding the purists that would complain for not being able to play the game on real hardware... well, if you like the game enough, you'd be willing to do a compromise and play it on an emu. I've played almost all my favourite snes translations on PC and I've enjoyed them practically the same as if I'd played them on its original hardware.


That will work if you just show the whole translated file, but this isn't text. This is graphics. The emulator still has no way of knowing what is on screen when. So the only thing that will happen here is showing a whole file along with the emulator. Beyond that you still face the exact same problem I brought up before. Not knowing what is on screen when. Being in an emulator doesn't change the operations of the SNES or the rom code. And you still aren't hooking real text. You can get the emulator to tell maybe a text window opens but knowing what is in it isn't likely.


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Post subject: Re: Translation request if possible
PostPosted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 4:26 am 
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As far as hacking goes, yeah modifying the game code to show other languages can be difficult. Each rom is different from the next. Although, I'd assume translation eats a staggering amount of the time of total translation. The more complicated the rom, the more skill a hacker needs. I won't minimize the value of quality translation though. So let me say to you translators, you are invaluable.

However, I do want to talk on this further and truly explain with an example what this idea entails. When you say it is generally easy to figure out text by the distance between letters, that absolutely is not case at all. In an older game system, there is nothing that says what order a font has to be in. Japanese fonts especially. Remember, no standardized character scheme.

Let me put it simpler with an example.

Lets give letters a value for this example.

A B C D E F G H I
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

You know that H is always going to be 7 away from A. 8-1=7. G is always going to be 4 away from C. 7-3=4

So you go about searching a rom for these letters assuming this scenario. But what if the rom is instead set up like this.

B D I F A C H G E
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A And H are no longer 7 apart. A=5, H=7, 7-5=2. Are roms likely to have the font and/or code setup like this. Not in English, but it also is not impossible. There are no standardized character schemes. But when it comes to Japanese characters, it gets a lot more possible and even a lot more likely than English this is actually happening at least to a minor extent. Hiragana and Katakana have a general order to them just like English. However, it isn't unusual to see an omitted character. Do they have marks or not. And lets not begin to think about Kanji, that is a completely different ball of wax with no set order in roms. No two roms will likely ever be the same that have Kanji unless they're the same series (and even then it is possible they aren't). Will the idea work for some games, sure. Will it work for all games, definitely not. Will it work for enough to make it worth while for emulator developers, probably not. If someone wants to tackle it more power to them. I just want to explain how daunting this actually is. It is in every way as difficult as actually hacking every rom individually.


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Post subject: Re: Translation request if possible
PostPosted: Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:22 am 
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There's already two programs available that offer automatic translations when playing a game in Japanese, but the accuracy for both is definitely not perfect.

The first is RetroArch. Here's two videos from Youtube that demonstrates it's usage (both text and audio translations):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGNBMK71srQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yij_ydE9vd4

The second one is called Wanderbar which allows you to make your own instant translations. It appears to offer some sort of automatic translation and dictionary feature as well. You can read more about it here:
https://legendsoflocalization.com/wanderbar/

Overall, no automatic translation program nor feature yet exists that can replace an actual fluent human speaker. Especially for a more complex language such as Japanese. However, this is still nice to have if no actual translation exists. Such programs will also become more valuable with time as well seeing as how many talented romhackers have left the translation scene like Bongo` and Dark Force. As well as many fan translators too such as those in DeJap Translations back in the early 2000s.


"Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind."
- Edward D. Morrison (Tales of Phantasia)


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Post subject: Re: Translation request if possible
PostPosted: Tue Sep 29, 2020 9:09 am 
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Both things, in a way. Wildbill is still on hiatus and our lead romhacker, Bongo` has left the hobby and group for quite some time now. With the tools that he has left behind, most if not all of the currently active projects will be released in some form or another. However, it's rather unlikely that any new future projects will be started. Unless of course, a new dedicated main romhacker desides to join up along with whatever translators are needed for said possible games. This too, also depends on whether the current core members here actually wish to continue or not. I certainly can't speak for anyone else here besides myself, so we'll just have to wait and see what Taskforce and Wildbill have to say about this. As long as I have the free time and can still be helpful in some way, I'll definitely stick around to help out however I can.


"Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind."
- Edward D. Morrison (Tales of Phantasia)


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