Dreamcast Games Translation - Megathread

[bingobongo]

Are we one step closer to an English translation of Tokyo Bus Guide? I see there's a Chinese version freshly translated (well, from last year)

Along with Densha De Go! 2 - these are two titles I'm really hoping will one day see an English language translation. Both games have detailed English translations in text form over on Gamefaqs and there's no 'story' to speak of - it's mostly the same text over and over again.

[ateam]

Are we one step closer to an English translation of Tokyo Bus Guide? I see there's a Chinese version freshly translated (well, from last year)

Along with Densha De Go! 2 - these are two titles I'm really hoping will one day see an English language translation. Both games have detailed English translations in text form over on Gamefaqs and there's no 'story' to speak of - it's mostly the same text over and over again.

Doing a complete and thorough English translation patch of "Tokyo Bus Guide" isn't super simple. The fact that Chinese is a similar language to Japanese in terms of number of characters required to express an idea definitely makes it less painful than an English translation.

From a technical perspective, it may not pose the most insane of challenges, sure... There are various container files holding text that have easy-to-understand headers, meaning an extract/rebuild program could be written with relative ease (in order to fit expanded English text). However, there's still a bunch of text inside the game executable that would need some pointer modification in order to expand and fit English text (my initial opinion being one would need to use a disassembler like Ghidra to at least understand how those pointers/offsets are being calculated, identify their base addresses, etc.).



The game has a decent looking 24x32px font built in, and all text is encoded as 2-byte Shift-JIS (not a surprise) and does not support 1-byte ASCII (also not a surprise), meaning you DEFINITELY need to expand files in order to fit English equivalents of various Japanese text. That, or do some assembly hacking to allow the game to interpret 1-byte characters, although you would still need to expand out files to fit the English text, so likely not worth doing.



Furthermore, given the size of the font tiles, there may be places in the game where the allotted space on-screen isn't big enough to fit the English translation. If the person (or people) working on translating this game encountered this and couldn't shorten their English text to fit the screen/dialog box, then even further modifications would be required to use smaller font tiles.

Regarding VMU icons, it's been a while since I've really sat down and played "Tokyo Bus Guide", but there appears to only be one that would require re-doing ("DANGER").



All of that being said, there's an incredible amount of textures that require re-rendering in English. I suppose somebody could produce a low-quality translation of this game with some degree of ease, but to really give it the polish it deserves, substantial efforts would be required.

[theirvgotti452]

Unfortunately it is so true. You most def need some ASM and a big aspirations for this to work lol. I tried this back in 2016 lol.

[fafadou]

The game has a decent looking 24x32px font built in, and all text is encoded as 2-byte Shift-JIS (not a surprise) and does not support 1-byte ASCII (also not a surprise), meaning you DEFINITELY need to expand files in order to fit English equivalents of various Japanese text. That, or do some assembly hacking to allow the game to interpret 1-byte characters, although you would still need to expand out files to fit the English text, so likely not worth doing.

In first, I want to congrat you for your work, it's not easy to locate the FONT, and the shift-jis table.
thank you for taking time to explain.

For grandia 2, in the shift-JIS table, all the 1-byte caracters were encoded by 0x 00 00, instead of 0x 00 01, 0x 00 02...
So it was easy to patch.
Probably not the same, and you have already look at it but it's a possibility.

Furthermore, given the size of the font tiles, there may be places in the game where the allotted space on-screen isn't big enough to fit the English translation. If the person (or people) working on translating this game encountered this and couldn't shorten their English text to fit the screen/dialog box, then even further modifications would be required to use smaller font tiles.

the issue here looks more about a vwf issue than tiles size maybe ? Do you have find a vwf table ?
On the picture you shared, all letters are the same width.

According to your post on discord, there are a huge amount of texts in textures format, it's also a very huge problem as well...

[megavolt85]

According to your post on discord, there are a huge amount of texts in textures format, it's also a very huge problem as well...

what exactly is the difficulty? in translation or in texture painting?

[fafadou]

According to your post on discord, there are a huge amount of texts in textures format, it's also a very huge problem as well...

what exactly is the difficulty? in translation or in texture painting?

Texture painting, I'm doing it for sword of the berserk and it's very long, but tools available are good.

[megavolt85]

Texture painting, I'm doing it for sword of the berserk and it's very long, but tools available are good.

maybe Imagemagick will make your task easier

examples

Code: Select all

convert -depth 1 -background black -fill white -font Arial.ttf -pointsize 100 label:"Text\nDreamcast" 1.png

1.png (1.95 KiB) Viewed 7456 times

Code: Select all

convert -depth 1 -background black -fill white -font SEAWEED.ttf -pointsize 100 label:"Text\nDreamcast" 2.png

2.png (2.6 KiB) Viewed 7456 times

[fafadou]

Not sure to find the best version...
What link do you recommend for windows please ?

Thank you this tools looks very good.

[megavolt85]

Not sure to find the best version...

curent stable for x64 or x86

[bingobongo]

Just want to say thanks for all the incredibly detailed replies - it's fascinating to see it broken down and explored/explained.

I haven't got a clue about these things beyond what I can decipher on these forums but I was really (really!) hoping "Tokyo Bus Guide" would actually be quite simple - that's why I was kind of surprised the translation groups hadn't released a patch - but, when you read these detailed posts that break things down clearly it really opens your mind about all the processes involved in translating a game.

If I've understood correctly, you'd need a specific tool to modify the text and that text would come with a ton of limitations (notably space for the characters and the actual appearance)

All I can add is that I'd happily donate to a team that would take this on - I think a lot of people don't realise that underneath the language barrier there's a really good game in there - if you like that kind of thing It's probably one of the most relaxing DC games once you master it - which doesn't take that long.