bingobongo wrote: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.
It's probably one of the most relaxing DC games once you master it - which doesn't take that long.