Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

[Kyence]

Hello, all! It's been a while since my initial post, but I wanted to show some screenshots of the English translation I'm working on. The biggest challenge has been the compression; a big thanks to Orakio_rob and RodolfoRG for the e-mails and decompression program (they are working on a Portugeuse translation). Over the weekend, I figured out the event pointer algorithm and how to tweak the compression flags to allow me to insert English without breaking the game. There's still more to be done, but here's some proof that I haven't given up!

1.JPG (46.37 KiB) Viewed 75067 times

[Kyence]

The last three images:

[Zucca]

Wow. This is great! Are you working alone on this english version?

The biggest challenge has been the compression; a big thanks to Orakio_rob and RodolfoRG for the e-mails and decompression program (they are working on a Portugeuse translation). Over the weekend, I figured out the event pointer algorithm and how to tweak the compression flags to allow me to insert English without breaking the game.

What type of compression method it uses? Regular deflate? LZO?

[Kyence]

Thanks! I think it uses a form of LZ compression. Without the program from Orazio_rob's team, I don't think I would have gotten this far. Yes, I am the only one working on the English version.

[Missagh]

This is great work Kyence!

If anyone is interested in assisting on an English translation, orakio_rob has been offering his findings while translating it to Portugeuse. It would be great to have a team of English translators if you would approve of that Kyence?

I'm thinking this rather than new translators starting from scratch.

[Zucca]

I think it's then LZO. AS it's quite modern compression method that uses very little memory and is blazing fast. Many compressed filesystems use LZO of deflate.

[spookeydonkey]

hey do you know if this is the same compression method used for PS Gen 2? I'd love to know if it works!

[Zucca]

Try to uncompress the file(s) with LZO.

[Missagh]

hey do you know if this is the same compression method used for PS Gen 2? I'd love to know if it works!

Yes Orakio Rob confirmed that it is.

[Kyence]

Ideally, if I can make it through PS1, I'd like to work on 2. It was always my favorite of the series.
I may need some help with translating the Japanese text but I'm okay with the encoding. I will need
help with the menu graphics and the monster name pointers. Those are static images or a separate.
katakana font. If anybody would like to help it would be great! If not, I'll still keep going at it.
Thanks for all the positive words, everyone!

[Black Sword]

You will be a legendary hero once you finish translating this! What kind of help do you need for the static images?

[Zucca]

You will be a legendary hero once you finish translating this!

x2

[spookeydonkey]

it's been a few years since I lived in Tokyo, but I can maybe help with translation, as long as it's not too much. Of course, at this point I'm just going to assume that your Japanese level is much higher than mine, so I'm wondering what kind of help translating you'll want (technical or just because of sheer amount of text needing translation) ?

[LegoMuskCat]

The only thing that bugs me at all is that it's all caps. Other than that, your translation efforts are terrific!

[Kyence]

Thanks, everyone!

Spookeydonkey, there is quite a bit of text to translate. I would definitely love some help with it!

Black Sword, the images are also compressed;I can decompress them,but since they are stored collectively in a.DAT file,I can't seem to visualize them separately.I did some trial and error with the pointers, but I can't find the menu and battle icons with Japanese letters on them; I have also had no luck attempting to splice the hex code into a plain black bitmap to at least see the image. Ideally I would like to edit these with English and reinsert them uncompressed at this point. This will likely be done after the text translation is completed.

Dreamer, thanks! The reasons I chose all caps were both aesthetic and alphabet issues. I had originally tried using the lowercase letters,but since they used a fixed amount of space for both upper- and lower-case letters, the lower-case letters look very spread apart and it was distracting to me. I also realized that in the English font the programmers included in the game had omitted some small letters:j, q, w, x. Most of them I could live without, but not even being about to write "swd" made me decide to do the all caps route. I had not intended to make a new font table when I first started out,until I realized that the monster names have a separate font that only has four letters (ABCD),so that will be needed anyway for them...

Would it be worth delaying the text encoding for a few months until I develop a main font with wider lowercase letters? Since lower-case letters have a separate hex code,it would be prudent to wait if lowercase was decided upon. Since this is a translation meant for all of us,I'd like to know what you guys think.

Thanks again!