Hi AwesomeBrand
I am one of the guys who are working with the translation. Basicly we want to translate the game to spanish for people who don't speak english can enjoy this great game.
The translation of the texts was really easy thanks to Mairtrus. He explain me some details about the binary files, how to change the offsets from its texts and provide me a new SUBCODE.BIN with new replaced chars like ñ, á, é...
The texts are inside the "SPXX.BIN" files and starts in 0x3800 offset. You can search his pointers in the code by "0xHHXXXX" where:
- XXXX is the number of chars in hexadecimal from the begining to first char on currently text minus 0x3800
- HH:
· 0x34 when is a menu text for selection.
· 0x36 when text is from nobody
· 0x432000YY when is a sentence from some character. YY represent the number in hexadecimal from the ordered list of characters in SUBCODE.BIN file.
When we start with the translation I created a CakePHP web project for manage this files and its texts in community. So people can translate the files (and change the character from sentences) easily in html forms. I also created a parser to generate and download the files with the translated texts in one click. Between the texts are some bytes that represent special chars like A button, start button, new page, new line or print texts in other color. So only we have to store this bytes and replace it with <n> where "n" is a number to identify its "special char".
There are some errors detected in the game which now can be fixed. For example:
- In file SP03.BIN the character from text number 216 is assigned to Jamie when in fact is Gillian.
- In file SP10.BIN the character from text number 22 is assigned to Gillian when in fact is Napoleon.
Currently, Mairtrus is working with the translation of the disk from the PC-8801 because the texts are fixed in sprites. He's also trying to remove censorship (eg Katrina in the shower).
The idea is to create one patch to remove censorship and other patch to translate the game. I uploaded an inicial web project in
github, so everyone who wants can translate the texts easily to any language (or just change the texts). I hope can update soon the web project to import texts directly from binary SPXX.BIN files and create a howto basic installation.