Doshin the Giant 1

[Kerr Avon]

Have you made any progress with SimCity 64's translation? I was surprised that Nintendo didn't release it on the Wii's Virtual Console service (in English), as I'd have thought it would have been very popular with Wii owners. They did it with Sin and Punishment, so why not SC64?

Anyway, thanks for keeping us informed, it's very interesting.

[ozidual]

No real progress on SimCity 64.  I found a ton of textures with text and passed them on to Binkers87, but I know he has a lot of projects up in the air right now.  There are some sections of text where they cut the texture into multiple pieces which is going to be a HUGE pain to translate.  It's only a small portion of the text, but a huge pain. 

At some point, it might make more sense to play the game and do screen shots of the text textures because it is hard to make them out when the textures are just extracted.

I think the reason is that SimCity 64 is just so complex.

[Kerr Avon]

No real progress on SimCity 64.  I found a ton of textures with text and passed them on to Binkers87, but I know he has a lot of projects up in the air right now.  There are some sections of text where they cut the texture into multiple pieces which is going to be a HUGE pain to translate.  It's only a small portion of the text, but a huge pain. 

At some point, it might make more sense to play the game and do screen shots of the text textures because it is hard to make them out when the textures are just extracted.

I think the reason is that SimCity 64 is just so complex.

Why was it done that way? Was it to save memory (by making the textures as large or small as need be so they could be used anywhere, so that, say, instead of having one texture that said "nowhere", they had two; "no", and "where", so either could be used on it's own where relevant)?

It always amazed me how much data could be stored on small (capacity) cartridges by skillful programmers. It's easy to get some idea of how well compressed data was on a cartridge game by zipping up the rom file, in many cases you won't see more than a few percent space saving, which is pretty impressive, I think.

Thanks for the reply, mate.

[ozidual]

Doshin News!  The Night Comments have been expanded to allow for more letters. 

The hack:  Night Comments use a separate character set from just about everything else.  One that would not benefit from a VWF (the NOW LOADING text shows you an example of that character set).  Instead, I doubled the height of the text boxes which required adding a line break character and allowing the text to extend to a 2nd line.  I also had to fix the character counting function, since it was reading English text as half a character instead of a full character.

What's left:
1. Morning Comments need to expand beyond a single line per comment.
2. The "Delete Photo" textbox needs some tweaking
3. The "Delete Save Game" text box needs some tweaking
4. The Titles in Monument text need some tweaking
(5. Expand the characters per line limit beyond 20)

Number 1 will take some work.  2-4 should be pretty quick and simple.  5 would make text look a little better.  5 is in parenthesis because it's giving me trouble and may not be possible with my current knowledge.

@Kerr Avon: Sorry, I missed your question there.  My guess is that they created a function that helped them somehow, but the side effect was splitting up the images.  That or they're just plain mean   It probably was to save RAM, which could easily be a limiter for SimCity 64.

[ozidual]

Update # 2 within 24 hours (see previous post for translation hack progress)!  Debug Menu code:

R + Left C + Right C + Z + A*

* DO NOT turn on TYCONF.SU option 15. Debug
On the ED64 v2.5, it crashes the game during the intro and corrupts the SD card so that any game you load after that will be corrupted.  I had to use SD Formatter to reformat the card before it would work again.  Other options seem just fine.  I've played a couple days with day set to 48, Land overlay, Monyu A Time at 50, Monyu B Time at 50, 2nd Kyojin + on, and 3rd Kyojin + on.

1. Go to the Title Screen Menu. 
2. Highlight Start Game.
3. Press and hold R + Left C + Right C + Z
4. While holding those, press A.
5. The Debug Menu will appear

I've confirmed it works on the Cart version on the ED64, and it should work on the original 64DD hardware as well.  It will not work if the save game is stuck, so for the default cart version you will need to erase the Save Game first.  The clean version will work just fine.

Within the Debug Menu:

C buttons change to different menus
Z/R increment by 1
A/B increment extremely fast

Enjoy!

Edited for clarity.

[ozidual]

Done.

Before I get started: If you are working on the translation, please let me know.  I am going to be more active in recruiting translators.

The link above includes the textures to translate, the text to translate, and a patch for the Doshin Disk ROM (not the clean version).  I also included some documentation on how to re-insert translated text and textures.  I would still recommend working with me to add in the text, but if you know what you're doing you could do it yourself.  I just ask that you mention me in the final release.

The patch basically prepares the game for English text.  There is a VWF to make English characters look better and allow 20 characters per line vs the 14 original.  Any text piece that might need more than one line now has the option to flow to multiple lines.  I allowed the Night Comments text box to auto-expand to two lines since a VWF wouldn't work.  Don't attempt to use the Debug option on this patch.  I replaced most of the code for that, but haven't disabled the Debug Code yet.

There are a few additional changes that I would like to make:
   Expand the character limit to 40
   Fix the highlight box around the two Yes/No options

These are not necessary, so I am putting them aside until I have time later.  If a translation appears, I'll make them a higher priority.  I have a good start on both of these already.

Additionally, on the main page I'm including a link to the Doshin GameCube English Manual to provide a frame of reference for translators.  The 64DD game has more text than the GameCube game, specifically the Morning Text and different monuments, but it's the best I can do for now.  The 64DD manual is available at 64dd.org.

[Kerr Avon]

Sorry mate, I'm not sure what this is (I'm not a technical person). Am I right in thinking that this is not a complete English translation, instead it's a template for an English (or other languages) translation, and you've extracted the Japanese text for Japanese speaking people to translate into English?

One thing I've never understood about a lot of Japanese games (mainly arcade games) is that they have both Japanese and English text on the same screen. I don't mean that they have both texts saying the same thing (which would make sense, as that way speakers of either language could understand what was displayed), but say the game text would be in Japanese, and the yet the game might say in English

Score: 230,761                         Lives: 3                     Island: 2

Why do some Japanese games mix languages like that? And in Japanese, do they use the western symbols for numbers (1, 2, 3, etc)?

[ozidual]

Yup yup.  It's a pre-translation patch, so no English.  I'm basically saying that if I had a translation script today, the game would be fully playable in translated form not long after.  It would take a little time to insert the script, and I'd want to go through some testing, but I would hope to get it out in a couple of weeks.

The reason I posted it is two-fold.  One to show that the game is pretty much ready, and two so I'm no longer the only person out there with a copy of this game that can be translated.

From what I've read, English is taught in Japanese schools, and is an integral part of Japanese culture.  It's not so much mixing languages as an extension of Japanese.  Similar to how I can say Voila! and you'll expect some sort of magic trick to be completed.  Along those lines, the Doshin Debug menu is already mostly English, but there isn't any English in-game (beyond a Thanks during the credits).

[Kerr Avon]

Yup yup.  It's a pre-translation patch, so no English.  I'm basically saying that if I had a translation script today, the game would be fully playable in translated form not long after.  It would take a little time to insert the script, and I'd want to go through some testing, but I would hope to get it out in a couple of weeks.

The reason I posted it is two-fold.  One to show that the game is pretty much ready, and two so I'm no longer the only person out there with a copy of this game that can be translated.

It's a very good idea. Anything that can potentially encourage people to work on translations is good for the community.

From what I've read, English is taught in Japanese schools, and is an integral part of Japanese culture.  It's not so much mixing languages as an extension of Japanese.  Similar to how I can say Voila! and you'll expect some sort of magic trick to be completed.  Along those lines, the Doshin Debug menu is already mostly English, but there isn't any English in-game (beyond a Thanks during the credits).

Oh right. That does make sense, with English being so prevalent world-wide.

[ozidual]

Doshin the Giant now has a translator!

In working with the translator, there are a few more features I'm going to try to add to the patch.  The hacking part of the patch is still essentially ready.  The new features are more enhancements to add more text (not to change any gameplay). 

Work continues.

[Kerr Avon]

Great news! Please keep us informed of your progress (it's been quiet here for the past few weeks).

[johnson]

That's great ozidual I'm happy for your project

[ozidual]

Great news! Please keep us informed of your progress (it's been quiet here for the past few weeks).

Will do!  Yeah it has been pretty quiet.  BOTW is definitely having its effect on the internet  

That's great ozidual I'm happy for your project

Thanks!

[ozidual]

I haven't done an update in a while because there really isn't anything to update.  Still... it's been a while.  So here's what I've got:

The translation continues on schedule, but it takes time to translate.  That part will be done when it is done.  I have identified all of the parts to a new feature I would like to add to Doshin, but I haven't taken the time to put it all together yet.

What have I been doing?  Not much.  I'm giving myself a break from any major hacks for a time.  I was burning out trying to do too much stuff at once.  I did a little work on Aroenai's Zelda patches, some of which I'll add to my own Zelda patches.  I'm working from time to time on GCto1.0 and GCtoN64 patches for the updated Petrie's Challenge patch.  I also wrote a small simple program to help me with Zelda translations and Doshin translations (converting text to hex and generating tables).

I'll post another update if there's news, or if it's been a while since this update.  Even if I'm not posting I still check this forum and my messages daily.

[Aroenai]

And we all appreciate your work!

I'm working on cleaning out some trailing spaces and misc formatting/translation fixes, so it may be a little bit until the fruits of Ozidual's labor will be apparent lol.