Sim City 64 (64DD) Translation

[krom]

Hi ozidual,

Sorry it took me a while to reply, I got caught up doing GSU (SuperFX) ALU tests, to help SNES emu authors get their GSU cores more accurate, & hopefully get GSU running in FPGA on the SD2SNES. https://github.com/PeterLemon/SNES/tree/master/CHIP/GSU/GSUTest

I like all your new ideas, I think it is great that you looked at Sim City 2000, & changed the names of stuff to the new ones that you have (I do prefer these names to the originals I gave you).

Once again, you are doing really great work, thanks so much for all of this =D

[ozidual]

Hey krom,

No worries at all.  I'll make a note in this thread when I make changes from your original work (or the original ROM).  Just know that at any point if you'd rather I revert any changes or make different changes, all you have to do is send me a message or post in this thread. 

That is awesome work, krom!  Personally, I'd rather have work done on SuperFX for the SD2SNES than this translation (sorry Kerr Avon)   I completely understand that you usually have a lot of other projects going at any point.  We all appreciate your other work too!

[Kerr Avon]

Here it is: Left Menu v1.0 (aka VWF v0.5.1)

All of the base left menu has been translated except for the speed controls.  The boxes around the text will still be shrunk to fit the text - what you see is the max box size.  As a bonus, I threw together a few lines of code that added the shadow back.  Terrain is slightly messed up.  I was playing around with it last night and forgot to revert it.  I made no changes to the font that was in the screen cap for my previous post.  Let me know how it looks.  I tested it on my UltraHDMI and it looks decent.

Again, krom, this is still your translation.  If you prefer the exact menu titles that you translated just let me know and I'll revert them.  Check my previous post for an explanation on it.

That looks fine on my TV, perfectly legible.

...
That is awesome work, krom!  Personally, I'd rather have work done on SuperFX for the SD2SNES than this translation (sorry Kerr Avon)

Eeek!

[ozidual]

Latest patches: here.

Most of the Left Menu items have been converted to their English counterparts.  There are a few that have yet to be converted, but at least the initial, pre-save and pre-present textures are translated.  I just now played through the first level, saved, and found out about the others.  The upper left HUD texture was updated to add Y for year, M for month, and Pop. for population.

Not in this patch, but I found out where the message that sits at the top center of the HUD is located.  It's not really a texture at all, but a spot where text is displayed.  I did some tests with the English text, and it doesn't look right.  I'll either need to find a happy medium for the Dr. Wright text and this text or I'll have to find a way to add another font   I still haven't figured out where the Yellow letter texture in the HUD is located.  It's not too important, it just tells you the speed you are playing at. 

On the plus side, I created a lot of extra space by double compressing the Left Menu textures.  I still need to crunch it all together and change some pointers to gain access to it.  I'm also toying with adding the ability to press A to skip through all the N64DD, EA, Maxis, etc. logos.  The Year, Month, Pop. texture clued me into another trick they used to make editing textures more difficult.  One line of a texture reads like it looks, the other flips every 2 words.  I'll need to create an app to help me with those too, but that should be simple.

As usual, feel free to comment and make suggestions.  I am open to making tweaks and adjustments to just about everything I've done so far.  I plan to tweak the Year, Month, Population piece to look a little better already.  I was thinking a couple things:

1. lower case y, lower case m, drop the period in Pop and expand the lower case p so it matches the upper case.
2. Get rid of the y and m, and just add a dash or a slash between the year/month.  That will get rid of some of the clutter.  I could also keep the period in Pop and shift the o into the capital P to allow expanding the lower case p.

Happy Turkey day if you celebrate that.  It's about 50/50 whether I'll be around until Sunday.

 

[krom]

Hi ozidual,

Wow sounds like you are making amazing progress once again!
Thanks for documenting everything you are doing, I find it very interesting.
Also thanks for the new patch, I love trying out all your new improvements =D

[Kerr Avon]

Ozidual, this is great! It's fantastic to see the project progressing so well, and just flicking through the icons and seeing that they've been de-mystified is brill  It will be great to see the game's main menu translated, so I can finally see what it all means. Could you maybe make the default city and player name into English, please?

Some of the words are perhaps a little difficult to read, due to the font. Things like the way 'w' looks more like 'vv', or 'ace' isn't too clear. It's still great, and I didn't have any problems reading them (even with my less than great eyesight), and maybe no one else would either, but I thought I should mention it.

Re: the year and month letters, I think they should probably be in lower case, and maybe a different colour (say if the 'y' and the 'm' were green). And the ability to skip through the logos and stuff would be appreciated, too 

BTW, the date in the patches' filenames is 1st of November ("NUD-DSCJ-JPN (Cart T+Eng2017-11-01)(VWFv0.5.7)"), it's not a real problem, but it might cause confusion for some. Thankfully the date inside the zip itself is 22nd November, so it's easy for the user to confirm it's the new patch.

[ozidual]

Just stopped in to say I'm blind   The link in the main post where I said the Main Menu translation was lost.  It's right there.  Here are the options from top to bottom:

Beginner's Mode (https://64dd.org/tips_sc64.html)
Scenario Mode
Free Mode
Continue
Sound

By the way, I got LuigiBlood's approval to bring in his translation of Beginner's Mode, and I've added it.  When I get home, I'll add it to my build and release it.  There's still a bunch of untranslated text that will play as Dr. Wright talks to someone, and a few left menu items untranslated, but Beginner's Mode should be playable after that.

Kerr Avon, I'm looking into a base name for the City/Mayor.  Any suggestions (open to all)?  Each name must be 8 characters or less unfortunately.  Otherwise I had planned to do Lord Vetinari and Ankh-Morpork   I need to find where these names are stored since what you see currently is a pointer in text to those names.  Please excuse any misspellings in this message.

[Kerr Avon]

I'm looking into a base name for the City/Mayor.  Any suggestions (open to all)?  Each name must be 8 characters or less unfortunately.  Otherwise I had planned to do Lord Vetinari and Ankh-Morpork   I need to find where these names are stored since what you see currently is a pointer in text to those names.  Please excuse any misspellings in this message.

If you like Family Guy or the 1960's Batman TV program, then you could call the mayor 'West' and call the city 'Quahog' as in the city where Family Guy is set and Mayor West is of course the part played by ex-Batman actor Adam West! It would be a nice little tribute to Adam West who died some months back.

[ozidual]

[VWF 0.5.9]No patch yet, just a screenshot:

被災地移動

What you see there is a Left Menu text texture that is never used in the game.  There are no pointers to this texture anywhere, though I suspect it would fit in the Disasters menu.  I don't have a good translation, but it's something like Movement of Disaster Area.  Maybe krom can chime in if he has time.  You're seeing this because I checked all the pointers to Left Menu text and went through all of the textures.  They are now all translated and mostly tested.  My previous patches missed: Save, Load, Restart Scenario, Present, Bonus Building, Arcology, Dispatch Fire Brigade, and Dispatch S. Fire Brigade (Super Fire Brigade won't fit).  I also changed Save to Save As since it is more about creating a Save point and the new Save just saves over your existing save point.

I added Luigiblood's translated text which helps you through Beginner/Practice mode, but it revealed a few special instances that the VWF didn't account for.  Hence no new patch.  I also need to fix the spacing for Menus, Yes/No questions, etc., and possibly translate all the Yes/No's to English.

While on break I made a good start at translating the main menu.  I went back to the original Sim City (SNES) for this translation:

Practice
Scenarios
New City
Resume
Sound

The Sound Menu will become:

Sound

Mode Mono Stereo
BGM
SE


I'm working on making/expanding the English character textures to allow for this.  It is quite an undertaking to edit the main menu, but it just doesn't feel right without it.  By the way, this will not show up on the next patch.  It's just one of my current projects.  krom - no rush at all on this since it will take me some time to create the font, but could you translate the Sound Menu next?  I'm guessing at Mono/Stereo, and I have no idea what the last line that begins with a weird A should be.

I did some researching and Sim City 64 is based on Sim City 2000 but it is meant to be a successor to the original Sim City on the SNES.  I'm going to stick with the modified Sim City 2000 English font since it is very similar to the existing English font in Sim City 64.  Going forward I plan to look first at Sim City SNES, then at Sim City 2000 for any standard names.  I like standard names - they mean I can translate things on the fly

As for the default mayor/city name - I accidentally used the non-clean ROM as the base for my hacks.  If you start with a truly clean ROM it asks you for both names because clean ROMs have all of the save data removed.  For testing purposes it's easier to have pre-defined names, but I plan to move to a clean ROM when I get closer to finishing.

I'm hoping to have the new patch ready this weekend or early next week.  By the way, I'm testing out listing my current build name at the beginning of the post for documentation purposes.

EDIT 2018 08 14: Replaced the link to a picture with the actual picture.

[Kerr Avon]

As always, your progress is fascinating to read, Ozidual.   

Out of interest, what changes or improvements did SimCity 2000 on the N64 have over the PC or SNES versions, please?

[ozidual]

Thanks

There's a pretty good wikipedia article on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_2000 that compares the various Sim City 2000s. 

The PC version had an expansion that you could buy, some of which was integrated into the N64 version I believe.  From the videos I've seen and trying to play it myself, the SNES version is very slow and clunky.  They cut things out to make the game fit on the SNES, so think of it almost like a AAA game ported to a portable system like the Gameboy Advance.  The N64 version is supposed to be a lot faster.  It took SC2000 a step further and added features like the Dating Sim, Horse Tracks, etc.  I haven't found a good list of all those new features yet.

[ozidual]

[VWF 0.5.11] Newest patch here

With LuigiBlood's approval, this patch introduces his translation from here: https://64dd.org/tips_sc64.html

Thanks LuigiBlood!  For the translation, for getting the 64DD games dumped in the first place, and for keeping a fantastic, useful, up-to-date central website for 64DD.

Just a warning - his table has mini spoilers.  The game doesn't tell you what building you will win.  My insertion of the text still isn't 100%.  If you fail a step the year is garbled.  I'll track that down later.

For the fix I found 3 more 'max characters per line' variables that for the boxes.  I suspect there are more, but I'll need to play more to find them.  I may try to find the money cheat code to speed though my play through

I replaced the Japanese yes/no with the English yes/no.  I also took it a step further and translated some of saving dialogue.  I did not find all of it, and this is not meant to be a final draft.  It's just to help people play. 

My next plan is to tackle the text bar in the HUD that displays things like: Citizens demand a Fire Department.  It's one of the last barriers to making the game playable at its basic level.  I've pulled a the translation from SCSNES and SC2000, and will fill in the gaps with similar sounding text.  Remember that this will require either a new English font or some way of modifying the existing English font.

As I mentioned, the Left Menu has been completely translated for this patch.  I went through and found all the pointers and all of the textures to make sure I got them everything.  Three posts above I included a screen cap of a texture that isn't used in the game.

By the way, Kerr Avon, the date on the patches is still 2017-11-01 because that was krom's last translation update.  Since these patches are a combination of krom's work and mine, I put info about both of our patches on there.  That way you can see progress a little more easily and it helps with revisioning.

[krom]

Hi ozidual,

Sorry for the late reply, I only just noticed you asked me this:

krom - no rush at all on this since it will take me some time to create the font, but could you translate the Sound Menu next?

Yeah sure I'll get this done for you =D

Thanks LuigiBlood!  For the translation, for getting the 64DD games dumped in the first place, and for keeping a fantastic, useful, up-to-date central website for 64DD.

This will prob blow your mind, but I am good friends with LuigiBlood for the past few years, he is one of my main buddies in the N64/SNES scene (it's a small world!) =D
Also I have been consulting him on some of the translation stuff for Sim City 64 myself, so pretty cool he has done so much work to help us out.

Great work BTW with your latest updates, I am very happy to see all your progress, in such a short space of time.

[ozidual]

Hey krom!  No worries.  Whenever you have time is good.  There's more than enough stuff to fix besides the Main Menu   For example, I noticed you translated the descriptions for the various scenarios.  I found the textures for the scenario names which I can now translate with your text.  That will probably happen some time in the near future too.  It seems like there's enough to keep me busy for months

I didn't realize that - that's awesome.  LuigiBlood is great.  We've only sent a few messages back and forth, but he always responds quickly.  Mato with his Mother 3 translation blog made me want to translate games.  LuigiBlood and his championing 64DD got me interested in 64DD games.  That's the main reason I did my Doshin the Giant translation hack and the reason I'm working on this one too.  Well that and Kerr Avon has been trying to get someone to translate Sim City 64 forever

LuigiBlood's done some great work with Satellaview games too.  It's awesome to see him push to get new games dumped every year.

[VWF 0.5.13a]Latest screen cap here:


Not too much happening.  I freed up a bunch of space in the ROM by moving around the Left Menu textures.  I now have 0x281C (~10,000) bytes freed up, and that's after moving all of my hacks to this space.  It seems so simple, but there were a lot of pointers buried in code to redirect.

You'll notice in the screenshot that I've translated the text for that central text box in the HUD.  I believe that specific piece of text is supposed to read "Brownouts, build another Power Plant."  Still, you can see how ugly the text looks.  Next steps will be to get rid of the 'max characters per line' variable, and to get the text looking better.

EDIT 2018 08 14: Replaced the link to a picture with the actual picture.

[ozidual]

Short update.  Font for the HUD text created.  It's now loading correctly and the code seems solid.  Still need to fix spacing.  Here are some pictures of how bad it looked along the way:

Right after I combined everything, it looked like this:


An hour of fixing some math errors, an error in my MIPs to Hex converter, and one missing command leads to:

This is how it looks now:


I'm off to bed.  I'll fix the rest in the morning and try to throw together a patch for the weekend.

BONUS: One more mistake from earlier on:



EDIT 2018 08 14: Replaced the links to pictures with the actual pictures.