Shiren 2 Translation

[ozidual]

A translator has approached me about translating this game.  I've passed him the full text, but we're still in the early stages.

Websites:
http://roadbikebeginners.com/n64-fuurainoshiren2-cheatcode/
http://roadbikebeginners.com/n64-fuurainoshiren2-debugmode/

Master code: F1032240 2400

Enter debug mode when you enter next dungeon floor: 80142F1F 0001


Original text (January 10, 2019)

It's Shiren the Wanderer 2. I started working on it again recently. I don't have much time to put towards it, but Shiren doesn't demand much time.

No patches to post yet, but I thought I'd throw this up here to make note as I progress through the hack.

In the interim, go pick up the 2 English Shiren games out there! I've put quite a few hours into Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for the DS. Great game.  The other one is Shiren the Wanderer (aka Shiren 3) for the Wii.

There's also the SNES Shiren the Wanderer which was translated many years ago by Aeon Genesis.  The DS game is an official remake of that.

[ozidual]

The progress so far...

Way back at the end of 2017, I did some initial work on Shiren while in the middle of another project. That first Shiren patch didn't go so well, so last summer I started over.  So far I have:

1. Ascii patch (newer, trimmer, better)
2. VWF (the game already has a VWF for Japanese and English)
3. Created a Japanese to hex table
4. Ripped a good chunk of the text in hex form
5. Started an initial run of finding Japanese in textures
6. Started comparing text from the 2 English Shiren releases to match against the text in Shiren 2.
7. Created a spreadsheet to allow me to convert text to hex and back

Shiren has the worst Japanese encoding I have ever seen.  That is to say that there is no standard encoding.  Just 1100+ characters pulled from the full Japanese characterset.  It took a few weeks to put together an encoding table, and I've already found a couple characters that need fixing.

At some point, I threw all of the text into Google translate just to see what it was like. It's not playable, but it helps me verify everything.

[tbpbird]

looks fun, cant wait to play it.
cheers

[Kerr Avon]

This is fantastic news! And it will be great to have another RPG on the N64, a genre that's sadly almost non-existent when compared to the libraries on other consoles.

[Immorpher]

Awesome, keep it up!

[Shellshocker18]

Awesome! Remember I have completed save files and know where everything in the game and postgame is if anyone ever needs help. Gamehacking.org also has cheats your all going to need if anyone decides to play it. Without English you won't be getting through without dying until you've already beaten the game before and know what you're doing.

[ozidual]

Awesome! Remember I have completed save files and know where everything in the game and postgame is if anyone ever needs help. Gamehacking.org also has cheats your all going to need if anyone decides to play it. Without English you won't be getting through without dying until you've already beaten the game before and know what you're doing.

Thanks Shellshocker18!  Those may have to wait until I get a translator, but I'll keep them in mind if I need them.

At this point I think I've found all the text, and figured out how to make more space for it (both in RAM and in ROM).   Next step is to figure out what all of the text codes mean - there appear to be quite a lot of them.   Once I get that figured out, I can start putting together a list of text to translate. 

The hacking side of things is going pretty quickly even with the little time I have to put towards it.  The translation side of things is going to take quite a lot longer.

[ozidual]

Took a short break from code to fix the font.  Shiren had every letter starting at the same level, so decenders (g, j, p, q, y) were at the same level as all the other letters (note the lower case g and p in the 1st image).  It's still the exact same font, but with most characters shifted up 3 rows.



Fixed that, but then found that there's still text out there that I haven't found.  It's about 50/50 whether the missed text is in the code or just a list of numbers somewhere.



The English characters are in two places right now - their original, unchanged place, which is encoded in 2 bytes, and their new, texture fixed place which is encoded in 1 byte.  The image above shows the old font (the numbers) next to the new font (the letters).

Remember, these are not officially translated, just machine translated to help me work on the game.

[Immorpher]

Nice seeing the progress.

[ozidual]

I know I said I put Shiren on hold, but...



a translator approached me asking to work on it.  Getter Love is still my priority, but you may have noticed that the rate of hacks on GL is slowing down.  So during the down time (for me) I'm working on Shiren too.

[Galron]

Nice, having all the RPGs and Visual Novels translated is something I hope for!

[ozidual]

Normally if a game requires a solid chunk of time, I'll work on other small hacks in between (usually Zelda stuff), but right now Shiren has lots of little hacks that need work.  So with the 10 minutes here or there, I can do things like this:



I figured out how to modify the window widths so we can have longer menu names.  I also made some minor changes to textures and a handful of other changes.  I also realized that I haven't modified a single line of code in Shiren.  It already has a VWF and 1-byte text, which are the two major hacks I usually need to do.  Almost all of the work was getting the non-standard alphabet figured out and sorting out textures for letters and such.  Mind you, once I finish GL hacking, there are some hacks that will need to be implemented in Shiren such as:

Adding an 's' for multiple items (check for the number and then put an s on the end if needed)
Adding 'st', 'nd', 'rd', 'th' depending on placing
Changing Item options depending on the item (e.g. inserting items into a pot vs. pouring water into a different pot)

The translation is moving along fast and is focused mostly on the dungeon/item/monster text right now.   I think the first pass on most item names and descriptions, most monster names, and things like that has already been done.  It's pretty cool to see since this is the meat of the game.  There's a delay on the game dialogue right now until I can get the text extracted in a way that is easy to update.  That text is buried in command codes and seems to use non-standard ways of doing just about everything

[Galron]

Yay, glad to see more work on this!

[ozidual]

I know it's been pretty quiet on both of my translations lately.  Getter Love is still moving forward - it's just such a dense wall of text

As for Shiren, things are picking up again now that I'm finally opast one of the largest hurdles.  There are two sections of text - the battle/dungeon/item/monster text, which you probably run into the most, and the dialogue text, which fills out the game and is quite a bit larger.  I may have mentioned that before.  Well, the dialogue text is mixed up with quite a few command characters (0x00 through 0x7F or 128 in decimal) - things like change this text to yellow or advance the movie forward or move these characters around or most importantly jump to this section if this value is true.  That last bit is very important when you change the length of dialogue by modifying it.  It took a while to identify which bytes were command characters, which bytes were modifiers, and which were text.  After that, I had to find a way to re-calculate those jumps to new sections.  I think we're finally there, and the translator is moving forward with translating that text. It's exciting to see

After tackling that, I decided to work on the Name Screen, and I think I finally have most of that sorted out.  It used to look like this:



Now it looks like this:



Unfortunately, the game only reserves 4 bytes in the save file for the name, so I'm going to have to dissect that a bit to find 7-8 bytes for the new name, but otherwise it appears to be done.  It's not the most exciting thing, but it's nice to finally make some visible progress on it all