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PostPosted: December 1st, 2018, 1:19 pm 
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I would like to start a translation project for giten megami tensei.
All the files of the game are in .bin.
Do you know which soft I could use to open the files, and write english text instead of japanese ?


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PostPosted: December 2nd, 2018, 10:37 pm 
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It usually doesn't work that easily with some sort of universial tool. I think Esperknight may have taken a look at this specific game and perhaps even extracted some text. If you don't have any experience with hacking/programming, you will have a hard time producing something.
If you are proficient with Japanese, it's probably better to seek out someone else who already has some experience with hacking and team up.


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PostPosted: December 3rd, 2018, 11:22 pm 
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Too bad...
I prefer doing alone, and by myself because :
- I don't want to do it a work, it's just to have fun with by translating some stuff in the game, with my own rythm
- As I don't have too much time, a complete project of translating would take 100 years for me :)
- I like the programming aspect (even if I am just a normal user). And if I can manage to change some things in the game by myself I would be very happy !
Do you know where I should start to try to do something ?


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PostPosted: January 19th, 2019, 10:37 pm 
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Have you looked at any of the .bin files in a hex editor? (I use one called wxMEdit but any one will do)

PC-98 games often have their text encoded with Shift-JIS. You should be able to open the files, set the hex editor's encoding to Shift-JIS (View -> Encoding -> East Asian -> Shift JIS), and look around for text you see in the game. If you're lucky you can just replace it with ASCII English text and it'll show up when you reinsert the file and load the game up again.

If ASCII doesn't show up, you either have to settle for fullwidth Shift-JIS text (2 bytes per character), or do some assembling hacking and change the way the game renders text. The latter would be tough for a first project, particularly if you don't want to work with anyone else...

Let me know what you find!


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PostPosted: January 25th, 2019, 8:22 am 
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Thanks for the advice !
I will try that next week and post again !


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PostPosted: January 27th, 2019, 2:40 pm 
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hollowaytape wrote:
Have you looked at any of the .bin files in a hex editor? (I use one called wxMEdit but any one will do)

PC-98 games often have their text encoded with Shift-JIS. You should be able to open the files, set the hex editor's encoding to Shift-JIS (View -> Encoding -> East Asian -> Shift JIS), and look around for text you see in the game. If you're lucky you can just replace it with ASCII English text and it'll show up when you reinsert the file and load the game up again.

That method indeed seems to work with Prince of Persia 2 fine. I actually would maybe consider completely translating this version someday since it has some extra features compared to the standard IBM PC/DOS version. I've already replaced the audio for the entire opening cut-scene with audio from the regular DOS one with MT-32 music, and it worked out well other than some minor sync issues.

Example of my WIP:
Image


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PostPosted: January 28th, 2019, 1:03 am 
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Great ! I will try that tomorrow (day off !) !
I will post again !


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PostPosted: January 29th, 2019, 8:17 am 
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OK, I tried to open bin files. But there are thousands of files, and some I tried to open were just strange list of symbols...
Any idea about what file I should start with ?


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PostPosted: January 29th, 2019, 9:35 am 
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No way of knowing. There are no standard way of doing things when it comes to game development.


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PostPosted: January 29th, 2019, 9:40 am 
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Any idea of size of files containing text ? 1ko should have nothing... 500 ko is maybe to much ?


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PostPosted: January 30th, 2019, 9:40 am 
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There is no guarantee that all the text will be located in one file, it all depends on how the developers decided to organize their game data. You might have better luck locating any potential text by doing an automatic search for a string that you know exists in the game. But since the text is coded in Shift-JIS an automatic search will be tricky. Plus, the text might be scrambled due to compression.

Anywaste, seeing as how you have next to zero technical knowledge you clearly have bitten off more than you can chew.


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PostPosted: January 30th, 2019, 11:39 am 
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OK, too bad. Then I continue the game as it is ! In japanese !
The game is one of the hardest game I ever did !


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PostPosted: February 17th, 2019, 5:03 am 
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I don't know about dialog files, but this game sure comes with a nice set of MIDI tunes. Check out SM002.bin for... a “Song of Storms” precursor?! What year did this game come out?!
tpgb12 wrote:
I've already replaced the audio for the entire opening cut-scene with audio from the regular DOS one with MT-32 music, and it worked out well other than some minor sync issues.

This is impressive! Thanks for sharing your WIP.


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PostPosted: February 18th, 2019, 1:54 am 
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Giten Megami tensei relesed in 1997. The soundtrack is really good. I use native MIDI trough my Roland MPU-PC98Ⅱ To Decoder SC-88 when I play he game (GM).
This Megami tensei is a very good and original RPG ! I am now around 30 hours of the game, and the atmosphere is so good. But the game system and hard level make it difficult to be played by people who cannot understand japanese, or are not used to hard level RPG (I mean doing game over, during weeks in the same dungeons, after hours of fighting and level up is hard, mentally speaking).


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