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I've been toying a bit with Elf stuff since I finished porting the Yu-No translation to the PC-98 version. And so I've managed to convert a handful of their early stuff in HDI format. Could be nice for people wanting to run them from hard drive, or emulator users that don't like disk swapping. Oh, and hackers willing to take a look at some of them for translation projects for instance

Games included are : Curse of Castle, Dragon Knight, Dragon Knight 4 Special Disk, Foxy, the Pinky Ponky trilogy, Ray Gun and Run! Run! Kyousoukyou

I've also added the Retronomicon version of Dragon Knight. I had to entierly rework a couple of files that were broken (don't know how they even managed to work in the first place...) but haven't corrected anything else (missing animations or script errors). There's a way better effort in progress for this game from another translator, so you can just wait for it instead if you plan to play it.

All file references have been corrected to point to the right place, but I haven't fully playtested everything. Everything should be OK, though.

So it's either on : https://mega.nz/folder/jXxwXCiS#0H3V2yDJihE6ZdHB_fQwYg
Or here : https://archive.org/details/elf-hdd-conversions

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My archive.org stash (Fan translations and more!)

Tried running Pinky Ponky series and got an error like this.

I just checked. The hdis work on emulator, if they're directly mounted as a single drive. But if you try to copy the game files somewhere else and launch them, it doesn't work. That's because I kept references to the root drive a: in the .MES files. Thanks for pointing this issue, I'm going to fix it and upload the corrected files ASAP !

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My archive.org stash (Fan translations and more!)

OK, everything is in working order now. The problem only affected the Pinky Ponky series, but I re-organised each HDI in a cleaner way while I was at it.

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My archive.org stash (Fan translations and more!)

Hi @BabaJeanmel and thanks for sharing!

This is very interesting. I actually made tools to replace kanji with hiragana for easier reading, but had issues due to the limited storage on floppy discs.

Your project fixes this issue! I can now even do furigana - kanji with their reading, thanks to the extra space.

Here's attached a patch for your Dragon Knight HDI release on archive.org.



By the way, did you use the easy version or normal? Cause the normal version is way too hard

I've just tried the intro and it seems to work.

Though the text might get cropped as there isn't enough space on screen. I'll see if I can fix that.

Though, I made this patch with just my hacky tools. If you actually have access to tool to edit .MES files, you could do a much better job than me.

It's quite simple, I'm using the pykakasi python api to do these conversions. You can incorporate that in your pipeline.

Thanks!

I used the normal version. And finished the game (it was kind of a grindfest )

There is indeed a tool to edit MES files. I won't share it without the author's (tomyun) permission, but maybe you can ask him. He's registered here, too.

Anyway, it's a very cool idea to combine Kanji+readings. I look foward for some of your future works !

I must warn you somehow: the engine has a memory limit. If you go beyond, the game will crash. Early games such as Foxy have a very tight limit and require splitting the .MES files if you add content to them.

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My archive.org stash (Fan translations and more!)

I see. Thanks for the information!

I've improved my patch.



Now the text should be properly cut.

I've also replaced the automatic text with waiting for user keypress, as it's easier for slow readers like me

@BabaJeanmel: Any chances you'd make an HDI of the easy version? I don't know what files need to be modified.

Here's how my patch looks like.



Thanks!

For easy mode, the files to change are the .MON files in the DR subdirectory.

Here is a prebuilt hdi : https://mega.nz/file/SPoF1YxR#VrWTTVUMB ... DlI061wUAY

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My archive.org stash (Fan translations and more!)

Perfect. Thanks a lot!