Tokugawa Corporate Forums

Hello!

Some of you may have used text hooking and auto-translation software like AGTH and Textractor to play Japanese games.
When Neko Project 2 introduced native text hook support last year, I decided to look upon details of its implementation and decided to add support for text hooking into ePC8801MA emulator to be able to play PC-88 games. I posted the modified ePC8801MA pack on PC-88 Discord afterwards.
In the course of this year, I modified several more emulators to play X68000, FM Towns and NEC PC Engine CD games with text hook support.

Thus, I want to present a set of emulators with Textractor support. Any game that use computer's built-in Kanji ROM could be hooked now in Textractor.
It is advised that you know about how to use Textractor and these emulators. The only thing I did is addition of text hook support.

Currently available emulators:
XEiJ (Sharp X68000 emulator)
Mednafen (for NEC PC Engine CD)
Tsugaru (FM Towns emulator)
ePC8801MA (PC-8801 series emulator)

I've included some information regarding each emulator hooking quirks in readme.txt (included with emulator pack)

Screenshots:

Emerald Dragon on FM Towns:


Angelus on PC-88:


Dragon Slayer 8: Legend of Xanadu 2 on NEC PC Engine CD:


Ano, Subarashii o Mou Ichido on Sharp X68000:


Download the pack here (along with modified source files): https://www.dropbox.com/s/s45vi0j1he1zm ... 0.zip?dl=1
Extra stuff - Lua helper scripts: viewtopic.php?p=18045#p18045

Feel free to ask questions if something doesn't work as intended. I've tested each emulator on Windows 10 64-bit.

Thanks a lot for implementing text hook support in those emus.
I'm not a big fan of auto-translators but they sometimes prove very convenient.

_________________
NECstasy | Kaminarimon HES Music Archive | VGMRips YM2608 Archive | YouTube Channel

Thank for your work! It's great and very useful indeed

_________________
Call me Snake...

Thank you very much!!
This will greatly help me enjoy FMT games

Yes, I too prefer the option of having a good hand-made translation for a game!
Unfortunately, a lot of Japanese retro games remain untranslated, and knowing the real amount of effort one need to put to produce a good translation, I decided to make this pack to have at least "quick and dirty" option to play the games.


Thanks, Snake

--------------------------------------

Anyway, here's a little extra stuff I wanted to show: Lua helper scripts for Textractor.

A couple of months ago I managed to beat Legend of Xanadu on PC Engine CD and Legend of Heroes 3 on PC-98 by relying to Textractor translation only.
Unfortunately, the game outputs the conversation text in a form "character name + message" without putting anything between character name and message, resulting in somewhat garbled translation.
I decided to make a simple Lua script (since Textractor allows you to modify the hooked text using Lua) to separate character names from messages, so they would get translated properly.

The Lua script is simple - it just looks up in a dictionary of character names, and if it finds a match, it cuts out the name from the rest of message. I populated the character list while playing the game.

Here's the result:
------------------------------------
Without Lua helper script:

------------------------------------
With Lua helper script:


Though sometimes it cuts out the name even if it should not do so - for example, in a case when non-conversation message starts with character name, but these cases are rare, and there's not simple way to detect such messages.

It's possible to adapt the script for your game if it uses the same conversation text format - just replace the character names in Lua script with the ones from your game.

You could download the scripts here:
Legend of Xanadu: https://gist.github.com/Mistranger/2736 ... 75a5b260f6
Legend of Heroes 3: https://gist.github.com/Mistranger/bb35 ... 4a83f9a04c

Just load them in Textractor's Lua extension and place it before your translator extension (Google, DeepL) for it to work properly.

Thank you for your work.
If you don't mind, can you make Sega Saturn and PC-FX also support texthook?
There are some games I want to play there too.