HomeForumsWhat's newResources 
 
 
Time to translate Riglord Saga 2! WIP
DragonsOfSaturn - Jan 26, 2025

 < Prev  1  2  3  4  Next> 

  DragonsOfSaturn Mar 21, 2025

Lirinica said:

Actually, the game supports ASCII and seems to be uncompressed so far. I might still look for the font file and all that if it's needed.

 Lirinica Mar 23, 2025
Hi.
I analyzed part of this RPG code, here are some information that may be useful to you.

The font file is RIG2INIT.DAT.
Well, the text is apparently in vdp1, I don't know if at some point it can write text in the other vdp or with different routines (probably not, but who knows).

The text header of this game is encoded, but not exactly, I mean there is no table with text offsets that we can read in the hex editor (at least I didn't find one), but there is a table with variables that a basic decoding routine uses to pull the offsets of the texts, very simple.

The way the "text writing routine" works is strange, but the concept is simple:

- The words in the text offset go through a calculation routine that results in pointers to the LWRAM, where the font archive is.

- The routine saves the character offset in the Stack and here's the trick: each variable (also in word format) that represents the letter/tile/pixels within the file goes through an routine that writes some values in a table, e.g. the first variable of the first part of character 7 is 3F80 (each character in this game is made up of 8 lines of code in vdp1), this 3F80 will be compared with the variables of the routine, and for integer results, some bytes are added in positions (virtual coordinates) of this table .
Finally, the table with the "character bytes" is pasted as it is in vdp1, forming the complete character.

Well, the font file has a large amount of space. Assuming the font file will not be unloaded from its offset, it is possible to replace all the Japanese characters with new text headers, this would solve the space issue.

As Malenko pointed out, the game makes ascii tiles with 1 byte.
I just saw that the game has 2 ascii fonts, one in 8x12 and another in 16x12.

 Malenko Mar 25, 2025
It supports ASCII natively, he's replacing the 1 word Shift-JIS value with 2 ASCII values and the game is displaying everything fine so long as he doesn't break offsets or control codes.

 Lirinica Mar 26, 2025
I see. Now it makes sense for the ascii font to be at the beginning of the file.

 DragonsOfSaturn Mar 28, 2025

Lirinica said:

I appreciate you looking into this for me. Thank you. Once I'm done with dialog, I'll look at pointer tables to make things like ATK become ATTACK.

 DragonsOfSaturn Apr 3, 2025
Alright! Super minor but super important update!
Are you ready?
Here it is, folks:

I don't speak or understand Japanese very well. I know, I know. There's lots of screenshots with legible English here. But after getting help with one of the townsfolk's dialog sections in the first town, it's painfully obvious that I do not know enough about the language to complete this game's dialog in a manner that will make sense, and be accurate. So I'm putting feelers out there to see if anyone is interested in working with me on this project. If they are interested in helping with the Japanese conversion, I want to state that I'm willing to credit them as the Translator and give them the primary spot for that on the credit roll. I would still take credit for formatting and injection of the English into the game.

I'm still able to work on several parts of the game; menus and minor dialog that isn't complicated. But there's already a few spots that I'm gonna have to fix once someone else comes aboard to help with this project, so I'm going to stop translating the game dialog text at this point, and focus on getting the items, menus, and that sort of thing up to par with a quality English version of the game.

If nothing else, I can get the script ready, rip it out of the game, and that sort of thing if I run out of things that are within my scope to translate.

 schminitz Apr 3, 2025
Wow that's crazy, Mystaria (Riglord Saga 1) is one of my favorite game of all time, and I want so much to play the sequel, but I don't know anything about japanese.

And today, totally randomly, I checked google if there is a translation existing. And I see that your last message is from today, it seemed so strange to me that I had to create an account just to post a message ^^

But sorry I cannot help you with the translation, I'm just hoping someone will do!

And to be honest, I'm mostly interested in the gameplay than the story, so even with only translating the menu and spells / actions, would be enough for me ^^

 DragonsOfSaturn Apr 4, 2025
I mean, the combat system is really fun. I have several things to work on still before the story is going to advance much further. I've gained access to some tools that allow me to really hammer out the details on what I have available, and I have some good notes on things I need to check and adjust as it is. Even if all I do for a few weeks/months is figure out how to change data pointers, it will be a learning time for me, and that right now is the big goal, being able to work on projects of my own so that in the future, I can mostly do this by adjusting tools for the task at hand, which is to help translate Sega Saturn games. ^^ (I'm also super excited to play through the game from start to finish!)

 Malenko Apr 6, 2025
I wrote this up for pointer tables, maybe it'll help you out:

  DragonsOfSaturn Apr 7, 2025
Ohayo gozaimasu! So I was having troubles figuring out what these words might mean in Riglord Saga 2. I have listed here what I can come up with for a translation of them, and what they do, but if there's no word equivalent in English, what sort of solution could I use for them? I wonder: should I just leave them translated as these? I only have 8 characters to use in a combat technique name due to in-game limitations. I can explain what each does accordingly in the descriptor text when I get there. Also, I believe in a normal playthrough, these might never get seen. I haven't found a single character or enemy that can naturally use them (I haven't seen most of the combat areas yet.)

PIPIRUMA (MASSIVE SINGLE TARGET DAMAGE!)


PRILYMPA (MASSIVE FULL MAP DAMAGE)


PAPAREJO (MASSIVE DAMAGE ONE TEAMMATE)


DORIMINPA (MASSIVE DAMAGE ALL TEAMMATES)

 Danthrax Apr 7, 2025

DragonsOfSaturn said:

these all seem to be phrases that appear in the anime Magical Princess Minky Momo's ending theme song "Dreamin' Pa"


They seem to just be nonsense, except for , which is "dreaming" and part of the song's title.

So I think these are just joke references to an old anime, especially if they seem to be "hidden" attacks.

 DragonsOfSaturn Apr 7, 2025

Danthrax said:

Excellent! I think I will leave them as is then, and update their text, depending on how much space I have. It's not clear to me yet where these descriptions are located in the files, but I'll find them sooner or later. Thanks for finding that info!

 DragonsOfSaturn Apr 11, 2025
A couple things:

I did find someone to help translate the project.

And I'm going to start trying a lot of respacing now to see if I can fit some longer words (Attack, Defense, that sort of thing) where I only have 2, 3, or 4 spaces now. Likely gonna break stuff. Should be fun, right? Wish me luck! Matte ne!

 Malenko Apr 11, 2025

DragonsOfSaturn said:

All joking aside, that's my favorite part. It breaking then me finding a way to make it not break.

 DragonsOfSaturn Apr 15, 2025

Malenko said:

This is your favorite part? I think my favorite part is very much the opening new files and scrolling through, and documenting the offsets, and then working through how the files connect and all the jargon you can find. I like a lot of what I'm doing, but the cool part for me is seeing how it all connects together and what goes into (This game specifically) making a game work so far, at least on the Saturn.

 Malenko Apr 16, 2025
pretty much the same, seeing how it works, how I break it and how to fix it
keep up the great work!

 DragonsOfSaturn May 8, 2025
Alright, the person helping me translate has asked for a bit of a break. We're not quite caught up to where I was at on my own with my poorly translated effort, but it's a good start! The game boots, and you can play all the way to the first town with a proper translation. I'm also working on fixing some stuff in the combat side of things that I didn't get right the first time through. This is very tedious, but also important. As such, I've done a bit of game breaking, and must say that the debug menus and options are quite amazing. The area in the this screen shot is only supposed to have Rasty and Mieu in it, and here we have all 10 party members. This is specifically so I can test and fix the Technique menu, specifically when acquiring a new technique, every character has a unique phrase, unlike the first game, and I typed through this area before and really broke most of these, so I'm fixing them up now. Also, if anyone wants to help with the project, please let me know, as I would still like to continue to work on the Japanese translation throughout the summer as much as I can.

 DragonsOfSaturn May 15, 2025


Alright! 143 locations in the game! And I believe 6 are fully translated at this point! This is completely inaccurate and just for fun, but that works out to approximately 0.04% of the game translated. This is assuming that every file listed there needs some translating. This also doesn't take into account the fact that a few of the files in the game are not loadable, playable spaces, so some of the things that will need to be translated- character and enemy bios for example- are held elsewhere in the game, and are not actually areas to visit. I believe Byte_Search said there is somewhere around 2048 files total. A portion of these are definitely the audio files- including voice lines!- and those won't be considered for translation in the alpha build. I might consider translating those- yes, that means Voice Acting- if I can work out a proof of concept and actually inject my own file, or if someone else wants to come aboard to help with that later on. We're making progress, though, so LET'S GO! (combat seems to be nearly 100% completely translated, and I might put together a very very alpha build for playtesting it soon!)

 DragonsOfSaturn Jun 2, 2025
Hello, folks! Getting close to a time that I will be looking for some playtesting to iron out bugs and mistakes and to see how well the game plays up to a certain point in the story, and to see if there are glitches or trouble with my project so far. This will be a closed Alpha, and will not be representative of the finished translation. Again, the purpose of this is to see if there's any major flaws, crashes, mistakes, or issues. So I will need play testers that can use different methods of testing. I might need to find someone with a Mode and a Rhea. Pretty sure I can find a real Hardware tester, a Yaba Sanshiro (any/many/latest) tester, a Mednafen tester, and an SSF tester. If there are other methods of playing on Saturn, please let me know as well, I think there might be others.

 Lord Darkstorm Jun 2, 2025
There's Satiator, Fenrir, and Saroo for disc replacement systems, though I wouldn't recommend bothering with a tester for Saroo as it seems to have a lot of its own bugs. I believe Satiator was the most accurate at one point but I haven't kept up.

There's some newer saturn emulators but I think Mednafen and SSF are still considered the most compatible so not sure they're worth bothering with at this point. I guess you're using Yaba for it's debugger?

 < Prev  1  2  3  4  Next>