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Lets localize Terra Phantastica!
Malenko - Aug 16, 2022

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  Malenko Aug 16, 2022
Lets start with the obvious. The likelihood of me actually finishing this is pretty much non existent. I saw this game on a SegaLordX video and thought it looked neat. Also mentioned below, this is not the best technique to use on a text heavy game like Terra Phantastica; this is more about how to do it and less about what game we're working on


There is an immense amount of text ; and my knowledge of Japanese is laughable at best. That being said, I am going to do my best to figure out how all the data is stored and how to change it so that maybe some others will help by making tools and offering translation help.

I thought this thread could also double as some sort of quasi-tutorial so people can see my terrible method for figuring these games out.

I almost *always* start with the menus. For me its the most important part because navigating around and knowing what to pick to even start a game is pretty high up on the priority list. So for Terra the screen you get is this:


Now I've played enough import games to know the second one is options, and since I know I don't have a save game for this title I was confident the top one was something like "start game". After finding the data , I did use deepl and google to machine translate just to make sure. Machine translation is absolutely fine for most menu items but you'll need a real translator for story and dialog!

So what I did was look for the options screen text by searching it's shift-JIS value in @derek (ateam)... 's byte-search tool. If you are unsure how to get the shift-JIS value the easiest way is to use google translate on your phone, then copy/paste the text and email yourself the Japanese. Then just copy 1 letter at a time and search a shift-jis table (like https://mattsmessyroom.com/uploads/sjis.tbl... ) I found it in 0.bin . So I opened 0.bin up in a hexeditor and found the value:


You can see on the right that the Japanese text matches perfectly. The CLUTCH thing to notice is that the word EXIT further down is in English in Shift-JIS value. So the first thing I tried was just using English values for the main menu. With with wxMEdit you can type on the right or put values in on the left, other editors may vary. I always try to use the 2 byte value first because then you get double the letters. if it doesnt work you just go back and use the 4 byte values.



Without knowing too much about the way the data is presented; I always try to use the same number (or fewer) letters, then pad out the rest with either 20 (single space) or 8140 (double space) in this particular case I padded out "Options" with 208140 which is a total of 3 spaces. Then I used @Knight0fDragon... 's SSP program to make a new patch and apply it so I can test. I have started a new thing where I keep vanilla versions of the files and ISO, just incase I need to go back to untouched files. I use the Vanilla ISO to patch against when testing


The important thing is to be fine with it not working and not to get discouraged. It not working is not a failure, its eliminating what doesn't work, so that you can narrow down what DOES work. I got lucky this time and it worked first try:


I then repeated the same process for the options screen, which was made easy by the fact it already had *some* English on the screen:


Find the values (I didn't byte search this, since I figured the menu text was all together) in 0.bin

and then change them to English:


Since I was using the 2 digit JIS values I was able to put more letters on each line and better flesh out what the options were and what they do.
There is ZERO tile editing on these screens, these fonts are already part of the game. The 2 digit JIS values here gave me false hope that I could use them for the entire game. SPOILER: I could not and had to make custom tiles.

And the result of the patch on the options screen:


In your head-cannon you probably think this took 5 minutes but in reality it took me probably 2 hours to get it all sorted. All of these projects are big time sinks so you do have to mentally prepare for that. Don't get burnt out, take breaks, hop in discord to ask for help, hop in discord to hang out and relax.

 Malenko Aug 16, 2022
Continuing on the "get the menu's done first" trend, the next screen you get after the intro video is the name entry screen:

Just gobs of Japanese eh? Well name entry in a localized game will probably need to have English letters right ?

So again this is where playing a lot of import games has me recognizing some of the Japanese which will make finding this data a little easier.
On the bottom row, below ! and ? is "backspace" , so I just searched for those values in 0.bin (again assuming all the menu data is in 1 file) if the value wasn't in there I would have used byte-search again. Unfortunately the Backspace and Exit text wasnt near the alphabet, but everything was easily found:


Since this is a single tile using a 4 byte value, I used the same thing for the English:

It may look a little wonky in the hex editor, but you have to keep in mind what is there on the game screen. I have not decided what to do with the excess Japanese glyphs on the right, Im sort of ok with them there unless I have to eventually edit their tiles to be used for English (spoiler, I had to edit some later). Save the file again, make a new patch, and test:

TADA!

So with little to zero Japanese knowledge, the game now has its main menu and name entry screen in English.
Now the hard(er) part begins.

I will give a little warning in advance, this game does something very weird with some text values. It takes known used 2 byte values and re-uses them to display a different Japanese glyph than normal. This is not common in any of the games I've messed around with BUT the important thing to take note of is, lots of games do weird undocumented one-off things like this. There is no "standard" that will work for every game and its very likely you're the first person trying to figure this stuff out for this game.

To expand on what I mean by using a 2 byte value differently than normal, it goes something like this.

Typically in JIS, the Value 41 is a capital A .
In the non-gameplay menus, this game uses 41 as a capital A.
However, IN GAME, the value of 41 is a small question mark that usually has the value of 3F.
3F however is a big question mark that usually has a JIS value of 8148

I made a spread sheet :


which helps with the visual.

Which brings me to my next point. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING YOU CAN.
Make documentation, try to keep it organized as best you can. Take lots of notes. I used to take notes for me, but now I take notes under the pretext that someone else is going to need to read them, even if no one else ever will.

So after the main menu, and name entry the next thing we see is the intro battle. It shows the pre-fight dialog, a non-interactive fight, then more dialog.


If you know as much Japanese as I do then you know nothing about what's going on
Using context clues you can probably discern that some the red guy with horns probably has his name in yellow and is talking to the girl and the text is white.

What I did next was take a screen grab like the one above, and then I also opened up Yaba's VPD1 debug so I could see the tile.
Now Yaba shows that its 1 big sprite, and while its completely possible that it is 1 giant sprite (like the menu descriptions in Street Fighter Zero 3) its just not likely in a game with this much text.


So what I did next was use byte-search again to try and find the values for the glyphs in yellow
(Zaitan a Satan pun I guess?)

And no dice. byte finder couldn't find it. I thought maybe there's some weird spaces or padded value between characters, so then I started searching for various combinations of 4 byte values 2 byte values and a mix of box but couldnt find the whole word in any file. So I eventually tried to search for the 2 byte values and parts of the word.

To explain has a JIS value of 835E. looks like a squashed version of the same tile but has a value of C0. So what I did was look for 2 "squished tile" values from the middle of that word and got a bunch of hits, so I figured I was on the right track. When I added the first letter I got nothing, so on a whim I added the 4 byte value of the first character (8355) to the B2, CO, and DD values and 3 or 4 hits so I opened each of the files and took a look.

I was able to find 8355 B2 C0 DD in a few files, but I had no idea which one was the correct one. What I did was change the value of 8355 to 8260 (4 byte value of a capital A) save the file, patch and then keep testing until I found the right one. The file I needed ended up being EV_MA001.MXE This basically told me that the MXE files are likely the files that contain the pre and post fight dialog, and the map data for the fights.

So to recap:
and make look different in a web browser and hexeditor, and have different values, but this game displays them to look the same.

We can start looking at the other values by starting at where the 8355 B2 C0 DD value is in the file.

We can see strings of other values mixed in with some other Japanese. We know from the screen shot that after Zaitan's name there are 3 characters, a space, then 5 more characters including the ! Next there is another line of text with 16 characters including its ending !

Since we know 8355 B2 C0 DD is the name in yellow we can use this section as a test bed to figure out other values. B2 C0 is a great place to test because it gives you room to test 2 2byte values or 1 4 byte value. I used up using all the spaces to test. I started by plugging in 10 11 and then saving, patching, and testing.

A value of 10 hard crashed the game, like HARD

the positive take away from this is that we now know the game has a debugger!
Eventually I got through all the 2 byte values in that google doc up there and started testing all the spaces:

changing 8355 B2 C0 DD to D0 D0 D0 D0 D0 yielded me that result.
So the next step is to put his actual name in there. Zaitan requires 6 spaces but we only have 5 characters , so we will have to either use an alternate spelling, or start editing tiles. I chose to do the latter.


FINDING THE FONT:
Now before we get too far into the weeds on this, a very important thing to do when you start working on a game like this is to extract all the files. You can do this with Knight's SSP patcher or you can use a program like CDMage. Again, Terra is a little outside of the norm in that there are zero folders in this game. All 2,242 files are in the root of the CD. What I did in this case was sort by file type. then just glance at the files by their group. There are some standards that apply to *most* games, like CPK files are almost always Cinepak video files. That eliminates them from being the font file. In this game we discovered MXE files are the gameplay maps, so its unlikely the font is stored there. So I always look for something called FONT or ASCII or anything of that ilk and then open it up in crystaltile; for Terra the file was called FONT12.DAT



I know your looking at that thinking "no way that's a font!" But you cant just give up like that I know from working on other Saturn games that fonts are usually 8x16, 16x16, or 12x12. Since this File was called FONT12.DAT I thought 12x12 was a pretty safe bet. So I plugged those values in and scrolled around and bing bango

you can see the in game font! I just need to hold CTRL and left arrow it to fix alignment


At the top of the file there was still a bunch of garbled dots, so I adjusted the width until there was some clarity:

You may recognize this font from the main menu and options screen, when you plug in a 2 byte value the game uses this table to display the text. If you were to draw a smiley face to replace the letter C, anytime you put in the value for C, you'd get a smiley face. This is the premise of tile replacement in this game.

Since we need an extra letter for Zaitan's name we will be putting 2 6x12 letters inside the space of a single 12x12 tile. If you are looking at the 2 byte value sheet from before you can see that I used the value of "AB" to replace with Za , the value of AA to replace with it and then 97E0 , which is on a different sheet for 4 byte values, to replace his name with Zaitan.


Save, patch, test. I saved all my changed files in a different folder (edited files) then make a new patch against the vanilla ISO just like before. If you are making lots of changes you may want to make a back up of your already edited files in case you need to revert. Test thoroughly as well. Just because the screen loads and shows the text you want doesn't mean the the game will proceed to the next screen ; a lesson I learned the hard way on this game.

If you did everything right, didn't fat finger any values and drew good tiles (or in this case made a 12x12 tile based on the 2 6x12 tiles)
it should look something like this:

This game has some odd kerning , so all you can do is your best!

You can then apply the values you discovered to flesh out the rest of the text. I wont be updating this thread for a few days, I want to grind through all the intro fight text and get that part functioning before showing you how I figured out the battle menus, though to be honest its just more of the same.

 TrekkiesUnite118 Aug 16, 2022
While the craming 2 letters in one tile works fine for more simple games or a mini game, etc. it's probably not best to use it for something like an RPG that has a ton of text. You should probably try to figure out how to enable the 6x12 font system used in the menus instead for the normal game text instead.

 dadregga Aug 16, 2022
This is awesome as a purely "here's how I do it with all the potentially un-fun bits left in" standpoint - I love it.

 SoloNerfherder Aug 22, 2022
Hi, very interesting to see an example of English patching a game!
Do you need any help with translating? I’m a smartphone game translator for a company here in Japan, but would like to work on console games, even old classics like this!

 Malenko Aug 23, 2022
Saw your reply on Shiro, hop in the discord and we can chat. I did find a full play through that has *ALL* the text on screen, so that should make my life a lot easier.


https://youtube.com/2wIqdm5A5kg



I found the data tables for all the classes and enemy types, so those are all done now. I am about 70% done the battle menus now. There are a few spells that dont make any sense to me like.....



Tomato Tomato High?





 SoloNerfherder Aug 24, 2022

malenko said:


Got it, will check the playthrough out, thanks!

BTW, just eyeballing that katakana, it says Tomato Mato High. But without more context I can't say if that's 100% correct.
Ah, ok, found a scan of the manual:
On the right hand side, just says it's a more powerful version of the Tomato Mato spell that drops even bigger tomatoes that crush enemies.

 Ace_of_DiscaL Aug 31, 2022

SoloNerfherder said:

Hi,
I LOVE RPGs, and this one is so obscure & delicious looking.
Is there anyone working on the manual yet? I can help by using Google Image Translate to translate the manual.

The scan You linked there is a bit low res though btw.

 Danthrax Sep 1, 2022

Ace_of_DiscaL said:

This one is better: File:Terra Phantastica Sat JP Manual.pdf - Sega Re...

 Malenko Sep 6, 2022
Big thanks to @derek (ateam)... for writing up a tool in PERL to automate converting the weird custom value table to Shift-JIS and also taking the shift-JIS value and putting the glyph into a text document.

I still have to copy/paste the values but this is an incredible time save for me.

Now I can get big chunks ready for SoloNerfHearder to translate. like this:

  derek (ateam) Sep 6, 2022

malenko said:


Happy to help! Also, long live Perl

 incrediblehark Sep 6, 2022
Really excited for this, gotta have all the Saturn RPGS translated! Thank you for putting the time in to this project.

 Nemu Sep 7, 2022
Very interesting explanations. It makes me wanna retry to translate some obscure Saturn "dating" games
Can't wait to read your next posts.

 Malenko Sep 7, 2022

Nemu said:

That's the idea, to help people get started on their own projects. Pick a game, look at the files then hop in the discord. We are here to help.

 SoloNerfherder Sep 8, 2022

Ace_of_DiscaL said:

Malenko and I happened to discuss the manual (I only just saw your comment), and I said I'd do it, but thanks!

 Malenko Sep 14, 2022
I finally plowed through the tutorial to create a save game.

So I am going through and getting those squared away.




but I still have a few strings left to locate (prolly a ton)

I know where its getting the save titles from, but it writes the name from the file when you save, wont be an issue if you save after the translation is done.

Leaps and bounds have been done to the battle data, while there is some abbreviation its likely the best I can do if we cant get extra letters added to the available space.

  Malenko Sep 16, 2022
Now that have a save, I am continuing work on all the menus that occur between battles, such as Claude auto equipping your troops


found the data for item descriptions and there's A LOT.

  CrimsonDragoon Sep 20, 2022
Looking good so far!

 Malenko Sep 28, 2022
Been working with @SoloNerfherder... on getting the opening scenes translated. They are mostly done, on paper. Next step is working with @Mr Conan... to figure out how to hijack the print screen command so that the work load gets cut by hundreds of hours. Plan is to get the compression sorted for the graphics so I can get the town names and certain attacks in English as well. @nanash1... did something similar for my drift king project and he said he would try to help out again in a few weeks.

A lot has been done on the "back end" but nothing I can really show in screen shots

 Malenko Sep 30, 2022
So I did put some placeholder item descriptions in while Nerf works on finalizing the text:



Some item names will change, and I'm sure the description text will as well but it still feels like progress to me!
(and its something I can show in a screen shot other then hex editor captures)

Most (all?) of the formation names are also in place......


But some still need their descriptive text inserted


I reallllllly hope people give this game a go after all this work is done.

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