Home	Forums	What's new	Resources

Tengai Makyou - Test translation by Retro dad and modern lad

Mr^Burns - Jun 25, 2021

		Mr^Burns		Jun 25, 2021
			https://youtube.com/Ee4fMcB8hNw Retro Dad writes: "Retro dad and modern lad presents Tengai Makyou: Daiyon no Mokushiroku - The Apocalypse 4 - Sega Saturn - English translation test/ practice. Since undertaking the egword english translation project for sega saturn i have been looking at various other games to translate. I have been using a few games to practice translating games and improve my knowledge/ techniques. One of the games i have been using is Tengai Makyou: Daiyon no Mokushiroku - The Apocalypse 4. I thought i would share some footage on real sega saturn hardware of my test file. This video mainly shows text swapping. I am also looking at swapping in-game video/ sound, and font styles. In my opinion the game file system seems over complex compared to other games i have looked at. For example when you go into the item/ armour menu when playing the game for every new area you enter in the game the code is repeated. So it needs putting in again or the menu reverts back to Japanese. Most games you change it once and it will stay that way throughout the game. Another aspect that would make a full translation more difficult is the game was never translated into English. Furthermore, the menu options for items/armour and in-battle only use two Japanese characters. In this video I have put three letter placeholders in. Using a smaller font it may be possible to fit the entire words in English. I want to make it clear that i am not committing to translate this game into English. I am simply using the game as well as other to practice in order to get better for a future new project. I am a big fan of this game and it is one of the few games that i would say you should definitely playthrough despite the heavy Japanese text. There is a really good English guide available online and also a playthrough on YouTube."

		retrodadandmodernlad		Jun 25, 2021
			Mr^Burns said: Thanks for sharing. Egword was a fairly simple translation, so trying to develop my skills in order to take on a slightly more challenging project

		TrekkiesUnite118		Jun 25, 2021
			The issue with the game having the same code or data in multiple files actually isn't that odd. A lot of CD based games did that to try and reduce load times as instead of having to seek for multiple files, they just have to load one file instead. Grandia did that for all the Weapons, Items, Spells, etc. So they had to be changed in about 100+ files.

		retrodadandmodernlad		Jun 25, 2021
			TrekkiesUnite118 said: That's interesting maybe it's because other games I had looked at had significantly less text and areas ( others were not RPG games). Yes, it appears similar to grandia for this then. I realise this may be a hard question to answer , but if you know the file that contains the game font how do you go about reducing the font in certain aspects of the game ? I ask this because as in my video description posted above the in-game option menu uses only two Japanese characters making it not possible to swap for English words (you can see this in video aswell). Or is there another technique that could be used to fit English words in the option menu small spaces. I am just testing and practicing to improve my skills at the minute mainly using trial and error so any advice would be really helpful. Similarly, i also notice that in the battle scenes the font is in a different fancy font but when I straight swap it out the font reverts to normal which is not fitting. Again have you any tips or advice on this ? Thanks for your advice and help

		Knight0fDragon		Jun 29, 2021
			In cases of very short spaces like that, you may want to think about using an icon instead.

		retrodadandmodernlad		Jun 30, 2021
			Knight0fDragon said: Thank you for the advice. Is there any documentation available or do you have any tips on how to go about adding in icons ?

		Knight0fDragon		Jun 30, 2021
			retrodadandmodernlad said: It is different for every game. Did you alter any of the font glyphs, or are you using what is already built into the game?

		retrodadandmodernlad		Jun 30, 2021
			Knight0fDragon said: So far just did some experimenting. Changing in game text boxes when the character speak looks okay, but the menus, and battle text are not so good. On the pictures provided you can see the original game text for the menu and then just so i could find it again easier i placed in some English abbreviations . Putting English over it seems to change the font style though. In the hex editor shown you can see i have highlighted 4 spaces which is the Japanese word from the in-game menu i replaced with "itm" short for item. However, because the font when replacing with English it seems to go different you can only get three letters in despite space for four. Even four spaces wouldn't be great as it would fit "item", but not "magic" or "armour/ equipment". Then also if you look at the picture of the in-game battle below you can see with this picture that when replacing the Japanese text with English the font is clearly not the same again. So that doesn't look right ( I added in the word "dealt point damage").

		Knight0fDragon		Jun 30, 2021
			You are going from 2 characters to 3 it looks like. That encoding looks to be Shift JIS. How are you altering the text hex? Some games do support both ASCII and Shift-JIS, so it will use half width characters (8 pixels wide) instead of 16.

		retrodadandmodernlad		Jul 1, 2021
			Knight0fDragon said: At the moment by simply just using the space available and going over the Japanese words with English text (see pics below). Is there a better way or process i could use ?

		Knight0fDragon		Jul 1, 2021
			so what happens when you add more characters? You have the string space for the full word. Does it render beyond your box?

		retrodadandmodernlad		Jul 2, 2021
			Knight0fDragon said: no, it doesn't render beyond the box. if you try to add more characters on the item spaces it just displays the first three English characters still. As shown in the pictures below.

		Cargodin		Dec 18, 2021
			Hi there! Sorry for creeping in so late. I was recently told about this forum because I have a rough translation text done for the PSP version. I'd be happy to rewrite it for the saturn version, as I have an idea of and translations for the differences in each version. I'm easier to contact over rhdn or twitter under the same name, but i look forward to hearing from you if you're pushing this project forward.

		Cargodin		Dec 18, 2021
			Rough shots of the PSP version to verify. Hope this helps!

		LTH		Dec 23, 2021
			That looks pretty nice

		Jinnosuke999		Jan 29, 2022
			I played that game so many times. I would love to see a translation that give access to every players. I'm still wondering why the tengai makyô series didn't get more intention. Would love to see the 3rd episoode on ps2 and Ziria's remake translated.

		Ace_of_DiscaL		Dec 31, 2022
			What a wonderful love of the Saturn you are, Mr. Burns. HAPPY NEW YEAR FULL OF SUCCESSFUL ENDEAVOURS!!!