Over the years I have worked with several individuals who had the same desire as myself; of seeing various games we had liked translated into English.  After many laughs, successes, disapointments, tantrums, sulks, etc we finally had our desires fulfilled! :) What follows is a list of translations which I have contributed to (mainly tool writing, recoding aspects of the game code and script editing), and links to their respective Homepages. My thanks to those who let me work with them, and knowing it was all about fun and respect for others.

Front Mission | Romancing Sa.Ga 1 | Alcahest | Papuwa

Romancing Sa.Ga 1

Overview:

Released in Japan in 1991 and one of Square's first ventures for RPGs on the S-NES.

Notes

It's been a long time since I updated, so here' goes!

Firstly, my thanks to all who have emailed to give positive support to this project: this, along with the talented work put in by the other contributers, is why I will continue until our project is completed - please then consider it yours :) . Our only goal was to see this game translated, 'scene' or no 'scene'.

What stands in our way are technical aspects of the translation and the time to work on them. I have to stress these are not just 'enhancements', but ways of displaying more text than what was previously capable (either on-screen or character names stored in RAM), so 'removing features' is a wrong request to ask of us.

I'm glad to report that the display bug from hell looks like it has been fixed! :) The following picture shows it working, along with a few other modifications that will need to be made (they look worse than they are!):

Though the above looks mighty unimpressive, it brought cheering from me! :D The menu variable width font code works a *lot* different than RS1's dialogue VWF; in that it has it doesn't have a round-robin VRAM buffer - that submenus will overwrite and recurse without full refeshes to the window text, so tiles can't be dynamically placed: they need fixed positions. This meant I had to change the screen from 4-bitplane to 2-bitplane, and change VRAM settings to allow space for a screen-sized tile buffer.
The menu also set columns within the window (ie: the File 1, 2, and 3 column text) and have cursor offset to text within the columns (ie: offset+2 for the 0:23, 0:51 and 1:25). Anyways.. it seems to be holding together!

What needs to be worked on now is the glitched text: it seems that RS1 stores in whole the Save names/attributes to the backup RAM, and then transfers them into the snes RAM for writing them to the screen. What makes it worse is that some of the texts are fixed to 4 and 8 characters in sizes. What I will need to do to compensate for the longer english names is to do something similar to my 'town names' fix; that is to detect a Japanese name by running a checksum and replace with a pointer to the english text - it will also detect if it has saved to Backup RAM a translated 'pointer' and use that instead of text.

On a less technical note: it seems that the clock time is missing the ':' font - I'll have to rebuild the font and add that in! It also seems the white and red 'selection' is missing - I'm currently working on this to get it fixed.

Sorry for getting 'techie', but I hope it explains what is happening so far. Until the next update!

-- FH

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