I hate this game.

[Cless]

It looks so simple and innocent to hack at first glance. No compressed text! Font isn't compressed!

...and then you look at the menu... and find it uses a completely useless form of compression (unless you like your compression to use MORE space than necessary). Then you have to repoint every string by hand.

Oh, what's this? Dialogue? Haha! No standard pointers for you! Here's a mess of a dialogue routine! Either figure it out or forever be stuck with the same amount of space as the Japanese per string!

Sigh. I hate this game.

[Goshi]

Don't worry Cless, just Fight On!

[Cyllya]

Try playing around with ND2 to see how easy it would be to do a hack/mod and simply remake ND1. It might be easier, not to mention more worthwhile (e.g. more people will play it that way than if you do a trans patch of the real ND1).

[Yetika]

An ND1 remake would be godly. Although, all that spritework would be a pain to do without a dedicated pixel artist...

Still, good luck figuring out the evil coding, Cless. :x

[Gideon Zhi]

HAY CLESS

You might want to look at this.

[Cless]

ooooh

now that's what I call random! O_o

[throughhim413]

I can hardly claim to have any knowledge of programming.  Still, I tried out the program, but it didn't put the Japanese text into a usable format.  Like I said, I don't know how meaningful this program will be on the hacking side, but it doesn't seem to do much for the translation side of things.  I probably speak in ignorance.  In any case, this is kind of thing is what that program output:

//[7AA2B]
#WRITE(PtrTable)
<$B5><$C5><$0D><$D0><$C9><$A4><$B5><$BC><$D7><$BE><$14><$BD><$A1><WAIT>

<$0D><$C2><$CA><$A4><$0A><$DD><$0C><$B2><$C9><$20><$8F><$9E><$74><$CA><LINE>
<$C4><$B8><$1E><$C2><$C5><$20><$1B><$BC><$AE><$14><$BD><$A1><WAIT>

<$BA><$C9><$C2><$08><$CA><$A4><$F1><$A0><$ED><$71><$A0><$C9><LINE>
<$BB><$B2><$BC><$AD><$B3><$B6><$B2><$BF><$B3><$20><$C5><$C9><$14><$BD><$21><WAIT>


By the way, Cless, is anyone actually on board for translating Narikiri Dungeon?  I just saw that DDS was listed under Former Staff Members.  Does that mean that he's already completed what he needed to do?  Or that things just aren't complete?

[Cless]

The character table supplied with the program is not complete, so running it is going to output a bunch of undecoded hex codes rather than the script.

I'll dump the script with it in a bit. I'm kinda busy with some things right now.

As of right now, the project does not officially have a translator. Cyllya had some interest in it, though...

DDS did some translation work up through the end of the first dungeon, but that's about it.

[throughhim413]

Ah, I see.  I saw you put the script up, I'm looking forward to looking through it.  I'm certainly not looking to steal anything from Cyllya, so if she wants to translate it, I'll have no complaints.  Still, I'll offer up my interest in helping out.  I'm willing to help in any way possible, so whether that's translating or just checking things over and offering suggestions, I'll be happy to do anything I can.  A very nice surprise.  Looking forward to seeing this project progress.

[Cyllya]

Considering this game...
(a) is terribly unpopular, which means less fans, which means less people willing to spend time on it with stuff like this (recall that ToP, a far more popular game, required nearly six years to find a suitable translator...assuming nothing prevents Shinhoshi from finishing.)
(b) has very few kanji and also very few spaces between words, making it harder for anyone not totally fluent in Japanese to translate
(c) has no text labeling who's speaking, making it harder for anyone not very familiar with the game to translate (also, the script dump appears to be ordered by location like the other games')
(d) has not aged well and is only getting older!

...maybe Cless would be willing to bend his "one script - one translator" rule and let us work on it together. I'm not sure how much of this game you've played; we might actually need each other's help to get it done. Even if we don't, it would get done twice as fast with two of us. The editting process would get rid of any noticeable differences in writing styles.

Cless, is the English script still limited to 16(15?) chars per line, or are you going to try to get VWF? Can we increase the number of text boxes? I remember playing around with translating this before and found that, unlike the interface text, it did seem possible to squeeze all the necessary dialogue text into the exact same amount of screen/letter space that's already available, but more space would still be a lovely thing. Should we comment out (//) Japanese lines instead of replacing them?

[Cless]

Well, I don't really care too much how this game is done. I don't know if he even lurks here anymore but I wonder if ChangeV would be interested in doing a bit of coordination...

I don't think we should worry too much about formatting right now.

more boxes is fine, all it takes is adding <PAGE> commands before the <END>.

[throughhim413]

Cyllya, if it's all the same to Cless, it would certainly be my preference to work together on it.  I really don't have all that much to add to what you said, I completely agree that it would get things done quicker.  And since I'm sure we'd both be double checking everything, any differences wouldn't show through in the final version.  So yeah, I'm definitely interested in working on that with you since Cless doesn't seem to mind.

[Cyllya]

Great. Is there a certain way we should split it up, or just start grabbing sections? I started on Kaze no Tani and Fushigi no Tou sections.

<CODE 04><$D9> and <CODE 04><$DA> are apparently Dio and Mel's names (respectively, I assume). Only four letters.

[Cless]

Doesn't matter to me, really.

[throughhim413]

Cyllya, I'll send you a PM.

Cless, you mentioned that DDS had done part of the translation.  Do you want to use that?  Or should Cyllya and I just retranslate it?  I certainly don't mind redoing it, but I don't want to do it if you already have that and you would like to use it.

[Cless]

Well... it appears I don't even have DDS' file anymore.

My whole ND project folder is a mess, but I don't think it's in there...