I would like to form a team of dedicated people to translate the Super Gokuden series for the SNES, being one of my favorite(and one of the best)DB games ever, I feel it really needs a translation.



It also has mini games for the training sessions. This particular games starts from the beginning of Goku's adventure to the end of King Piccolo Daimo.

It's fun and I would like to make a decent translation, we don't have to go through the game's text to get an understanding, I guess we could fan translate it, considering I have a basic understanding of what is being said since I know the anime all too well.

Well I like Dragonball, and it sounds fun.

The problem is: I am only familiar with the basic kana alphabet--not Kanji and not Romaji-to-English conversion. As things stand, I hardly know any Japanese words so much as a literal understanding of some translations I have experimented on.

But I've delved into a shitload of Dragonball [Z] memories and trivial information to the point that I'm somewhat of a nerd on it, and I'm great with some literal aspects and mechanics when choosing between Latin roots versus English.

I've never done a translation before.

I've never done a translation either and I only know the symbol for demon king lol so I dont know Japanese either, but I figure that it can't be that bad if you know the series and how things play out, right?

There might be a dump of text from the game somewhere, so I light look into it so I can structure it correctly.

Yeah, with a text dump ... here are some tools I have used successfully:

http://www.animelab.com/anime.manga/translate/
http://www.dicts.info/dictionary.php?l1=...ese_romaji
http://www.romaji.me/

Those are all for converting between English and Romaji.

http://www.romaji.org/
http://www.whiteagle.net/
http://translate.google.com/

Those are all for converting between English and the kana alphabets (or Romaji).

Kakkoi

That's a place I found some dumps at, sort of. Apparently there are people that are trying to attempt this as well since Kakkoi himself quit the job.

Maybe I'll dump the text myself, the problem with that is I have to find teh time to do it.

I have to study for ASVAB, and fit Zelda into that schedule so usually..there is little time for such a strenuous task lol

As far as the text exporting, although I have never done it, I have taken notes on the official Unicode layout of Japanese characters as well as the code page for pointing to the characters in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, so with enough dedication I'm sure locating the entry point into ROM where the code points are stored would be a start to devising an automated way to do it.

Ahhh...it's been so long since I worked with a hex editor. Last time I did anything like this was when I was hacking a Pokemon Silver rom, I had the unicode "transformation" sheet which helped me find the words but I doubt anything like that exists for this game since its not that popular.

The various text strings are going to be referenced by a table of memory addresses to look them up before printing them to the screen, so with enough dedication, anyone could write an application to read the string pointers from the earlier section of the ROM and convert all the Japanese characters to Unicode code points to display on the common personal computer.

I've done something similar with the N64 Zelda games, but I haven't hacked much outside of N64 stuff XD.

There's also that chance that the game uses the standard Unicode convention, too, just like most devices in the world do today. With at least that much luck, any hex editor could search the game for Japanese text that you'd see in the game. That would speed up the process, too.

Unfortunetly I don't posses the skills to build a program lol.

Sorry for the late reply, my internet was down since we switched providers.

EDIT: Apparently from what I read, there is no space in the game to do a translation. Which means one would have to make a dump of the text itself and delete them. The problem lies in finding the strings with the pointers that point to the texts that corresponds with the string itself...

EDIT 2: Well I read that one could expand the rom, so I guess that works too.

Thing is, it's easy for me to do with ASCII text.

Japanese characters unfortunately don't fall under that category.

Unless the game is backwards-compatible with ASCII (i.e., Unicode code page for supporting the kana alphabet) then you would definitely have to rewrite the code page interpreter. Honestly I am not an experienced translator; I don't even know any spoken languages besides English. But otherwise, apart from that, it's easily done, without space being an issue (just offsetting some data most likely, as is the case for surely any translation).

Also XD from what you said in that first edit it sounds to me as though you do in fact have the skills to build a program. Hell, when I first started building programs off of tutorials, I was like..."Man, this shit is gay," but then I was like (years later), "Man, this shit is Grrrrr-REAT!!!" *Kellogg's*

Lol that just means I have knowledge with rom hacking, not programming.

Apparently the guys at Kakkoi are still working on the project as I talked to one guy there. He said a friend did some routines in the game and modified some parts to deal with the whole shortened space and alphabet thing. They inserted a new font as well.

This is the font.



It appears that they don't want any help because they have 2 portions of translating left.

I guess we could do a translation with the sequel even though it has one already, it's just very poor..

Knowledge of ROM-hacking is knowledge of programming.
It may not be knowledge of a programming "language", but, more often than not, the technicalities pertinent to a specific language are irrelevant.
Either way when I was hacking ROMs, I didn't know shit about "strings" and "pointers" and those terms , even though I actually understood them anyway without knowing. It's all language vs. concept.

And if you can get a hold of that ROM, translated to lololol is that Korean or sumshit (jk it's French), then that is definitely ASCII text, although the code points used to map the character glyphs might not necessarily be those of ASCII. Still, it will fit much more nicely, so extending off of that will be easier anyway. And if they don't want any help, all the more reason to have no guilt in taking that work and rewriting everything for your own project. It's not their software, after all.

Lol it's not that simple. They have their stuff in files somewhere not accessible to the public. Besides, they're almost done it'd be a waste of time.

Note that's why I said "if" you could get it; even so it doesn't make it impossible to get the data anyway.

Why would it be a waste of time? They're not translating it to English. I thought that was the language you were intent on translating it to. If you prefer it in French, then by all means, it would be a waste of time to not let them finish it first.

No no, they are translating to English, they just didn't have a screenshot of it in english form.

That's why it would be wasteful lol

Yaaay!

Problem solved XD; they'll take care of the nasty code page shit...while I can solve more productive problems like my N64 memory pak manager application.

Is that for an emulator?

lolXD well you might say that

Technically, it's for handling the Controller Pak file (At least, that's Nintendo's legal name for it.) inserted in the back of the standard controller.

N-Rage's DirectInput currently provides these features for managing the memory pak file system:

• format: Re-format the mempak for standardization and erase all current game note data
• save note: Export an Adaptoid64-encoded game note from the Controller Pak.
• insert note: Import an Adaptoid64-encoded game note to the Controller Pak.
• delete note: Destroy the game save record in the respective game note index slot in the memory pak.
  

My mempak manager handles the N64 controller RAM with a few other options that N-Rage doesn't support, including:

• more detailed system-reserved page formatting when formatting the mempak (upon request)
• exporting single 256-byte page binaries (from 0 to 127, 128 * 256 = size of mempak file in bytes)
• renaming the game note label, like changing a game save name from "MARIOKART64" to "HAHAUDIENIGGA!"
• exports save data from the N64 mempak without including excessive text/ASCII bytes like in the standard A64 files N-Rage exports, using binary file output for smaller sizes that are a multiple of 256 bytes
• fragmented page overwrite when re-importing hacked game notes (like, export the game note, edit it with a hex editor to change game save progress, then re-import it back in with this option)
• I'm thinking about other stuff to add, like a defragmenter utility to rearrange all the pages that compose game note saves into a linear order instead of letting them be scattered around in the mempak system-indexing reserved pages, although this occurrence is rare...at least when using a good emulator to write mempak data or the official N64.
  

Most of that stuff isn't all that useful; I'm just writing a mempak file manager so that I can start writing save editors for any of the N64 games that save data to the mempak instead of the save chip (SRAM/EEPROM/Flash).