/jp/ - Otaku Culture

[Anonymous No.]

Hey, /jp/, I just want your honest opinion and sage advice on this.

I'm right now going through research to see if translating the PS2 game Amagami in my picture is feasible. The reasons for translating it is mostly non-/jp/ related but everything is looking kinda alright besides the technical issues that I'm going through, which I won't talk about. I want to hear from your sage wisdom the ramifications of translating this. Is there any?

I doubt there are any supposed ramifications for /jp/ since this is probably shit-tier compared to what you guys usually are exposed to and you won't care anyways. The only drawback I can see is that I've heard that the Japanese from this game is very simple and is used by some as a kind of learning tool or somewhat for learning Japanese.

So tl;dr. What are any if there are any if any at all consequences that are negative if this thing got translated.

[Anonymous No.]

How could there possibly be negative consequences? Stop being crazy, anon.

[Anonymous No.]

Amagami is pretty nice. I'd say if there are people who would read it, then go for it.

Some stupid hipsters around here starting hating on VNs once they get translated because more people can read them, but please ignore them.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666278

I dunno. I have some kinds of worries on the fact that the hipster effect might kill any of the love for this series and such. Most of that may be /a/ but the effect for that is usually magnified here so I just wanted to see if that could be avoided or something.

[Anonymous No.]

uhhh
I would care slightly more about it than I do now?

which is to say not very much, since i found it pretty boring in general...Ayatsuji's route was the only interesting route

but hey go for it

[Anonymous No.]

>The only drawback I can see is that I've heard that the Japanese from this game is very simple and is used by some as a kind of learning tool or somewhat for learning Japanese.
I don't think you need to worry about that. PC VNs work better as learning tools anyway since you can use text hookers on them, and it's not like there's any shortage of those. So, I say go for it.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666295
I know what you mean, but realize that hipsters are just a really vocal minority. Much more people will be thankful than people getting upset about it.

I just suggest trying to do a decent job; with that I mean caring about the translation, proof-reading and the like.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666309

Is it really that boring? I was under the impression that it should be at least mediocre since my Japanese isn't that great and I'm only concentrated on trying to get some issues worked out, I've only ever read the first portion of the game, so basically, the introduction?

It wasn't that bad in my opinion. The storytelling is decent and the dialogue isn't unbearing.

>>8666322
>>8666326

I see... Just saying before anyone else gets confused, I'm only a hacker for this possible project. Most of the problem baring the translation at this point is time avalibility for the interested translators and technical issues with the text, which I'm trying to work out.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666340
translate super robot war games, like @2 and @3.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666295

Nah, mang, just go ahead and translate it. By the way, I could "play it" on my tv

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666340
do you know how to hack psps? Could you do super robot wars A, its already translated, you would just have to put in the text.

[Anonymous No.]

This is the game with the girl with the gloriously messy hair, is it not? I say go for it. Ignore the shitposters who'll complain and whine.

[Anonymous No.]

Amagami was the first game I was able to read to completion in japanese without relying on text hook, it should be a nice easy translation job and it's a fun game

[Anonymous No.]

By the way, you could translate more shit for the ps2.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666342

I need to reiterate, I can only hack, can't translate at all.

>>8666346

I've done low-key things in terms of hacking, but I'll see what I can do with that if I ever get done with this.

>>8666345

In theory, you could if you had a modded PS2. I haven't tested it out because it's just much more time-efficient to do everything on PCSX2 in terms of testing.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666342
>>8666357
Back to your Gihren thread

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666357

Depends if the game doesn't clusterfucks the files and text like this game does. I don't think I'm going to promise anything I can't do in a good amount of time.

>>8666356

So it did help you after all. But I'm wondering if translating this will desensitize the use of it in terms of learning Japanese.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666358
Well hear is the srw a in two parts http://www.gamefaqs.com/gba/582124-super-robot-taisen-a/faqs/17517

http://www.gamefaqs.com/gba/582124-super-robot-taisen-a/faqs/30933

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666340
let's just say that I probably wouldn't have lasted without the emulator's save state and "run at 300% speed" functions

It didn't feel so much as a visual novel as some kind of weird conversation simulator

even then talking in amagami felt like playing darts while blind, forcing me to keep reloading because apparently talking about food as your fourth conversation subject makes girls not want to kiss you

im not some kind of vn expert or reviewer but i think it turned me off dating sim games for a long time

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666390
the conversation system is pretty silly but honestly I prefer it to the standard dating-sim mechanics of 'raise 15 random statistics all at once to trigger events you have no idea to expect,' which renders things near-impossible to manage without a walkthrough

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666377
I don't see how this being translated will stop anyone from reading it in japanese to practice.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666358
well if you cant translate try doing srw a, if you know how to hack psps. Also you could do Giren's Greed axis v, here are all the menu translations. http://girensgreed.wikia.com/wiki/Menus

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666390

Probably not your cup of tea then...

There's a lot of realism I think the game might bring and it might bring some variety instead of the regular run-of-the-mill VN that people get translated

>>8666397

Bleh, so it's just me being an idiot.

>>8666384
>>8666405

I would need to get back my PSP to be able to reasonably test this and looks too time consuming for me at the moment.

[Anonymous No.]

http://pastebin.com/mH2fGU75
Here is the full game of griens greed if you want to look at it, also all you really need to do is the menus, if you want to do it real quick for us that would be awesome. Its really hard to find people that are able to hack psps so you are pretty rare.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666397
Plus, there are plenty of other untranslated games out there that are equally beginner-friendly.

I really wouldn't worry about that, dude.

[Anonymous No.]

To be honest I think the people who think /jp/ hates something once it's translated are more prominent than the people on /jp/ who hate VNs once they're translated.

It never made sense to me, the people who read VNs before they're translated are different to people who read VNs after they're translated because, well they can read Japanese. Hence it would be more accurate to say "/jp/ hates VNs after having read them", which is quite different to the original statement.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666429
well it was worth asking, you dont see hackers very often so i always ask when they come around. Could you maybe just think about doing the menus/stat windows for griens greed?

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666429
Just so you know, the PSP is probably the easiest system to hack in recent history. It takes all of like 5 minutes even if you don't know what you're doing.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666446
>>8666447

Free time being limited, I would do it if I wasn't tied up everywhere else. It's only hackable in 10 minutes if you don't have to rewrite tools and you could just run it through the arsenal of written tools for the system and easily crack it. Otherwise, it takes more than that to hack it, but I will agree it is easier than most systems to hack in recent memory due to Dark Alek's work on it from the hardware side.

But yeah, I'm not promising anything on those games. Sorry.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666295
>I dunno. I have some kinds of worries on the fact that the hipster effect might kill any of the love for this series and such. Most of that may be /a/ but the effect for that is usually magnified here so I just wanted to see if that could be avoided or something.
It's already gotten an anime adaptation, which is much, much more harmful to a VN's reputation than being a popular translated title is. Even Umineko was loved until the anime aired and lots of newbies became interested.

>>8666340
>Is it really that boring? I was under the impression that it should be at least mediocre since my Japanese isn't that great and I'm only concentrated on trying to get some issues worked out, I've only ever read the first portion of the game, so basically, the introduction?
>It wasn't that bad in my opinion. The storytelling is decent and the dialogue isn't unbearing.
It has 82/80 on EGS, which generally means it's very good.

>>8666340
>Most of the problem baring the translation at this point is time avalibility for the interested translators and technical issues with the text, which I'm trying to work out.
Unlike the fansub community, the VN translation community is always short on translators. If you don't have any interested translators willing to translate the entire thing, you might as well give up from the start. You can't just ask a random translator to translate a game for you here; it's much, much more work than fansubbing or scanlating, taking months of active contribution.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666447
if its so easy why has no body hacked srw games? could you do it? its still really hard to find hackers still...

>>8666471
well at least i tired..these games are so good but its so hard to find people just to hack them..

[Anonymous No.]

Any hackers here want to try doing girens greed at least? only the menus and stats that are already translated people want done, thats all.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666533
You already have a thread for it. Goddamn man.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666491

>It's already gotten an anime adaptation, which is much, much more harmful to a VN's reputation than being a popular translated title is. Even Umineko was loved until the anime aired and lots of newbies became interested.

Well, I doubt that it will hurt the game's reputation going by what you said because Umineko had the unfortunate fate of having the translation going and the anime airing at the same time. Not a great combination. By the time I get the thing to accept reasonably sized text, the current season would finish airing and the only thing that watching the anime before playing this would do is give people a kind of expectation for what this game will bring. The fanbase won't be that much more unbearing and as far as I can tell, Amagami is a much more quieter niche on /a/.

>It has 82/80 on EGS, which generally means it's very good.

Good to hear that it's good at least to a game reviewer, but what is EGS? I'm under the assumption that it means the European Gaming Series which is crappy esports?

>Unlike the fansub community, the VN translation community is always short on translators. If you don't have any interested translators willing to translate the entire thing, you might as well give up from the start. You can't just ask a random translator to translate a game for you here; it's much, much more work than fansubbing or scanlating, taking months of active contribution.

I have interested people luckily for this, but I would still go through with hacking this then peddling it to translators to translate if I had none.

You can probably thank this guy for doing most of this work though...

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666491
I think Umineko started getting hated because R07 plainly started insulting his readers in the latest episodes.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666539
that thread is a lost cause and you know it.

[Anonymous No.]

LE GET EN FRANCAIS

[Anonymous No.]

>What are any if there are any if any at all consequences that are negative if this thing got translated.
Other than C&D letters I don't see any.
However, I'm not very fond of the idea of people working on console games. Even with emulators around it's still a smaller audience than PC games and if you were to happen to lose your dedication it'll be much harder to find others who would continue the project. I'd try waiting for a PC release or something, but I'm really sort of prejudiced against playstation games.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666546
>Good to hear that it's good at least to a game reviewer, but what is EGS?
EroGameScape, it's japanese website where people review eroges and VNs.

[Anonymous No.]

Nobody will ever do the ps2 srw games...or the psp ones for that matter.. just girens greed alone would be fine but life sucks. Is it really that easy to hack psps? /m/ and /g/ said they weren't.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666589

Oh, I already hate Enterbrain game developers for all the non-standard things they've done in terms of encrypting and making this game.Take their font for example, as seen in my picture. I didn't do a lot of work compared to the guy who already worked out tools for the game. I only added exemptions for punctuation to work and fixed up some bugs that were crashing his tools. Also, I dunno what to expect in terms of a C&D letter because I have not left a way for them to contact me beside in two places that they would not be able to find.

I would port it to the PC but honestly, it's too much work. They had a fandisk which is all written in KIRIKIRI2 but every single format that they used on the PS2 is tossed out the window. Not to mention rewriting it simply is already a lot of work for a dating sim.

>>8666596

Can you tell me what they gave to a recent game so I can kinda see on an objective scale where this game falls with a an 82/80.

>>8666740

Depends how convoluted the game files are. I'm downloading it now as we speak to see if it really is that convoluted. Also, if you can unpack files from the game, have you though about the possibility that the menu might be comprised of images instead of text inputted from the game? It's happening with this game.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666546
EGS is EroGameScape, the most popular Japanese VN reviewing site, with some other database functionalities. Amagami's entry is at http://erogamescape.dyndns.org/~ap2/ero/toukei_kaiseki/game.php?game=11634#ad..
There's 91 votes, '82 out of 100' is the median vote and '80 out of 100' is the average vote.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666769
Well thank you for at least looking at it, it means a lot. update in this thread it you are able to do anything with the game or not i guess. And thanks. people who are into games like this and srw have to suffer forever but you might at least change that a bit.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666785

Thanks for the link. I looked at their other games and oh boy... I was thinking on maybe doing Kimikiss but they gave it 66-68. But then again, their strong point is supposed to be selling magazines so I doubt they're going to go after me for translating this.

>>8666799

Where's your other thread? I'll post there but I'm not going to give up my thread for posting about your game.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666858
I think that thread died, im not asking you to give up your thread just a yes or no if you can really do it or not would be fine. Also thank you. Im sure not just me but all of /m/ would be happy with this too.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666858
Also if i come on as to annoying sorry, just really happy somebody is looking into a girens greed game.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8666879

Well yeah, besides the point, there's basically a general consensus on the answer to my question so I guess my thread is done.
As for your game, it's screwed up. the mkd files in there are what I'm assuming is some kind of encrypted file archive. There are also .SQL database files that have the same name but I doubt they're related in any way. But anyways, I was able to extract it into these some .wav music files, .sd0 files with existing tools, but they are not at all recognizable to me in that state so they're most likely encrypted. You'll need to find experts and make tools to read the files, because there's no distinction on what they contain with the mix of files I got from one of those file archives.

I could probably do it if I had the time and enough of it to dedicate to the game. Unfortunately, I don't, but I can point you to some people that can do this for you.

http://forum.xentax.com/viewforum.php?f=10

I'm not saying that they're definitely going to do this for you but you should ask around and see if one of the experts answers. Also, doesn't this game have a PSX version? That may be more or less hackable depending on several factors related to the game itself.

[Tokiko No.]

>>8667061
Your Emacs looks really weird. Or is that the Windows version of Vim?

[Anonymous No.]

>>8667075

It's a HxD, a hex editor on Windows I use to determine if any kind of hints in the files themselves that would indicate if it can be read or not. unfortunately for this game, it looks to be a pretty hard task to get the file to be readable in any way.

[Anonymous No.]

I cant figure out how to save the fucking game in amigami ps2

[Anonymous No.]

>>8667061
Alright,thanks for having a look at it.

[Anonymous No.]

OP I will kiss you if you translate this.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8667146
Will it be a sweet kiss?

[Anonymous No.]

Nice going op.
I love Amagami.

If you want to be of some help in the future, you should have a look a Chun Soft games like Otogirisou, Machi, or 428.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8667514

Why did you bump this thread after 2 hours? Oh well, I guess I'm still around here if people need me to answer stuff and whatnot...

>>8667146
>>8667533

I wish it was even remotely that easy but yeah, I'm the hacker for this potential project, not the translator. If I can't get the text to look less ugly than it is, all hope would pretty much be lost even though I have 2 translators that are somewhat interested...

[Anonymous No.]

>>8667548
Good luck with that.
People gave up before.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8667579

Yeah, you don't have to confront me with that fact...

Curse the Enterbrain devs.

[Anonymous No.]

bump

[Anonymous No.]

Have you considered trying to hack the PSP version of Amagami?

[Anonymous No.]

Just curious, but will you be doing the version with the two extra heroines, and the route where you help hook up Umehara?

[Anonymous No.]

Don't like to bump topics but I'll answer these questions.

>>8674239
>>8674350

I considered both of the Ebikore+ versions that you two were referring to. The PS2 version is identical save for the system graphics which are somewhat crucial to the game's hacking which I might consider if I can overcome the text problem with the regular version. The PSP version, for one, I'm still researching but seems unfeasible at this point due to the fact that I can't find the scripts exactly yet and it uses a different encryption scheme. I'm hesitant to call this a project at this point because of the issues so it's more of a "research project into the feasibility of hacking the game" for me so don't bet on anything.

[Anonymous No.]

I don't know who will still be watching the thread right now or in the future but I'll put more information in this thread.

The tools right now that are used to do most of the hacking work and such is done by this dude, freesmiler. You can find his work and such here: http://freesmiler.livejournal.com/ His tools are perfectly workable, but I've only modified a bit of his code to stop some crashes and add hacked punctuation support.

I had made several threads on /a/ on the possibility but then stopped. You can find them in the archive by searching "freesmiler".

In case anyone wants all of the scripts, they're listed here in .xml files and read the documentation on freesmiler's site to find how they work. The beginning prologue when you start a new game uses the 8th script file so use that for experimentation if you want to play around with it.

http://www.mediafire.com/?laana1z5i50n2db

As a final note, I do want to say again that it's only a possibility, and apparently, you guys have discussed the possibility of this since 2009. I'm currently going through the whole file in MIPS assembly and while I only had a class in x86 assembly for EE, I think I should be able to do the editing of the .ELF binary file although finding where the text prints onto the screen and changing that location might be hard.

Don't really expect much progress from me and do expect that it might take years before a hack can be made and you guys might forget about it until someone else or such makes a hack. But everything should work well when the text issue is fixed. All the menus and such are stored in graphics so that shouldn't be too hard editing the menus.

Feel free to bump the thread if you don't understand something.

[Anonymous No.]

Go for it bro, for better or for worse.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8677720
wtf is basic research?
If this is the way you're going to translate the rest of the shit then you're honestly no better than an auto translator.

[Anonymous No.]

>>8678764

Told you that I'm not a translator. Multiple times in this thread, I might add so I suggest you actually read. It was a testing of text all the way back in terms of insertion of text and such as a basic way of doing stuff.

Anyways, I'm letting this thread die unless someone has a legitimate question to ask and such.