/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5042130]

why hasn't there been a bigger effort to translate wonderswan games? from my understanding, it was a good handheld with good games that was only overlooked at the time due to the gameboy.

[Anonymous No.5042141]

No good debugger and scarce documentation.

[Anonymous No.5042185]

>>5042130
Because anyone who cares knows moon

>>5042141
>No good debugger and scarce documentation
>literally the only console with a serious consumer devkit
>good documentation and plenty of source code
kids. lol.

[Anonymous No.5042697]

>>5042130
I am fairly sure good ol Bernie was a secret agent for Nintendo, there's no way that console could have failed against GB otherwise.

[Anonymous No.5042710]

It has no good games, most of it is shovelware
Bandai is the THQ of Japan when it comes to licensed games

[Anonymous No.5042728]

>>5042185
in moonspeak

[babbage's gramps !RATGzMALLY No.5042736]

Because it's still being overlooked for game boy. I see there IS a flashcart now at least but it sticks out a mile.

[Anonymous No.5042752]

>>5042728
>Why don't people translate these Japanese games?
>Well there's no documentation
>Yes there
>But the documentation is in Japanese!
I forget that people who "translate" Japanese media generally don't know the language at all, so thanks for reminding me.

[Anonymous No.5042769]

>>5042752
It's the sad truth. They mainly use machine translation and then brush over it so it's even more removed from the original.
People who actually know Japanese don't give a shit about translations because if you can learn Japanese then so can others.

[Anonymous No.5042791]

>>5042752
Yup. Most translations are done by an autistic tard who's not fluent in either the language he's translating from or to. And it shows.

[Anonymous No.5043315]

>>5042141

[Anonymous No.5043376]

>>5042710
this

when one of the best games is a fucking One Piece game, your system has major issues

[Anonymous No.5043432]

>>5042697
>>5042130
The console's screen loses to the GB any time of the day. Has only a few good titles, all ruined by the screen(s). I personally love the format and the sound, but the screens are hopeless.

[Anonymous No.5043443]

>>5042752
It's almost like the person doing the translation usually isn't the same person modifying the code and figuring out how to insert the new script. Dumbass

[Anonymous No.5043517]

Only worthy games are SRW Compact 1-2-3

[Anonymous No.5044173]

>>5042752
>doesn't know Japanese
>complains that other people aren't learning Japanese for him well enough

[Anonymous No.5044182]

>>5043432
wonderswan: 224x144
gameboy: 160x144
fuck off, faggot. do you even know who created the wonderswan? top fucking kek.

[Anonymous No.5044183]

>>5042728
Is the documentation translated yet?

[Anonymous No.5044190]

>>5042130
> why hasn't there been a bigger effort to translate wonderswan games?
a lot of people have no idea about the wonderswan outside of japan.
>>5042141
yet another clueless idiot that knows nothing about the wonderswan. genius level shit.

[Anonymous No.5044426]

>>5044182
People as retarded as you should be snuffed in the crib. When's the last time you tried looking at that screen? You're clearly too poor to afford a GBC AND the three WSs, unlike me. You just have to turn them on to realize they're near-unplayable compared to the gbc. It could be 40 inches and 8k and it wouldn't matter. OP's picture is an obvious promotional fake.

[Anonymous No.5044476]

>>5044426
>not owning a wonderswan flashlight
poorfag

[Anonymous No.5044496]

>>5044426
> be you
> american
> poor 24h/7 days a week
i have all the gameboys, original wonderswan and the wonderswan colour. the screens are all equally fucking garbage but wonderswan had a higher resolution for quite some time. when did nintenjews catch up? gameboy advance? and the screen was still garbage.

> be you
> who is Gunpei Yokoi?
the absolute state of this board.

[Anonymous No.5044919]

>>5042697
It didn't have any Western release (though I think there was some English games for the Hong Kong market) and lacked third-party support, there were a lot of recognizable names on the system but that's because Bandai had the rights to a fuckload of manga licenses.

[Anonymous No.5044926]

>>5044182
The screen is bigger but it's a much lower quality, hence the release of the SwanCrystal to make it viewable.

[Anonymous No.5044934]

>>5044476
explain, I am curious, or do you just mean using a light period? I have this little ear-mounted reading light that sucks, but that I carry with me if I'm carrying old portables. Works well enough, not as well as the sun does, but hey, can't always use the sun.

>>5044496
I dunno, I have a crystal and the screen quality is still not as good as a GBC or GBA, higher res and better visuals than GBC, yes, but just not a good screen itself. And granted it's been a little bit since I owned a Color or an original now, but I remember them being even worse, especially for ghosting.

>>5042736
Flashmasta WS doesn't even have a case, just a bare board, and it's still the best option


desu though I don't mind there being less translations for WS games, because it helps keep prices low. The system didn't really sell that well, so there aren't that many in circulation, and so the prices are still kind of high for what you get. My fear is that if it were easier to play the games that they would all be too expensive, just look at the going rates on western-friendly releases like Tetris and Makaimura WS, they are way too high.

[Anonymous No.5044946]

>>5042697
It didn't have Pokemon, that's all it needed to fail.

[Anonymous No.5045061]

>>5042130
>why hasn't there been a bigger effort to translate wonderswan games?
games that get translated are often done out of a person's love for that game

you rarely ever see someone translate a game they don't like. they're not doing this for the kids on the net, and they don't take requests. it's purely from hobbyist standpoint. very few people give a damn about the wonderswan, anyway

guilty gear, one piece, that's it man

[Anonymous No.5045445]

>>5042130
I mean just look at that pointless shit. The way it was designed. Does it look like it should have succeeded? It deserved to be overlooked.

[Anonymous No.5045637]

>>5045445
What makes you say that?

[Anonymous No.5045661]

>>5045445
>>5045637
Not him, but it looks horribly cheap. It looks like a toy you would buy at walmart on the same rack as tiger handhelds. It might be built well, but it looks very cheap. Having 2 d pads would have just appeared retarded to kids and potential customers. I would have liked to see what game mags said about the "terrible controls" after how they bashed the first few iterations of the standard modern dual analog fps controls.

I get why it had 2 "d pads" but the AVERAGE CONSUMER back then would have put it on the same level as game.com.

[Anonymous No.5046908]

>>5042130
>why hasn't there been a bigger effort?
>overlooked at the time due to the gameboy.
you kinda answered your own question bub. it's still just overlooked now.

[Anonymous No.5048137]

I'm down to translating Medarot Perfect Edition if anyone is going to do all the technical shit.

>Only the first game was released on the Wonderswan
>It takes the coming of the GBA for the series to get higher resolution sprites

[Anonymous No.5048408]

>>5045661
The B/W Wonderswan cost less than $50 when it was new and used its bargain bin price as a selling point. The color model didn't cost that much more.

[Anonymous No.5048614]

>>5048137
There was a translation project for the GB version that petered out not long ago, you should try contacting them.

[Anonymous No.5050383]

i started translating WS Rockman & Forte and that WSC Mr. Driller and both were easy to hack imo, and i don't even know assembly
I just didn't know a word in japanese so i quit

[Anonymous No.5050541]

>>5048614
I thought the GB translation was finished?

[Anonymous No.5051004]

Didn't this run at 120fps

[Anonymous No.5051034]

There was a rockman exe game for this that was based on the anime. Why the fuck would they release something so cool on this system instead of gba?

[Anonymous No.5052854]

>>5050383
sounds legit

[Anonymous No.5054393]

>>5052854
not memeing - see for yourself. Open up p. much any WSC ROM in a Tile Editor. The graphics are very neatly aligned 99% of the time and if they aren't, the tilemaps (or their pointers) are immediately after or before the gfx bank.
The ROMs rarely utilise compression, all the data is just ..... neatly arranged.

[Anonymous No.5054443]

>>5042185
>>5042752
Absolutely based.

Just fucking learn the language if you're really into obscure Jap shit, it's worth it and not just for video games.

[Anonymous No.5055556]

>>5054393
I'm sure opening a rom in a tile editor constitutes starting to translate a rom. For your kind.

[Anonymous No.5055927]

>>5054443
You forget the endless kanji that exists in the Japanese language.
You know not what you suggest.

[Anonymous No.5055992]

>>5055927
>endless kanji
Top kek kid. Evil axis rape fags use, at most, a few thousand of our master race Chinese characters. You are a fool and a tool.

[Anonymous No.5056004]

>>5055992
I have no idea what the fuck you just said. Goodbye.

[Anonymous No.5056029]

>>5042130
Are there any games that on the WS that deserve seriously to be translated?

[Anonymous No.5056054]

>>5042130
It has a small library, and the only halfway decent games for it (FFI and FFII) got officia localizations.

Why bother?

[Anonymous No.5056057]

>>5056004
Neither do I, but do you know what happened in 1989?

[Anonymous No.5056206]

>>5056004
>I'm ignorant. Goodbye
Don't let the door hit your weeb ass on the way out.

>>5056057
You will once you read these. Skim the first paragraph if tl:dr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_powers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

[Anonymous No.5056220]

so its not worth getting?, I borrowed one and played the one piece game and the graphics looked about as good as the gba. I mite have to collect neo geo pocket instead.

[Anonymous No.5056236]

>>5042130
Most people are probably unaware of its existence.

[Anonymous No.5056274]

>>5055992
The chinks don't even use Chinese characters anymore, instead it's ugly simplified communist scribbles for barely literate chinsect peons. The Japanese have far more genuine Chinese characters in current use today than the butchered chinsect mutt system.

>>5056206
>nanking massacre
never happened lol

[Anonymous No.5056287]

>>5055556
What I was trying to convey is that for whatever reason, wonderswan games typically have their data (character tables, tilemaps, and yes, tiles) very neatly arranged. You have to look hard for ultra compact clusterfucks typically found in NES and SNES games.

Lots of tile reuse and little compression plus obvious arrays. Translating Wonderswan games is not difficult.

[Anonymous No.5056396]

>>5056274
>i wear my ignorance on my sleeve
Japs use simplified. 18+ Back to le reddit

>>5056287
What I was trying to convey is that you're a typical millennial who thinks it's "started translating" a game by opening a rom in a "Tile Editor". While it's an impressive move for your kind it doesn't come close "translating" a game.

[Anonymous No.5056424]

>>5042130
super cool but too few people experienced it while it was relevant

[Anonymous No.5056428]

>>5056396
b-but we're meant to learn from you pls help

[Anonymous No.5056605]

>>5056428
b-but you're not. Anything you'd learn from me would be the antithesis of what you're meant to learn. Are you really ready to turn your life 360 degrees around?

[Anonymous No.5056647]

>>5055992
>>5056206
>>5056274
>>5056396
>>>/pol/

[Anonymous No.5056661]

>>5055927
Kanji isn't why Japanese is hard, although it doesn't help. 2000 kanji sounds like a lot but realistically you can read most text (outside of like legal documents) if you know only a fifth of that.

That said, do WS games even use much kanji? Seems like the resolution is too low for that. Game Boy and NES games also didn't use kanji, and most (but not all) SNES games stayed away from it as well. Often actually makes the games harder to read because of all the homonyms.

[Anonymous No.5056663]

>>5056206
>i hate everything Japanese because of some shit they did 70 years ago

Why are you on a Japanese otaku board if you have such a bad impression of the Japanese? Do you also hate all Germans?

If we're beating dead horses anyways we might as well say that all Americans are evil because they genocided most native Americans and enslaved a whole bunch of Africans.

[Anonymous No.5057193]

>>5056663
>i hate everything readingcomprehension
I don't hate all things Japanese or German. In fact they're the 5th and 4th languages I learned. Before a few dialects of Chinese. I don't even hate ignorant summerfags who are barely proficient in their native language but pretend they know anything about another. But I will make fun of them. And I'll absolutely make fun of any stupid self loathing American who blames itself for whatever it's crazed teacher is spewing. And I'm here because I was here long before you made your first shitpost on reddit.

[Anonymous No.5057463]

>>5056661
It's hit or miss, there are a lot of VNs and similar story games that use kanji, even some simpler games like Chocobo Mystery Dungeon use some basic kanji.

If you study enough basic Japanese you will start to get through. I'd say study all of Tae Kim, study the "optimal kanji deck" from /jp/ DJT's new site, and you can get there.

[Anonymous No.5057465]

>>5056029
WildCard, Blue Wing Blitz, and all the horror games would be interesting. Good luck getting all the horror games to work in English though, they love vertical writing on this system. Pic related.

[Anonymous No.5058882]

>>5056396
>What I was trying to convey is that you're a typical millennial who thinks it's "started translating" a game by opening a rom in a "Tile Editor". While it's an impressive move for your kind it doesn't come close "translating" a game.
No dude, I legitimately opened the ROM in a tile editor, replaced the fonts and edited graphics with Japanese text on them with graphics with their English counterpart on them. I found the script, figured out the dialog commands and replaced them with an english script. None of this was hard, but you can only go so far with Google translate.
All this without a a debugger. Wonderswan ROMs have an unusually clean structure and translating them is trivial in most cases. With "translating" I mean the hacking/reverse engineering procedure, not the act of taking japanese text and translating it to english.

[Anonymous No.5058884]

>>5056396
>What I was trying to convey is that you're a typical millennial who thinks it's "started translating" a game by opening a rom in a "Tile Editor". While it's an impressive move for your kind it doesn't come close "translating" a game.
No dude, I legitimately opened the ROM in a tile editor, replaced the fonts and edited graphics with Japanese text on them with graphics with their English counterpart on them. I found the script, figured out the dialog commands and replaced them with an english script. None of this was hard, but you can only go so far with Google translate.
All this without a a debugger. Wonderswan ROMs have an unusually clean structure and translating them is trivial in most cases. With "translating" I mean the hacking/reverse engineering procedure, not the act of taking japanese text and translating it to english.

Did you not see the image I posted? >>5054393 That is legitimate hacking, is it not?

[Anonymous No.5058970]

>>5058884
I think you might just be wasting your time, he seems more that he wants a wee giggle than a legitimate contribution.

That's interesting, I may be asking a bit much, but would you mind opening the rom for Wild Card and seeing if that is similarly arranged?

[Anonymous No.5059140]

>>5058970
well, -right off the bat- starting from address 0x0 up until 0x13CABF it's just 4bpp card graphics, unsurprisingly neatly aligned, zero tile reuse, palettes immediately after graphics.

At 0x18000 there's the font, 2bpp.

At 0x1A9A50 there's a dialogue pointer array. $C7 is the terminator, six bytes per entry. Here's the first four, for example:
E4 AE 40 F9 00 C7
E4 18 41 F9 00 C7
E4 7C 41 F9 00 C7
E4 C6 41 F9 00 C7

Second and third bytes make a little endian pointer, so that'd be:
40AE
4118
417C
41C6

Heading over to 0x190000 (where the script is) and adding a value from the pointer will get you the first dialog text. $190000 + $40AE = 0x1940AE => legit script

One byte = one character. The bytes correspond to the font located at 0x18000.

[Anonymous No.5059228]

>>5059140
Anyone know Japanese?
I took a look at the ROM too and kinda wanna try.
Let's translate the game /vr/

[Anonymous No.5059232]

>>5059228
I know Japanese.

[Anonymous No.5059316]

>>5059140
That's so cool. I have the JP cart and it's one of my goals to be good enough at the language to play it unassisted someday.

>>5059228
That sounds like a novel experience. I am babby-tier Japanese, but I would like to follow along and try my best to contribute.

[Anonymous No.5059478]

>>5059316
welp, i extracted the font. it would be great help if someone could find the real moon glyphs for there. OCR isn't giving me shit.
Every character is 16 x 14 px

[Anonymous No.5060245]

>>5059478
Interestingly the kanji seem to be grouped together by use such as 魔法使.
The moon glyph you are looking for is in 13th row, 9th column.

TL-note: 魔法使い means magic user.

[Anonymous No.5060324]

>>5060245
No I mean like
Can someone post the Unicode for all 1024 glyphs?

[Anonymous No.5060404]

>>5060324
What for?

[Anonymous No.5060461]

>>5060404
Script extraction

[Anonymous No.5060953]

>>5060461
What if someone retyped the list in notepad++ for example and uploaded it? Would that work as a source?

[Anonymous No.5060967]

>>5059478
I tried google translate image translation, but it was pretty hit or miss. That's the hardship of older games, the low-res kanji are often recognizable by someone familiar with the language, but not by machine recognition.

Fortunately I don't think it would be a hard task, just a boring and tedious one.

[Anonymous No.5060973]

>>5060953
Yeah i mean, just as long as i have the glyphs from the image in a state of which I can copy & paste them, we're good.

>>5060967 is exactly right.

[Anonymous No.5060981]

>>5060973
okay, I'm the low-level moonuser from earlier, I will do what I can!

[Anonymous No.5061020]

>>5060973
Here's a sample of the set, I did the beginning which is just the numerals, all of the hiragana, and all of the katakana (or at least, all the parts needed to render it).

http://www.mediafire.com/file/6265nlq6dc6vzwe/sample.txt

Can you evaluate and let me know if this is the kind of thing you need? Also I confess, at row 6, column 7 and 8, I don't know what the difference between those two dashes is supposed to be. But the rest should be right unless I was sloppy.

Let me know if this works, and I'll try my best on the rest. Might need to lean on someone like this anon though >>5060245 since my kanji is still weak


http://www.mediafire.com/file/6265nlq6dc6vzwe/sample.txt

[Anonymous No.5061093]

>>5061020
welp, it'll get me started but eventually I'm probably gonna need the rest. This is still exquisite work, thank you! I'll keep you updated.

[Anonymous No.5061575]

>>5061093
okay, it will take me a while but I'll keep going, and try and post progress regularly to keep the thread alive.

[Anonymous No.5061645]

>>5061575
Well, I already headed to bed but right now the extractor spits out strings of text with a {$nn} inserted if the glyph isn't in the glyph list you posted (and there are a lot of {$nn}s...)

Once I get the full glyph list, things'll look much better.

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5061734]

>>5061645
As in, if the glyph is not correct, or just if it's missing? If only the latter, then I imagine it will improve as I progress.

As stated, progress will be slow, but I will try to keep going at a steady pace. Putting on a trip just to keep things organized as we go forward.

[Anonymous No.5061932]

This page might help with the kanji used in Wild Card:
https://refuge.tokyo/wonderswan/00194.html

[Anonymous No.5062104]

Wild Card will still need some assembly work.

1) game displays in a double width font > no room for full text, full card names (just 8 chars)
2) game needs a dictionary compression implemented to lessen english text bloat > not enough room in addressable rom to fit all of the translation

Still definitely doable.

Other doable games
- Blue Wing Blitz (Square) English font in the open, has English and VWF, uncompressed text (arbitrary encoding, needs kanji id), some uncompressed UI graphics.

- Star Hearts, pictured. Has a full working English font. Main font is out in the open, but it's 22 strips of 8 pixels encoded in 1BPP that arrange in a weird order to form 16x11 characters. Secondary font is compressed (assembly problem). Most graphics compressed like title screen (assembly problem). Fixed width (assembly problem). Text uses Shift-JIS instead of an arbitrary encoding, so kanji identification isn't needed.

- Flash Koibito Kun. Font and text out in the open. Arbitrary order, but no kanji id needed. Most graphics uncompressed.

[Anonymous No.5062153]

Just in case someone interested in this game can id its kanji to help making it possible. My incomplete kana-only research so far.

https://pastebin.com/5YCvLUP4

Characters from 0x30 - 0xF8 (0xFF?) are 1 byte kana and just upper case english. Everything else seems to be a double byte character (first one is 0x21 then the ID) for the lower case english and kanji.

Of course for the purposes of a translation, the font could be modified after the fact. It's in 0x120000 in the ROM. Areas from 0x40-0x7F could be filled with ascii, then european characters, so that they are neatly arranged. Might upload a base patch with a just that and a base fix for the vwf. Process will be
jap rom + original pastebin table for text extraction
jap rom with base font mod + second table for ascii for text insertion

Having some assembly work figured out for adding a dictionary compression could be wonderful for a tactical rpg as text-heavy as this.
>0x40="the "
Tricks like these is what made most official SNES localizations possible, but still simple tricks (unlike LZ compressions fantranslators love to do)

How, you ask?
mednafen is the way to go for WonderSwan Color assembly.
What you need to know is Z80 assembly.
mednafen's documentation and source code (as well as higan) has more information about ws hardware maps.

Seriously what's holding these games' translation prospects down is the lack of interest. No reason why a BS Dynami Tracers translation can't happen either.

[Anonymous No.5062190]

Square actually went and put a working proportional font in there. Even if the font used is ugly, fixing it is easy.

Between this and the wonderswan tutorials translated inside gba versions of final fantasy, it's more and more obvious they wanted to release their games in english, had Bernie Stolar let the device be sold overseas.

[Anonymous No.5062440]

>>5061734
The glyphs so far appear to be correct, yes, but because so many are still missing, most of the script extractor output is still unreadable. Once I get the full glyph list into my hands, things'll look much better.
>>5062153
>Characters from 0x30 - 0xF8 (0xFF?) are 1 byte kana and just upper case english. Everything else seems to be a double byte character (first one is 0x21 then the ID) for the lower case english and kanji.
Wild Cards looks has something similar. $00 to $BF is single byte, but if $Cn is detected it goes into "double byte mode." Interestingly the font also here is stored in "weird 16x14 strips" albeit 2bpp.

[Anonymous No.5062675]

>>5062153
>Seriously what's holding these games' translation prospects down is the lack of interest by people capable of doing it.
FTFY

[Anonymous No.5062743]

>>5056029
It got a Hunter X Hunter game based on the greed island arc that interests me.

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5062827]

>>5062440
Okay, I will keep on going. It's not going too badly, but I am finding some that are just totally unrecognizable to me. Fortunately I know some Japanese people, so I can ask them for help with any difficult ones. But I do apologize, this will take me some time to finish. Just know that I am still working on it.

[Anonymous No.5064289]

>>5062743
nothing immediately useful for a translation yet, i'm afraid

[Anonymous No.5064303]

>>5062743
Maybe it's possible after all.
It's likely it uses arbitrary encoding. So as always, here's the font.
Once someone identifies all the kanji inside and writes down a txt file, a text dump and starting a translation should be possible. Until then you'll have to wait for the stars to align.

Most character sprites are in the open (a 32 byte? color palette + sms 4bpp image)
If you wanted to do something as crazy as backport the smartphone version's sprites back to this, should be doable too.

[Anonymous No.5064324]

>>5059478
>OCR isn't giving me shit
Every fucking time. It's bad enough when people who think they're going to translate a game don't know the language. When they don't even know how to use the tools they need it's ridiculous. When used by someone who understands how, le standard free OCR engine will handle ~75% of that perfectly. Some of that stuff is so distorted it's hard for a person to tell what the character is without context. Is that character to the upper right of exit traditional dragon? Sure looks like it but then why have japanese dragon on the next line? An OCR isn't going to resolve all those characters but if it's giving you nothing you're doing it wrong.

[Anonymous No.5064389]

>>5056661
Kanji is easy if you focus on the meaning of characters. Too many people get hung up on the readings and fuck themselves over.

[Anonymous No.5064653]

>>5064324
go outside dude

[Anonymous No.5064857]

>>5064653
>waahhh
lololol. Was your widdle feewings hurt because everyone wasn't amazed by your mad skills of not knowing how to OCR shit? You may as well quit the translation game now. You'll get much worse, and possibly even not 100% justified, criticism if you ever release something that every single monolingual autist in the world doesn't think is perfect.

[Anonymous No.5064869]

>>5059478
To be honest, by looking at that table and your post you sound like a rookie and a moron.

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5064917]

>>5064324
Mind telling me about it? I'm going through the characters and would like to know more info if you're willing to share it.

[fontspammer No.5065018]

>>5064917
What >>5064324 implies is that feeding a font with a wall of kanji to an OCR tool is less efficient than feeding it screenshots of the kanji as they occur naturally in sentences (since some OCR tools checks not only for the shape of the letters but can use the context to deduce ambiguous kanji)

Two problems with this idea.
1) No OCR isn't trained enough with low res pixel fonts so it won't even recognize the shapes, unless you resize it and add white strips between then and hope it will work. OCR is so shitty right now for this it wouldn't even get the kana right in many cases, let alone kanji.
2) Fonts posted here have anything from hundreds to ~1700 individual kanji. You're not just gonna screenshot 1700 individual sentences (possibly hard to get text too) where those appear "in their proper context" and go through the OCR shit every single time. That's so suspiciously inefficient it seems like sadomasochism.

The best approach so far is to make the best out of the bad hand we're dealt with (bad OCR not trained with bitmap fonts) and use it on the font with the kanji wall to get as much as possible right, then look up the rest manually by trying to piece radicals together on jishoo.

You're doing well anon.

>>5056661
In older consoles, not using kanji was most of the time a memory issue if the game wasn't intended for first graders, like the NES PPU so limited the first MegaTen had a 8x8 ant kanji set because that's the only way it could have fit. That was no longer the case in later consoles. Remember the Zelda 2 tech demo for the Super Famicom? That was to show off it could do bigger resolution kanji.
12x12 kanji was good enough for the PC-98, SNES, WonderSwan, PS1, DoCoMo i-mode phones, GBA, DS... and it was used frequently on SNES. Zelda 3? 576 kanji. Harvest Moon FoMT? +2500 kanji. Your average DS game? +6000 kanji (yes pure kanji. the hanzi font was China-exclusive and +6000 or so)

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5065585]

>>5065018
Well, thank you for the words of encouragement.

Fortunately, links such as the game review posted here >>5061932 and the wikipedia.jp article on the game are helping a lot, in addition to good old-fashioned effort.

I've also been playing it a bit to get a feel for how it works as well as see where kanji are actually being used in game, and man, this game is weird and kind of hard to understand. Saw another review that had a similar opinion. It figures though, only a small amount of research revealed that Wild Card was designed by Akitoshi Kawazu. I'm a fan of his work so that explains why I gravitated to this game in the first place, but boy, I sure can't wait to have no idea what the fuck is going on.

[fontspammer No.5066078]

>>5065585
Don't mention it.

>refuge.tokyo
>wikipedia.jp
Have you also thought about looking it up in a search engine too?

>ワイルドカード wsc

reviews
>http://enixcomic.fan-site.net/game2/wildcard.html
>https://www26.atwiki.jp/gcmatome/pages/793.html#id_8e66831f (matome, but does the job)
card list
>http://www.ne.jp/asahi/personal/heaven/games/wildcard/
video playthrough
>http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm7579993

[Anonymous No.5066224]

>>5064917
What is it you want to know about?

>>5065018
But the OCR that most of the software out there uses as its engine is able to recognize all the kana and the vast majority of the kanji. Anyone who knows what they're doing can easily verify that using the image posted ITT.
I wrote software that does those thousands of screenshots, OCRs them and translates them as you play. It saves a copy of each screen shot. I do that so someone ca go through them and update the translation engine. Very efficient. The only sadomasochism is having to play through an entire game that was probably so bad no one wanted to translate it.

[fontspammer No.5066429]

>>5066224
In the context of a fan translation, it makes much more sense to identify the custom encoding used by the game, that is transcribe all of that font image into text form
(whether
1/ out of memory until you pass out from gestalt dizziness
2/ looking each one by radical
3/ trying to resize and recolor it until the OCR gods accept it (because OCR sucks with low-res pixel fonts)
)
and then build a table, use that table to dump a complete script of all lines be it frequent, rare, unused without even having to play the game until translation insertion and testing time...

than to go through a playthrough with a real-time OCR tool (which might be thrown off by scaled text, text that blends with backgrounds, other graphics that can be interpreted as text and mess up context for legit text... on top of shit pixel font recognition) hoping the game will give us just a privilege of the frequent lines.

Since we don't even have the encoding figured out we can't even repoint text in the ROM to test the rare strings as they appear onscreen since without a complete table we can't even tell what IS text in the ROM's data blob. There's a case to be made for limited tables (with just the kana) but they can only take you so far, especially in games heavy on kanji use.

BUT

Your experience with OCR is indeed very interesting and could be useful.
The main problem with most solutions right now is that they are not "trained" with monochrome / limited color fonts, or fonts that have dimensions like 8x8, 8x12, 12x12, 16x16. Result is that they suck. However Japanese software shared a few common fonts quite a lot.

I have, or can create some font images like the above with their kanji identified and transcribed (other game translations).
How can I train an OCR tool with it to create a database optimized specifically for ant kanji pixel fonts?
I'd like to think it could make this step far easier and less inconvenient for anyone else.

[Anonymous No.5066434]

>>5042752
you seem like a nice person

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5066906]

>>5066078
I haven't yet really, but that is probably a reasonable idea.

>>5066224
I'm just asking since the post I replied to acted like there was an obviously superior method, and because I don't really have any experience doing this. I just did it because I think that the game is interesting, and because it's a fun way to put my Japanese study to a "practical" use. If there are techniques that can improve my execution of this kanji transliteration then by all means I'll try to learn and use them.

[Anonymous No.5067025]

>>5066429
Seems to me your method is great for making chinglish bootlegs. Someone who just wants to play the game, and god forbid learn a little Japanese, would do best with a tool that runs on their computer and works with any game they could emulate.
Always great to hear that problems we identified and solved are a real concern to people we would some day use the product.
You'd be wasting your time trying to solve your OCR problems the the way you want to. Bog standard training files work just fine. Your problem is you know nothing about OCR but think you do. They're all trained with monochrome data. Try feeding your OCR that instead of whatever retarded shit you are and watch the miracles happen. Similar "tricks" exist for the other problems you think exist. I already ran OPs pic through my system and got excellent results.
But for inputting a few hundred characters the whole approach is retarded. Anyone over the age of 8 who uses those characters could type them all up in a few minutes. That's literally hundreds of millions of people, many of them willing to do it for a few bucks. Young dumb broke highschool kids are the number one cause of this shit never happening.

[fontspammer No.5067652]

>>5067025
Err... even when using OCR, that complete text dump taken from the innards of the game is still preferable. Say your OCR identifies and transcribes that line as string. Which would be better?
a/ passing the string to babelfish
b/ passing the string to a jp/en dictionary that spams 5 long ass definitions for each line
c/ compare that line to lines from a full text dump (created how? that's just that same old problem) that have numerical IDs, and then search in a separate text file with HUMAN-made English translations for that ID, and display it.

idk really in what bizarro world always-online machine translations are better than a direct, static english txt file either there to be summoned by the OCR tool or inserted into the game proper.

>Your problem is you know nothing about OCR but think you do.
I'm not pretending I am an authority on the matter, but there's like 3 free options online which I had to rely on in the past. They do relatively well for higher resolution or modern fonts (which Wild Card can count as one, it's from one of the fontworks warez packs) but still shit the bed (high error rate) with low resolution pixel fonts made for retro consoles. That was what I experienced. Sure the recognition went better when i resized to something between 200% and 300% with nothing in the way, but that was it.

>But for inputting a few hundred characters the whole approach is retarded. Anyone over the age of 8 who uses those characters could type them all up in a few minutes.
Kanji Gestaltzerfall.
The Japanese (the damn younger generation at least) are not used to walls of pure kanji.
It's a tedium, and that's exactly what automated solutions excel at solving, especially when the same few dozen fonts are repeated but the order is still reshuffled.

>just throw money at the problem
it always goes to shit with these projects when money is involved. "hey what about us", "spec work!" "industry wages!" "patreon" "profiteering off muh Bandai IP is unethical"...

[Anonymous No.5068120]

>>5056424
On the way to fatness, look at those popeye arms.

[Anonymous No.5068337]

>>5067652
It's really not worth addressing each of the points you're so phenomenally wrong on. It would pretty much be a commentary on each sentence. From your complete lack of understanding of how those fonts relate to the their use to display meaning, to your belief that Chinese characters are strictly a Japanese thing, your entire post is a shining example of the ignorance that pervades the translation scene. And calling spending a few bucks throwing money around indicates this is compounded by lack of age and money.

[fontspammer No.5068368]

>>5068337
I didn't expect much, and somehow I'm disappointed.

[Anonymous No.5068381]

>>5068368
Please add a trip so I can filter your cringe

[fontspammer No.5068410]

>>5068381
Just OCR it away, ol' Bernie

[Anonymous No.5068416]

>>5068410
You really are cancer

[Anonymous No.5068675]

some hope
>>>/wsr/569939

[Anonymous No.5068683]

>>5068675
More like an awkward conversation to me?

[Anonymous No.5068697]

>>5068683
yeah but at least it's possible we'll get the glyphs now

[Anonymous No.5068710]

>this entire thread
So much asspain....
i'm starting to think Aeon Genesis has infiltrated the thread

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5068992]

>>5068697
lol, I've actually still been plugging away at it, just like the name says, I'm just taking forever.

Was gonna say though, not to get anyone's hopes up but I do know some Japanese people who might accept the work in exchange for dinner or beer, want me to try asking?

Also, I think the really hard part is some of the super-dense characters toward the bottom. I feel like those will be really hard to make out as part of a straight glyph wall,might need to just find them in-game and translate them on the fly.

[Anonymous No.5068998]

>>5068992
>lol, I've actually still been plugging away at it, just like the name says, I'm just taking forever.
one step at a time. It's not like we're in a hurry or anything.
>Was gonna say though, not to get anyone's hopes up but I do know some Japanese people who might accept the work in exchange for dinner or beer, want me to try asking?
sure, but like i said, we're in no hurry. once we get the full script out it's much more appropriate to approach a translator
>Also, I think the really hard part is some of the super-dense characters toward the bottom. I feel like those will be really hard to make out as part of a straight glyph wall,might need to just find them in-game and translate them on the fly.
i think it's best to leave unidentifiable characters as {byte} and once we get the script extracted, we get to understand its context.

[Anonymous No.5069079]

>>5042130
>Learn Japanese and play the originals
>Learn Japanese, localization programming and how to develop for the Wonderswan

Pick one. Otherwise, move on.

[Anonymous No.5069084]

>>5059478
I did all of these and now my eyes fucking hurt. A bunch are best guesses and the ones i didnt feel comfortable identifying (either because they could be any one of a couple of characters or because they're too distorted) are marked as *.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/lv51a1wm79cc4w1

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5069105]

>>5069084
I know your pain. Still, nice work, you're way better than I am at this shit. Thanks so much for your work!

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5069112]

found a good page of resources, linking:

http://nozomi.2ch.sc/test/read.cgi/rhandyg/1292739085/l50

Notably contains links to a walkthrough and to the complete database of cards (doesn't look like there are pictures though). At the very least, get full text of cards reproduced in fonts not made for ants.

[Anonymous No.5069118]

>>5069084
Thanks a bunch. Script extraction will begin very soon. I'll post strings here and well see how it goes.

[Anonymous No.5069264]

>>5068120
I like them a little plump

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5069649]

>>5069118
You know, I just thought of something, instead of using * for every filler character, wouldn't it be better to use roman letters to replace each one, so that when we see a missing spot in the middle of a Japanese phrase, it's not one of several potential * but is instead a specific roman character?

At the very least we would sharply narrow down the list of possible characters that match the indecipherable kanji. I dunno how much of a wrench that throws into script extraction but I think it would have a noticeable benefit, specifically because the roman alphabet doesn't show up much in the game but for very specific locations and for a few known phrases (Yes/No, PC (player character), etc.)

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5069841]

>>5069649
example posted here, I replaced the 60 or so * with letters a-z, A-Z, and special characters, and changed the in-game roman and special characters to be the Japanese uniform-width style chars. Throwing it out there, if it's too much additional effort than don't worry about it.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/jdubbf04x1vfiff/fuckthis_2.txt/file

[Anonymous No.5069891]

looking great so far, only one unknown glyph occurred so far

[fontspammer No.5070072]

>>5069841
You had the right idea, but the wrong way to handle it.
Did this table file. Hex matches for the characters just a guess for demonstration purposes but bear with me.

C020=息
C021=*
C022=歌
C023=誘
C024=巨
C025=*
C026=*
C027=覚

Let's assume first and second unknown (wildcard, heh) characters are 私 and 大
Let's say the sentence is 私はベルニーストラーを大きらいだ。
In a text dump, with that table, it will appear like this:
*はベルニーストラーを*きらいだ。
That's a problem, since you can't fix the table this way.

But if you replaced those with placeholders that reference directly the kanji's identifier in the font, or its hexadecimal match, or whatever is directly useful for you:
C021=[k021]
C025=[k025]
[k021]はベルニーストラーを[k025]きらいだ。
The translator looking at this can probably deduce from context and playing the game what [k021] and [k025] really are, and report back the newly identified kanji to you, and gives you the exact information you need so that you update the table, and then you generate better and better script dumps.

[Anonymous No.5070091]

>>5064324 >>5064857
>>5064869 >>5066224
>>5067025 >>5068337
>>5068381 >>5068416
Hi Gideon

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5070241]

>>5070072
Yeah, that makes sense.

The script printout is looking good. These are the questions they ask at the beginning of the game to determine your "personality" (what character you play as). It makes sense that they wouldn't hit a lot of the weird characters there, since it's mostly general personality questions without a lot of unusual language.

Incidentally, I got the missing text screen in-game, and I'm pretty sure the missing character is 鍛, as in 鍛える. The question is "how do you become popular?" and that answer is like "work out and get sexy" or something to that extent.


Also, is there a reason that every question and answer set is being printed twice? Just curious. Anxious to see more of the script results.

[fontspammer No.5070258]

>>5070241
Idk, I wasn't the fast anon who extracted it.
My money is either on a quirk with the pointer system, or the game storing two different scripts for male and female options. A distant third is the anon's extraction script acting up.

[Anonymous No.5070274]

>>5042130
Any good rpgs

[fontspammer No.5070315]

>>5070241
>>5070258
Alright, confirmed it was stored twice in the ROM in succession because Square decided so. Trying to complete formatting that dump as a table even though fast anon already did it.

[fontspammer No.5070372]

Reinventing the wheel might have been worth it in the end.
Found something interesting...

Text that appears below options, monsters, etc.. has quite a lot of differences compared to regular (message) text.

While normal text relies on a pointer system and string terminators, option text does not use indicators for string end, just a lot of spaces. Probably means it's fixed length. That means its length is hardcoded (8? slightly more?), so for your translation not to look like Breath of Fire either programming a dictionary compression, or redrawing the font to have all possible long combinations crammed in just 8 "characters" is the way to go

Option text uses the same table for basic 1 byte characters as regular text, but needs a different table for kanji. For example, these two lines from either type of text

>19D1A0
>見まわす
In this option text sample, 見 is 0129
>1980D0
>ざっと周りを見る
In this regular text sample, 見 is C129

Nothing a find-and-replace can't fix, at the end of the day.

[Anonymous No.5070419]

>>5044919
>In 2000, Bandai signed an agreement with Mattel to bring the handheld to North America, but ultimately decided against a Western release.[3] The exact reason for this is unknown, but the crowded handheld video game console market has been suggested as a factor.

>Bernie Stolar served as President of Mattel Interactive from January 2000 through December of 2002 after serving as president and chief operating officer of Sega of America and Sega Entertainment, where he was responsible for Sega's console and PC gaming businesses in North America. Throughout his time at Mattell, Stolar refocused the company to deliver best-of-breed educational and entertainment products until that division was sold in late 2001.

[Anonymous No.5070427]

>>5069891
Guessing from the context, 0x270 is 鍛.

[Anonymous No.5070447]

>>5070419
>Stolar strikes again
Man that guy is cancer.

[Anonymous No.5070558]

>>5070447
Managed with varying degrees of success to sabotage 2 out of 3 consoles that gen (Saturn, PS1) and on the handheld front the only real competition Nintendo had for a while (Bandai's WonderSwan Color)

Didn't manage to sabotage Nintendo in part because its directors were assigned through nepotism, and in part because Nintendo was doing a fine job sabotaging themselves (for consoles: the N64, and then the N64DD delays to piss off any devs they had left; for handhelds, the Virtual Boy, firing Gunpei Yokio, canning Atlantis).
But what if he could? This recent interview quotes gives an insight...

>GamesBeat: What do you think of the console war today, where it stands between Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft?
>Stolar: I believe Nintendo is having a very difficult time. Nintendo should have just become a software company. But I don’t think Nintendo in Japan will ever allow that.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous No.5070565]

>>5070558
edit: and I forget one more thing.
After starving Sega off revenues for two whole years (the early Saturn death, and the Dreamcast delay, with hardly any games at all and localization projects he feigns working on then pulls the plug on near completion) he had this super expensive marketing event for the DreamCast and then sells it for half its planned price, and that original price was planned at a loss.
DreamCast sold like hotcakes in the US, but that was still not enough to save Sega.

[slowanon !E/s9UF5Oa. No.5070750]

>>5070258
>>5070315
Odd, but okay.

>>5070372
I don't know a lot about the encoding you describe, but I can corroborate that card names, for example, are all 8 characters or less. Given the names I've seen, some will definitely need some text-cramming effort.


Also, pretty sure that bottom row, fourth from the right, is 僕.

[Anonymous No.5070796]

>>5070419
To be fair, it wasn't exactly the wrong choice. By the time Mattel would have gotten it out over here, the GBA would be out. The GBA not only had backwards compatibility (for Pokemon) but also a few top-tier first-party launch games (like F-Zero and Super Mario Advance). The Wonderswan was both less powerful and didn't really have a killer franchise attached.

Just look at the PSP's release - it was more powerful than the Nintendo DS, had multimedia capabilities, and had a bunch of A-list franchises attached. And yet it still struggled against the Nintendo DS. Nintendo's handheld dominance was too strong.

[Anonymous No.5072170]

>no documentation
http://daifukkat.su/docs/wsman/

[Anonymous No.5072786]

>>5070315
Could this have actually had something to do with the possibility of releasing in other regions? Maybe they had this idea for mapping multiple translations of the same text in that way, but ultimately never did it? Or they were ensuring enough space on the cart for other languages to fit? I mean, this game came out in March of 2001, and the GBA was literally months away. Maybe they already saw the writing on the wall, and expected to port more than just the FF remakes.

[Anonymous No.5072948]

>>5072786
Could have. Could have been because any number of things. Having lots of resources and being lazy, for example.

[fontspammer No.5073115]

>>5072786
No. Other text in the ROM (either story or menus) is stored only once, and there's just one pointer table. Also, for the duplicated text only the second copy is used (but i wouldn't take the gamble. i would just translate them both, or better, translate one copy and repoint both pointers to the same place to win some ROM space).

Some other arguments for why I think not:

- Most localizations in that era would replace all the text.
- The only other planned language was just English, so you only need one language, not 3 on one card like Europe games needed.
- The few multilanguage games in that console gen were made for europe, jp/en games are rare and jp support is nixed because it has no benefit and lots of drawbacks (cheap reverse imports), but then again the WS handheld itself was $50 and the games even cheaper, and jp/en game hybrids (digimon) did exist for asia, just square never did that.
- While Square planned indeed to localize the WonderSwan Final Fantasy ports (after all, they were its killer app) and some of that localization is still buried in the GBA ports, this game is the sort of thing they would skip. Full width font, no proportional font or english support...
- Unlike the few Bandai WS games that had multi-language built in (depending on a value in the BIOS), this Square game doesn't seem to use the WS BIOS information much in other ways (player sex, age that affects difficulty options, blood type that affects personality... all of which except age Wild Card has but handles in different ways)

[Anonymous No.5074138]

[Anonymous No.5075683]

bump

[fontspammer No.5075687]

Trying to code something so that i don't have to retype all that character table by hand, and produce a text dump for wild cards.

[Anonymous No.5075948]

>>5042141
Do you just make up stuff randomly just so you have something to post in threads you obviously know nothing about?

[Anonymous No.5075961]

>>5042752
>I forget that people who "translate" Japanese media generally don't know the language at all, so thanks for reminding me.
So what's stopping you from translating whatever yourself?

[Anonymous No.5076253]

>>5075961
inb4 imma superior moonreader you plebs, will talk down people who translate gaems as i don't and take the superior moral ground and laugh at all you illiterates

ignore the thread shitter

[Anonymous No.5076262]

>>5075961
Just because you know a language doesn't mean who know how to translate.
You could learn it but it's mainly wasted time since you don't gain anything from it yourself.
Translating itself is also a demanding task with little return. It's far more effective for everyone to learn Japanese than for one person to do all the work so that a handful of others can play just one more game.

[Anonymous No.5076362]

>>5076253
Are you ok? lol

>>5076262
>Just because you know a language doesn't mean who know how to translate.
I wasn't arguing that. I'm just saying that if translators generally "don't know the language at all" then it should be trivial for him to translate his own shit. So then my question is why is he here crying about translations?

[Anonymous No.5076738]

>>5076362
I think his purpose is to shit on people trying to be the moonrunes prometheus when you'd be better off joining the gods on olympus. But then I might be giving him too much credit.

>>5075687
good luck with it m8