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When I was young I tried translating Pokémon Emerald to my Norwegian dialect. I found a program (I don't remember the name) that allowed me to extract only text files from Pokémon ROMs and edit them, it was absolutely perfect for what I wanted to do. But I quickly realised that the games don't support the Norwegian Å, Æ and Ø letters, which lead me to trying to understand how to add more characters, since there were blank spaces on the character sheet, but I failed miserably and gave up lol
You've done the world a service, but more importantly you've done me a service by letting me play Racing Lagoon and Aconcagua. Thank you for all the hard work.
legit thank you for everything that you do 🙏 i have a tiny bit of experience translating the simple toolbar UI of a piece of software using a hex editor & google translate. with that it was decently easy to figure out what corresponded to what, and all i had to do was change the text, but even then tons of stuff broke in the process, and it still took weeks. by the time i was done i wasnt even interested in using the damn thing i was trying to make usable lmao. so yeah i never figured any of this would be easy, but im still baffled by how much goes into what u do.
don't undersell this video's value - this video is singlehandedly the most useful "guide" for PSX fan translation. i bet this video will go on to jumpstart a lot more people's interest in PSX translation, and some of those people will be persistent enough to figure it out :)
you're telling me you do all that stuff plus the whole translation yourself ??? that is truly astonishing. and this video is really insightful so thank you ! i cant help but feel thankful for all the effort you put into these projects. thanks to you i was able to play dr slump in english and have a great time! (and i also will gonna enjoy the bokunatsu patch in the future for sure) and thank you once again for this video, it helped me to get a rough idea of what it takes to translate a ps1 game
"all we need to do is..." is the biggest understatement of all time. I've worked in IT and computer science related fields my whole career and it is staggering the amount of painstaking work that goes into this "digital archaeology" of fan translation. This video really helped me appreciate that all the more! Really can't thank you and those that do this work enough for preserving and sharing these cultural treasures before they are lost!
Jeez. I applaud those who have translated ps1 game. A lot of this stuff flew over my head cause i just dont understand it. But i have a better understanding of the literal hoops you guys gotta go through. Thank you and hopefully smt 2 and if... get translationed sometime in the future
This was incredible. A couple years ago I tried hacking and translating the PS1 FotNS game. I only got as far as dumping the disc contents and poking around in No$PSX for raw text sitting in ram. After weeks of no progress I gave up. This video has finally given me some insight into what goes into translating PS1 games. I've done some math with my PAC files and sure enough found the directory information! I've sliced out my first raw game data segment and the size lines up perfectly with the header size. Hoping you go over decompression in the debugger more in the future as that's my next beast to tackle.
Man I always wondered why the Princess Crown translation is taking so long but now I realize the inmense work that takes to do it. And I imagine that for every system the process will be different. Thanks for the video and the translations!!
Not only will the process differ for each system, it will differ from game to game as well; since every dev studio liked to roll their own proprietary file formats, containers, and compression algorithms back then. There weren't the type of standardized publicly available APIs and stuff we have now. (Edit: Looks like all that was covered towards the beginning of the video lol)
Awesome content. I always had apprecation for people who are doing fan translating. With my current knowledge of romhacking (which is extremly limted) I am making 60 fps hacks, but seeing people fully reverse engineering dieffrent types of files seems insame to me. Especially when you consider how hard can it be to inject a new data to an already compiled game. So Thank you for all of your effort which isn't obvious, and I would love to see more videos like this and I am looking forward for your future projects.
Hilltop I've been following you for a long time and I've been benefiting from your hard work for equally as long. I genuinely mean it when I say thank you so very much. Your hard work is not without appreciation or gratitude.
That's really informative so far. I tried some rom hacking back in the day, but a well put and centralized form of documentation isn't easy to find, so this is definitely going to be useful. Sadly, i have my hands full atm studying programming and web development, but i feel very tempted to jump at some particular games and give it a go.
My first one was the Langrisser(yeah it already has better translated rom furing that time) longtime ago was on Snes and boy it was messy,since i used it to gain more learning experience,never tried other platforms like Turbografx,PC98 and many other,if i had time(considering i was real busy with works nowadays,dont even had much time to play games or these days) i want to learn more
I started watching out of curiosity, realised I don't know a single thing, and continued watching anyway. The clarity of your presentation and delivery is top notch. Despite knowing nothing, I feel like I could attempt this and learn a lot.
I was considering translating the Super FamiCom version of Romancing SaGa 2. This is some really useful information. After seing this video, it seems to be complicated to participate in a translation project, but if the game is something I really love, I think I'd do it. Thank you very much for this video
this was such a release to find... im like you were, i didnt know anything about this, i use avs and other things related to video editing, and thats the extent of my programming knowledge (well, adjusting some json docs too) stepping into this is a whole other ball game. This is encouraging. I am just trying to turn Rockman Complete Works to english, which hopefully will be a little low bar for entry. But it is still alot to learn. Ill be watching this way too frigging much over the next bit
Great video here, the process of decompiling a game really is more insane and intensive than I could have imagined, and that's only the stuff covered in the first half of this video. Very educational and eye-opening, being a programmer I both dread the amount of work you described here and yet also can't help but be drawn to the idea of trying it myself someday.
"... recently i've moved to doing Playstation 2 games." Crosses fingers badly for Cowboy Bebop: Serenade of Reminiscence!!! Great video, wish i was more constant with personal projects like you.
Live hacking stream would be fantastic! A few tries on either platform could be worth it, if you have the time especially >4 hours, I watched your last announcement an hour after it went up. An announcement netting traffic seems likely.
if you don't understand the 4bpp image font with 4 1bpp images inside, imagine a 7(8, 10, 32, ecc...)-segment display, with every combination of on or off segments compose different numbers and simbols.
this was facinating, it both blows my mind how much work goes into it, yet knowing you basically started from scratch and learned is really useful too, this certainly has me thinking of dipping into this more then i was before atleast, but mad respect for the amount of time and effort it takes to take a game apart and put it back together like that!
I really admire the work of fan-translators in all media but especially in video games. I was learning Japanese to try and help translate them but this video shows that I need to study a lot of other stuff lol, even as a programmer I got lost in some of the concepts. But anyway thanks for making this video, my respect for you guys grew even bigger.
You’re the man. Thanks for all your outstanding service. I’ve enjoy Dr. Slump and Racing Lagoon thanks to you, looking forward to checking out Aconcagua now too.
Thank you! You have successfully dissuaded me from getting into ROM hacking. And saving me lots of headaches. The video was amazing. FYI: I wanted to translate Princess Crown.
I see... Now I'm even more confused. Thank you for the explanation. It's interesting to see how the whole process works. A lot of people think it's hard but it's a bit worse than that. Or can be. As everyone else already said, thank you very much for your hard work. I'm glad so many people were able to enjoy those games and that's thanks to you. Keep up the good work, Hilltop.
started learning japanese again earlier this year to hopefully be able to play japan-exclusive games. at some point I thought it would be great to eventually use my learning to help aid any translation projects, but I've had no idea what the process of fan-translation actually _looks_ like. technical stuff like this usually goes way over my head, but this was presented in a way that was easy for me to grasp (and made me realize that I'd definitely need to work with other, much smarter people that can handle all of the actual coding portions of things). great video!
This was such a good, well explained and deep explanation of how a game works and what it means to reverse engineer it. Also, you're amazing and thank you so much for all your work!
I enjoyed the whole video. Thanks for making this! I always thought that I want to fan-translate old PS1 games to Indonesian but don't know how. This gave me a perspective, and might be too much for me to do it alone haha!
This is incredible thankyou so much for all of this. I wish there was more content out there on hacking / modding ps1 games, I'm definitely going to have a go at ps1 model editing and see where I can get with that
- i somehow watched that complex video, even though i'm not really a computer coding enthusiast. i suspect its how... smooth his teaching sounds? not really in a sleepy way but idk, feels good to see someone talking so in-depht about such complex project, also the low-fidelity-like video is great!
I was looking for a video like this and now I'm absolutely going to do my best to get a few very obscure PS1/2 games translated :') I would very much be interested in more on the technicals! A video on localisation and writing would be interesting too, but there's comparatively more content out there on those topics
Honestly I spent like 10 minutes looking for a program called "Quick Translate" Because I believed that it would just extract the text and let me translate it I pressed play on your video and hear "Oh it's fake" Ah, no wonder there wasn't a link XD
Thanks to you I know what it takes to make a fan-translation, I want to learn better how to do it. Because I want to translate many videogames in italian language!
Great work brother, this contained a lot of information for someone new to these concepts like me. I really want to make an English patched Dragon quest XI for the 3ds! :) I think a live RU-vid video of you hacking the text of a game would be very informative and beneficial for us. Keep it up you got my Sub
Very interesting video, thank you for your hard work! I hope you or another team, someday in the future is going to translate some of the non RPG 2D hidden gems of the system, which unlike the 3D games, have aged visually like fine wine. I'm talking about games like "The Adventure of Little Ralph", "Panzer Bandit", "Gear Fighter Dendoh" and "AirGrave" among many others.
In the early 2000s I tried translating Yoshi's Island into Spanish (I didn't know the PAL version had different languages) it was an ordeal, since words are usually longer than English I had to change a lot of stuff to fit the text and I only managed to finish the first world before I gave up. I thought at this point there were easier ways to do this, but it hasn't changed at all, I can't thank people enough who have the patience to translate entire games that have even much more text.
Impressive work , honestly . Can you take a quick look at this game called K-1 World GP 2006 ? It was only released in Japan and it's the last in the series before K-1 went almost bankrupt and dropped in gaming in favor of UFC . It's a game for people who remember fighters like Bonjaski, Hari, Schilt, Aerts and what a show it was to watch them . I took a look at the game file , they are mostly . PSS files .
I want to try to fan translate a game, and I've never modded games before. I will watch this in full when I have the time, but I just wanted to say, thanks for creating this unformative video, even if the subject is very niche
Thank you so much for this video and also for all your hard work! I have a question: Do you think that it is possible to translate a psx game by only using a raspberry pi? I only have access to this linux based pc. I realy want a translation for "vampir kyuuketsuki densetsu" and waiting for someone else to do it is getting harder and harder every day. It has such an interesting looking gameplay! Using Google translate on my phone is a pain.
Hello, what a great video, ive been curious about this topic since ive enjoyed so many fantranslated rpgs, btw could you tell me how long did it take u to learn japanese, and what method of studyi u used?
I want to fix a translation of Demons Souls (PS3) and i'm basically starting from 0... There's a lot of mistakes in that translation that can actually lead people to misunderstand the game's lore.
any idea about translating GBA game ? because i want to start translating Mr. Driller A its never been translated to english only main menu but there is Korean patch
Great video, very interesting and useful for someone who would like to approach or know more about these projects! Unluckily, reverse engineering isn't something appealing to me
Interesting with AI evolving we can see a more fan-translated games in the future? They can help with reverse engineeiring for romhackers? p.s: anyway thank you for you job
And for translators who don't have any knowledge of source coding and who also can't modify or touch them because they work in mobile game applications...it's not that difficult. although we translate by eye, basically and via youtube.
why pour work into this when soon someone will just let loose GTP on the game files and get a better result in just a few minutes? it will finish the job in less time than it takes this guy to create a translated bitmap
Because GPT just gets very overwhelmed at very large amounts of text. It will sometimes also just overlook parts and more easily make mistakes than the human that can look and make some sense and find consistencies in all the hexadecimal madness. Trust me, I've tried incorporating GPT into the file analysis process, but it didn't help, even when I found out an archive structure on my own and wanted it to generate a command tool script to extract the archive file. Ultimately, it just slowed me down and I had to reach out to other modding friends for actual help.
Ain't nobody got time fo' dat. On a serious note, you can't rely on AI doing all the hard work for you, especially when you're translating a game in a different language.
@@el_primer_y_el_ultimo_caiman I think it's a fair point to make but only if you haven't actually tried programming with it, because it seems possible... but then it doesn't work.
Do you take requests? of course if you are free and avaiIabIe, I have one game but cant find anyone to transIate it, and guys on rom sites dont take requests
