Well, I decided to document my journey here, as a way to help myself learn and grow more than anything, but also with the hope that it may inspire and help others to get involved in this type of thing.
One of my dreams has been to translate a ROM. I’m bilingual, with English being my first language and Indonesian being my second. I mostly have this desire because I have a fear of losing my skills in my second language, and I figure this is a way to keep those muscles in shape and probably even grow them some as I encounter different things than my typical reading and tv watching provide right now.
I’ve tried translating roms on a number of occasions, but haven’t made it much further than just simply hacking some text and replacing some strings with set character limits. Until now, that is.
I’ve recently started working in a fighting game I enjoy quite a bit called Rival Schools.
It actually has a pretty large and involved story, for a fighting game, and although it’s cheesy and ridiculous, I love it. Now, I’ve come further along with this game than I ever have before. I’ve discovered the pointer. Table and how it works. This allows me to use unused parts of the rom and basically have text as large as I want in the game. Finally, I can actually provide an accurate translation without constraints.
I’ve finished translating the Gorin main story (endings are stored elsewhere, but I’ll get to them too). The game is also pretty generous with unused space, so I don’t anticipate any problems that way either.
My main hurdle now is figuring out how to automate the insertion of the translated text. I’ve already tried and successfully updated a good chunck of the Gorin text manually. But Im not going to do the whole thing manually. The sooner I learn the automation for this, the better. There are several tools for this, but none of them really seem to be documented well, so I’ll do my own documentation here. At least, that’s the plan.
Hopefully, this is just a stepping stone to doing many more translations in the future. I’d love to be able to open the world of these games up to some people who have language barriers to enjoying them fully.
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