Happy (Belated) New Year!

Okay, I’m about a week late, but I wrote this post a couple days ago and am now finally getting it posted. This post is a couple days later than promised (I’m not longer on vacation and am actually writing this at work), but it’s here none the less. So, as usual lately, here is a new post months after the last. And we do have some things to go over, some important things.

So to start, let’s talk about the translation progress. Last time I talked to Tom, our translator, he said he was going to crack down on this, and lately he has a bit. Only a couple of days ago he sent me an email to let me know that all of Haruhi’s text is translated. Every time a word comes out of her mouth it should appear on the screen as English! I believe all of the normal dialog is translated, and all that’s left are everyone else’s Motion Portrait Scenes (the special one-on-one scenes). This means that, obviously, the translation itself is still coming along, which is good news.

Now, about the hacking, and pretty much everything else- Soywiz and I have discussed how we want to go about the hacking, the best solution would probably be to do a prx that will hook the functions that display text to the screen as well as the display for the backlog and other things. This will allow us to bypass the buffer that is giving us trouble now (there is a size limit to it, which we break a lot. Going over that limit causes a buffer overflow and a crash). Our current fix now is to break these long entries into multiple dialog parts. The downside to this is that the spoken portion that matches that text doesn’t get displayed for the second entry on a split entry. Also, we have a bit of a problem with long names (buffer overflows again, but this time they run into the script entry name, so it extends the name to include the name and whatever part of the dialog entry name wasn’t overwritten). The prx would also probably handle this issue, but we could easily eliminate this issue by just using shorter names (the only name that has caused issue is something like the “Computer Club”). To fix these issues without a prx would require a lot of work.

That said, here comes the bad news. Both Soywiz and I are incredibly busy. Soywiz is starting his own business working from home- which reduces his free time to zilch. And I have 6 months of school left. Along with the fact that the last couple of months of school + work has left me with no free time, these last 6 months will be brutal. I am even considering to take the last 4 months off work, but that’s only so I can focus on my senior project, as I have an awesome group of people for it and we want to make something awesome (something we could enter into, say, the IGF student competition and get noticed or something we could turn around and sell, that kind of thing would get us jobs). I have multiple projects I wish I could pour time into, but sadly I don’t even have time to really work on one project that isn’t school related.

So what does this mean? Soywiz has considered making the project public and releasing the tools we have for it. But, Tom wants to finish the translation, and I’ve seen his work- He is an excellent translator and proofing/checking the translation should be fairly quick. This still leaves the hacking and the images I haven’t finished. I’m not worried about the images as the hard ones are done and I have translations for all of them—when the time comes it shouldn’t take much to finish them off. Hacking on the other hand is a bit of an unknown currently. I’m not worried about it, but I’m just putting the facts out there. Absolute worst case, we can release a patch that has less than optimal hacks/workarounds so the game doesn’t crash. You guys will be getting a patch, and it will be functioning and have all the dialog finished, but there are some unknowns at this point. And I’m sorry—I realize I always tell you guys that we are busy, but that’s how it is :/ and even more so than before. In the next 6 months I have multiple serious life decisions I have to make and I know I will have lots of work to do. I can honestly say I currently don’t know what the future will hold.

Look! A Wild Post!

Told you I would write a new post since I was going on vacation- and seeing as how my flight has just been bumped to a 5 hour delay (versus a 2 hour delay, I wasn’t even suppose to transfer planes), now seems like a good time to do this (ignoring that I don’t have internet to post it atm). (Actually, I’m actualy posting this during the flight home- I’m on the plane atm).

So, what has been going on? What is there to say? We surpassed the 50% mark a while ago- most of you noticed that. I was originally going to make a post after that happened, had it written up and everything, but I never got around to adding the pictures I had planned for it and it never got posted. So, months later, here’s a blog post mentioning it. At this point, the scripts are all translated, all that is left are the motion portrait scenes. But, as I’ve said before, when that hits 100% it doesn’t mean that a patch will instantly be released, but it will be close. Proof reading and testing will still need to be done, but the hardest part will be out of the way.

As was going to be in the original 50% post, I spent some time testing the game the last time I had some time off for a vacation (wow, I guess the last blog post was a long time ago)- and I must say the game is unplayable without the motion portrait scenes translated xD. That aside, what I could do was good- I noticed some typos, and there are a couple bugs that need to be fixed (there was a freezing bug, which might still exist, I believe there is something wrong with one of the scripts). And also, there is some hacking that needs to be done…

Which brings me to my next point. Hacking. There are a couple things that need to be done in terms of hacking- somewhat important things. Extending the display buffer for the text, as well as the backlog and names buffers. Right now there are names that are too long (they could be shortened if need be) and when they are displayed it also displays the script name since it overflows. As for the text buffers, if we overflow those we get a crash. Right now Soywiz has put a fix in place that splits text entries that are too long into two separate entries, but this isn’t ideal. If we can’t really extend the text buffer, we can improve the way splits are done (it’s pretty messy atm) and use that. As I said before, I started working on the hacking aspects during a short span of time off I had, but most of my time was spent getting the emulator to break on memory writes like it should. I have three addresses in the boot.bin that contains the code that writes to the buffer, but since the emulator doesn’t do tracing, things are turning into a bit of a larger pain than I initially expected- and then I just ran out of time to work on it more.

And, while I’m on the subject of emulators, good news for those who can’t run ISOs on their PSP (since you have to run a patched image, not because you have to pirate it), JCPSP can run SHNY- you just a) can’t use the media engine (it hangs when starting a game if you do, and the PMFs don’t have audio anyways, iirc some of SHNY’s PMFs are a screwy format). And b) You need fonts off a PSP and need to have the emulator use those fonts, without the PSP fonts you won’t get/will get screwed up text output. But otherwise, the game is playable (albeit slow). Also, this was using a version of JCPSP that is out of date- if you get the most recent builds, the PMFs might work and not hang. Looking through some of the changelogs since the version I was using- at least the hang bug might be fixed, if not the audio as well (Also, the fact that I don’t have sonic stage or whatever program is needed for the PSP audio format installed might be why I don’t have audio).

So, to sum things all up- translation is still coming along and getting close. Hacking still needs to be done, but since JCPSP can run SHNY, and has some debug features (tracing would make me a happy camper though) it’s a big help. Things are coming along, still, but as usual most everyone involved with this project is busy. But we are still alive.

Vimeo Account

It got deleted.

Nothing else to add, just letting you know why almost all the videos on the site are now gone. *shakes fist*

I might move back to youtube, especially since it’s not as bad quality and length wise as it once was. Though some of the videos that were on my Vimeo are not on my computer, so I’m not sure how much I can get back up- but I will work on it, I think I still have most of the videos I made for this project lying around.

A New Post!!11!1!~1one!

I promised it, so now I will follow up- the only problem is (like I’ve said) there isn’t too much to say. Soo, this post, in order to fill it out a bit, there is probably going to be a fair bit of off topic.

So let’s start, of course, with the on topic stuff- the translation. The script translation has been chugging along, Tom has been busy lately and his bits of free time have been getting sucked away with other things, but I do believe he will have more time in the future to put towards working on this- but he should correct me if I’m wrong. There are still images to do, but they are all small and there is more than enough time to do them before the script is done. And hacking wise there are still a few weird bugs, but- as with the images, there is still time to work on that later (and I haven’t heard from Soywiz in a while, but this tends to happen, so I’m not worried.) And… I don’t know what else to say here, so this might be all the on topic stuff I can come up with– told ya there wasn’t much to say. But I guess posting like this does indicate that we are still alive and kicking- and I was starting to feel that there hadn’t been a post in a while (I’ve just been extremely busy, got a job recently and between that and school my free time went from plentiful to almost non-existent).

So, what else is there to post? I could rant on about life, but that’s not the kinda stuff you are here to read about, so let’s throw in something at least some of you might be interested in. I debated posting this a while back, but since it was off topic and I felt a post dedicated to it was kinda outta line I didn’t. But seeing as how it will fill out this blog post nicely, I might as well. Plus, I’ve previously done Chrono Trigger related stuff on here (April Fools stuff) so why not?

(I recommend full-screening the video)

That is the Chrono Trigger MusiCompanion (CTM for short). I released it on RHDN a while back- you can find the thread here: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,10942.0.html
The programming aspect too a couple months of work, and the reversing took a couple weeks I believe. I did the reversing a couple months before the programming and had asked Soywiz to program it (because at the time I could program at all). But, he’s got a lot on his plate and is usually busy with other things, so he never got around to it. So, now that I’ve completed the core programming class and know a bit about what I’m doing, I wrote that. You can download it from the thread on RHDN, and it also includes the source for the DLL in the download. The source for the injector isn’t included, but that came from a tutorial which I link to in the credits (with some very minor tweaks so that it uses relative paths). As I say in the RHDN thread, the source is released for purely education purposes, being able to reference code and see how things are done is always a huge help to me, and that’s my thought when including the source with the release.

So, basically, if you like Chrono Trigger, download it and give it a shot (You need Windows and ZSnes). This program definitely came a lot further than I ever intended, and I exceeded my expectations with the resulting program– and I hope any of you Chrono Trigger fans out there enjoy it.

Also, to make this a little special, I’m going to include some things you will only find in this blog post. First, here is a promo video that I was working on to release with it. But for a promo I didn’t want to use commercial tracks (and I accidentally used two) and I didn’t want to change it, so I ended up scrapping the promo video idea in place of a gameplay video. Also, here is my favorite scene in all of Chrono Trigger with my replacement music (again, I didn’t normally release this video or use it in the promo video since I knew it had commerical music). Those links will eventually go down since they are hosted on tinypic, but they should last long enough. The oldest of the two uploads is already from almost two months ago (I dug them outta chat logs). And lastly, for you guys, I’m gonna give you my recommended track list (it actually does take some time to throw together 82 fitting replacement songs), but it will be in the comments, and I’m not giving out a download, since it does contain commercial tracks.

And with that, I don’t know what else to write, so I guess that brings this post to the end Hopefully I’ll have more to write about the next time I make another blog post.

Sign this…

… and tweet it, and email it, and spread it-
http://action.theeca.com/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1781

No, srsly, do it.

I’ve been meaning to make a proper post, but there hasn’t been much to say and I’ve been really busy. I’ll try and whip something up for you guys in the next couple days.

You’ve Encountered a Wild Patch!

Click me!

Well, it’s been over 2 months since I’ve made a post. No real reason, just that there isn’t much to talk about. This is also kinda backed up by the title of the post… I really have no idea what to name it Scratch that, I came up with a name. I was gonna make some kinda post like this when the script translation hit the 50% mark, but I have an hour to kill before I can hand my final paper in for a class, and I just finished the final in the class I’m sitting in now, so this seemed like a good way to spend it.

So, first thing I want to touch on, and the only real thing I can think of to include in this post. Some people have been asking about the few patches that are out in the wild, and if there are more. The ‘newest’ patch that is out in the wild (I don’t know where they are uploaded at to be honest , I myself might have copies sitting on some dark corner of my hard drive) is the ’0.2 Alpha’. But, despite being the ‘newest patch’ it is still incredibly old. (Actually now that I think about it, the newest build of the current patcher is around December of 2008… so there is no real ‘new’ patch in existence.) The point of those original patches was to try and get more people interested and involved in the translation. At the moment, we don’t have any plans for releasing any more patches until the translation is complete. Now, a couple of things will differ from the final patch and the ‘Alpha’ patch, I’ll present them in a nice bulleted list.

• All of the script translation in the alpha patch have been retranslated.
• The final patcher will be a program and will allow you to rip and/or compress the output image as well as apply the translation.
• You won’t need to worry about having the same exact input file as needed with PPF type patches.

Well, I wanted a longer list, but I can’t really think of anything else to add. On a note for the compress and ripping. If you rip everything (movie, voices, sound effects, music), and compress to CSO, the file comes out to about 50 megs. Just a fun little fact. So if you don’t mind not having any or some of those things, you don’t need to worry about having a memory stick larger than 1 gig.

Other than this I don’t know what to say, text is getting translated, some images need some work (but all the major ones are done), there is still some things that need to be hacked, and Soywiz has added some more features to the editor. I might eventually add them to the Web Translator page, but it’s nothing that’s too exciting for someone who isn’t a translator soo~~~.

I leave you with this.

Long Post made short

This was going to be longer, but as I wrote into the more off topic aspect of it, it turned into a disorganized rant, so now it’s all just the on topic stuff. You will hear my rant/thoughts at another time; it’s more fitting to be posted as the translation wraps up anyways. So here we go-

Alright, I’ll start off with this- I’m not looking for translators anymore. Why is this? Well, Tom has a lot of experience under his belt, and the quality of his translation is top notch. Having more translators would arguably speed up the process, but this way we reduce time needed to edit the script once the translation is complete. We also keep the translation more consistent. I have talked this over with Tom, and he wants to do the work on his own- this guarantees a solid, and consistent translation. The Japanese language, like most languages, it’s not a 1:1 translation (Hence why online translation tools usually suck). You can take one term and translate it 5 different ways. Now lets say you have 3 different translators and they translate things 3 different ways- that needs to be fixed. A good example of this can be seen in the fan based book translations. The ‘Blue Monster things’ as I will call them (if you’ve seen the anime, I think most groups called them Avatars, I don’t remember), there is, I believe, 2 different translations for them- Celestial and Avatars. Closed Spaces also have, I think, about 3 different translations between the different books. I had updated the contacts page to reflect that I wasn’t looking for translators anymore, but I didn’t have a post with it- so here it is.

Now, another thing I want to run over, when that image hits 100%- the translation isn’t done. It is very close to being done, and it probably won’t be much longer. But that image only reflects the script (which is 95%+ of the job). Though, there is a good chance that most of the other work that remains will be done before that hits 100%. Tom is trying to get the translation done in a timely manner, but remember- this is being done in free time for no profit So~~~

Here are some images for you, this post probably would have been up sooner if it wasn’t for me working on this video (this involved around 48+ hours of converting (thanks to my video editor not liking the video), so it was fun, also helped kill my computer’s PSU in the process).

Go to the site to watch it, I kept this one in HD

I’m not gonna explain the video, the description says enough, here are the final cleaned and finished version of that image (different from where I end at in the video). This is the last of the major text heavy images to do (I believe), all that is left is smaller ones.

So, there are some images, the text is going, the last aspect is some hacking. The game isn’t 100% done with the ‘hacking’ aspect, there are some text limits and name limits that are being troublesome. It isn’t impossible to just split these, but there have been some issues still. But, there is more than enough time to deal with these as the script translation is what is going to take the most time/work right now.

Yes, I know this is taking a long time, but it can’t be helped really- If I could get a translation done and out in a week for you guys I would- but things don’t work like that x.x We are all working our hardest in our spare time we have to contribute to this project for you guys.

Happy Holidays

Initially I was planning on making a post closer to Christmas, one that would have been longer, as I didn’t really have plans. But earlier today that changed- I’ll be flying home the 20th (and I probably won’t have decent internet access), so I’m gonna make a shorter post now. But, to be honest there isn’t that much to say- so let’s get it on.

Here’s a happy holidays image for you! Whatever you are celebrating right about now, this is for you.

Also, Soywiz linked me this earlier and I love it.
[EDIT: Just realized this trailer actually went online the same day as this post. Here's the source site. Gotta love the creativity.]

The seriousness of it is awesome, and I love the animation. I hope the movie is as serious as this trailer is portraying it to be- or it will be a personal let down. I haven’t watched the second season yet, but I’ve read about 7 of the novels- and this trailer makes the movie feel even more serious than the novels (with the anime being the least serious- though I imagine once they start getting into later stuff this will probably change). All in all, I’m looking forward to that movie- hope it’s as good as it seems it will be. Also, I don’t know what books the movie will cover or what exactly happens in each book (it’s been a while since I read them). But going by the scene with the gun looking thing- this will have my favorite scene from what I’ve read of the books so far. This is one of the more complex parts of the novels, and when Itsuki explained what exactly was going on (because that’s what he does) I had to reread it like 3 times to get a full grasp of all the time traveling and other stuff going on. I encourage discussing the novels, anime, movie in the comments. But try to keep it spoiler free~~

As for the translation, Tom is translation like he does. I was suppose to get translators from these guys- but this never happened. There still might be hope, but they know what I need from them (a username and pass, it’s really not that complicated. Hell the web interface is like 10 times easier than setting up an SVN) but they haven’t gotten back to me. But- I know who I can harass to try and move things along on that front- how much good it will do is another question. They are translating Air for the PC, so if you guys like that game you might want to check them out (I don’t play many VNs myself, they don’t hold my interest too well.) Not much else to say otherwise. I really am hyped for that movie though- but it will probably be a while before subbed version surfaces so I’m not too excited (here’s to hoping for a fast release to Blu-Ray!)- I tend to not get excited for anime, it’s slow like that (Black Lagoon 3, Shakugan no Shana 3, etc.).

Lastly, as for the Twitter. I admit I am glad that so many people dislike Twitter :3 (though I also admit it does have it’s own valid uses)
The poll does infact say I should make one…. I’m just… lazy- I don’t know if I want to make a Twitter >.<
But I should/probably will/kinda have to make one sometime soon anyways, so we'll see what happens. If/when I do I will add a widget to the side of the site that shows the latest Tweet, sooo~ yeah.
—————————————-

Offtopic/IRL
School is actually interesting when you get to classes that involve what you wanna do for a living , might/hopefully get a job soon (have passed the first stage of acceptance for some company's hiring procedures or something like that, waiting for another email from them), all in all not much going on.

To all the people who have emailed me asking for help/advice/whatever, sorry if I don't respond/get back to you. I have a tenancy to be bad with emails. If you wanna get help you best bet is to IM me. But- I must say, I'm not your best bet for getting help. When it comes to emails I have a habit of not replying then forgetting, like an email Tom sent me- I forgot and then didn't respond for like a week~ I'm bad at that. But, I'd like to point out I'm probably not the best person to ask for help- I'm not all that knowledgeable :3
Lastly, that Pandora thingy, to anyone interested in that. I hopefully should be getting it in January. Look on the official blog or the unofficial blog. An almost final case has been made from the molds being made for mass production of the case. Tons of videos are coming from the devs. A case which should be completely fixed and will get the green-light for mass production hopefully will arrive from China to the devs in the next few days from this post. I personally know a lot of people who are interested in this thing and want my opinion on it, so I might do some kinda video when I get mine- but no promises. ‘Specially since I don’t have a camera or a camcorder.

And I think that about raps it up- have a happy holidays you guys
–Zarradeth

(This post was longer than I thought it would be :3)

Gobble Gobble

I make turkey for you all.

Zarruhi… Updated! (a couple times- now with 125% more poll, images, and video)

Alright, now I’m rewriting the post, but I have plans for more updates to it with maybe another video and more images.
The original point of this post was because I was really tired at 2AM and had made up the name “Zarruhi” while talking to a friend online. I thought it had a nice ring, so I made a pointless post.
Thennnn, I decided to make this post into something, which is what he have here now.

First I’m gonna post up this link, I helped do image work on this, and helped the person working on it do some work retaining to PSP format files.
Soo, if you are interested, support this, if not, whatever– Kanon VN on the PSP

Now, before I get to images and videos and the such, here is a poll, I would like it if you guys voted on it, and if you want- make a comment (on this blog, not the poll website please)

I’m thinkin’ I should get a twitter, mainly for translation status… (I personally don’t use/like Twitter/facebook/myspace/etc. But I could see twitter being useful for small updates like this), what do you guys think? I could also use it to throw out anime recommendations, what I’m watching now, and little tidbits of random stuff…

I think a Twitter related to the project would help me stay on task more with it (me personally, that doesn’t effect translators), my personal choice is the second one

Now onto the images, here are some of the Poker Help images that have been translated and cleaned. I will be posting TDOS ones later, after I do them.

The stars in the background of the TDOS images make them really really super easy to clean xD.

Right click the images and pick “View Image” to see the whole thing- wordpress is clipping them off.
And here is a video of me cleaning part of the first one, I thought it came out pretty cool I wanna do another one for the first TDOS image, I wanna have it be the whole image cleaning.

Here is a youtube link if you prefer that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDSp2DY4RLQ

Again, youtube for those of you who prefer it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duu7NSY2TF8

I recommend going to the site to view it, since the video will be physically larger. Also, as it says in the description, all the work in this video ended up being pointless because I copy pasted from the second help image, it was an easier clean job and came out looking better, so I stole it for the first.

As you’ll see the TDOS images are much easier, lots more clone stamp tool, lots less redrawing.