Back in March of last year, TrekkiesUnite118 created a thread on translating Shin Megami Tensei: Soul Hackers on the SEGA Saturn using the official 3DS translation as a base.
One of the biggest hurdles was getting the English translation from the 3DS version of Soul Hackers back into the Saturn version:
The 3DS file formats are very similar to the Saturn file formats save for some endian differences.
– TrekkiesUnite118 on the 3DS text format
The game already supports ASCII encoding and will automatically switch to an 8×16 font when it detects ASCII text.
He also needed to figure out which additional text was added to the 3DS and PlayStation ports of the games, and which belonged in the original Saturn version of the game:
“What we found with this is the 3DS version that got a localization is very similar under the hood to both the original Saturn port, and the later PlayStation port. If you go through the files, you’re going to find a lot of the same files as the Saturn and PlayStation version. It made it easy to kind of figure out what text needs to go where, what needs to be swapped in, what needs to change.”
One thing you will notice in this build is that the text is not properly filling the text box. This is due to the 3DS using a variable-width font system and running at a higher resolution. Trekkies has a fix for this, but he needs to wait until all of the text translation has been inserted into the game first:
“The text is kind of overrunning the boundaries of the text box, and it’s not looking pretty, and that’s because the 3DS version had a variable width font system and it had a little bit more screen real estate. The line breaks aren’t at the right spot, so I’m working with Mr. Conan (another fan translator behind the Lunar 1 and 2 fan translation on Saturn). We’re working on putting in a variable width font system, and that does make it get it to the point where it now all fits in the text boxes and looks correct. I just don’t have it implemented at the moment, because our solution for that overwrites the Japanese font, and when we do, the Japanese text doesn’t show up. Then we don’t know if this a bug, or is this untranslated text, so it makes it harder to identify that. That’s why in this build, [The variable width font system] is not there at the moment, because we’re still trying to make sure we have all the text translated.”
Examples of the text not filling the text box properly.
Trekkies even rewrote how the name entry screen functioned to make the experience as smooth as possible:
“The name entry screen required a lot of hacking to get it to work properly. There were even some parts where I had to basically just write entirely new function, compile them, and then replace them. So basically what I had to do is I had to disable the three Japanese font systems, then increase the amount of characters per name. In the original Japanese, you had three characters for the first name, three characters for last name, and eight for your screen name. I had to increase it to six for your first name, six for your last name.”
Battle text is not fully implemented in this build, but it’s a work in progress. Even the Demon negotiation text was a massive undertaking in itself:
“The demon negotiation text was still partially implemented in this build. Basically for the 3DS version, the pointers are 32 bit, whereas on the Saturn and PS1 are 16 bit. I had convert over to 16 bit, but others were too big that I couldn’t fit them into 16 bits, so eventually what I had to do is I had to rework it to read 32 bit values just for these entries.”
Trekkies later submitted a build after the first entry that translates several of the battle elements such as demon names, item names, and attacks. With that change, it made the submission even more playable than it was before!
One of the biggest questions everyone has been asking Trekkies, though, is when will this be fully released? When asked, he replied, “It’s basically in the, “It’ll be done when it’s done” category.”
While this might be a little ways off, the progress Trekkies has made over the last year has been amazing, and we look forward to playing and covering this once the full release drops!
In the meantime, if you’d like to give the pre-release fan translation a try, you can download it from the SegaXtreme Competition thread.
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