Phantasy Star Generation 2: English Translation

[estus777]

I would absolutely throw down some dough to get this game playable. The freezing at the battle results screen makes me upset

[TheSegaDude]

Cool. But I think we're stuck waiting until someone that is or was involved in the project makes public the work/source.

Hello?... any of you guys out there?

[Shinto-Cetra]

Cool. But I think we're stuck waiting until someone that is or was involved in the project makes public the work/source.

Hello?... any of you guys out there?

I never heard back from Kyence. Not much more I can do at this point.

[TheSegaDude]

Thank you for trying!

Maybe Kyence will visit here at some point and see what we're hoping for.

[SandyLandale]

I never heard back from Kyence. Not much more I can do at this point.

Yeah, I never got an email from her either. Oh well.

[LordGiodai]

I never heard back from Kyence. Not much more I can do at this point.

Yeah, I never got an email from her either. Oh well.

Could you possibly be blacklisted at her e-mail? Can anybody else try to contact her?

[darkwraith007]

After my little anti-repro rant, I half-expected to get banned from the forums already. Or maybe I don't post here that often to worry about it.
I stated previously that the market for programmers/coders willing to work on translations and other bits is severely-limited.
-Tomato (of Aeon Genesis Translations) moved on to paid work at a professional translation company & is a book author. Awesome to see the success
-Gideon Zhi (also of Aeon Genesis) is still around but even they are having trouble finding dedicated knowledgeable coders willing to do the work (unpaid and for free) in their spare time.
-Neill Corlett, the legend of romhacking, responsible for the Seiken Densetsu 3 translation is now working at Google NYC and has a paid position; retired from the scene

The long and short of it is that the great people who did amazing translations for cartridge games not only saw their work plagiarized by profiteering bastards, but that they had to deal with endless hostility from people after the 'hard drive crash' incident. Some dorks never forgave them for it and some accuse them (to this day) of faking it. Ugh. >_>

And when it comes to Playstation 2 stuff, the market is even smaller. You'd need to find someone who's a great coder AND a fan of the Phantasy Star series; enough to get this done.
I've been poking around on Nexus doing mods for FF12 Zodiac Age. A PC port of the Playstation 2 game. Even there, it is difficult to find people willing to help decipher the custom archival formats that the game is using, especially when it comes to text changes.

I'll keep an ear to the ground and poke around to see if I can find a knowledgeable person who knows the Playstation 2 architecture well enough to finish this up.

And btw SandyLandale, I agree with you on doing this type of stuff for the love of the games. I've always personally released my work under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Sharealike. I don't see much point in claiming 'copyright' over it, but then again I haven't done a lot of in-depth stuff; just minor mods.

I'm usually hanging out on Discord nowandays and doing bits here and there on Steam Workshop and Nexus Mods.

[Novyal]

Shame that this project will remain incomplete.

But you have to keep in mind that fan translations are made by fans on their own free time for free. So they don't owe us anything and have no obligation to finish their projects.

When they do it's great, but we really can't ask more of them since it was their own choice to do it to begin with.

Even if they won't do anything more, I am still grateful for the work they did on this project! Thanks a bunch guys!

The fans still got a playable version of Phantasy Star Generation 2, and that's good enough for now.
Maybe one day someone will pick up where the previous team left and fix the bugs, but until then, this will do.

Cheers!

[Blaw-]

Guys, look, at this point we have to face the fact that an update's not coming.

I emailed Tryphon for something simple--I wanted the opcodes for the character portraits of PSG:1. Something simple that just requires telling me who makes what face, since I can't tell who is speaking by the text codes "[portrait 1]", "[portrait 2]", etc. I asked that back in December to no response.

Kyence has said she's not interested in finishing up the PSG:2 translation. I can't do anything without Tryphon, who seems to not want to do anything with this project anymore. It's not coming.

I don't know anything about fixing up improper translations, or coding, or patch types; I can't code worth beans and I don't know very much Japanese. I just worked on revising and playtesting PSG:1 v2.10. I wish I could do something, but I can't. I can't fly to France and force Tryphon to work on these games any more than I can code anything myself.

As the last remaining member of the team, I give anyone reading the PSG:1 and 2 teams' full permission to finalize these translations for play on real hardware. I'll even help out, unless something happens to me. But for now, it's over. It's not how I wanted it to go, and if I had ever imagined things would go like this, I wouldn't have signed on at all. I'm sorry.

I will upload the "final" version of the tools (which are named "algoring") I have for PSGEN2. Tryphon seems to have dissapeared so if it can be used by some other peoples, why not.

Edit : Here's the link of the tools : http://www.hiei-tf.fr/algoring-psgen2-final.rar (note that the documentation is in french and that the tools require to have python installed on your Windows operating System). Here's the name of the three python packs I had to install to get the tools working on Windows 7 : Python 2.7 numpy-1.6.2 ; Python 2.7 Pillow-2.5.3 ; Python 2.7 pygame-1.9-1. Tools are able to directly create a working iso, in the "output" folder. Just try to run "create.bat" in the root of the tools and if everything is configured fine on your computer, it should output a working (french) iso.

http://www.hiei-tf.fr/temp/Python/

It would require to find a way to redump the english text files to edit them, except if someone already have them (I'm not sure I do but I will look on my computer), but I think it can be done as the tools can dump the japanese text files from the original iso, so they should be able to dump the english files from the english iso (or either just try to contact kyence and ask for the english text files if she still has them, even if it's not the final version, it would be better than nothing). I'll try to see if I can redump them from the english beta version.

At least, if someone want to do a german or italian (or any other language) fan translation, it can be done with those tools (the random item drop bug doesn't appear on PCSX2 so the game is 100% playable on emulators. I can be wrong, but I think the tools I actually have make a version without the random item drop at all, because it never crashed on the real hardware for me, but I never got any item drops after a battle. I didn't even knew it was possible before someone said it to me, it would need to be checked on the version of the game the tools I have produce).

About PSGEN1, I can't do much. The tools are also compatible with PSGEN1 but the support was still a bit buggy for this game and was never finalized.

I can also open the private forums where we talked about technical things about the game, but bear in mind we are french so we were talking in french there. So you'll either have to be able to read french or to use an online translator.

Edit : Here's the url of the forums : http://www.hiei-tf.fr/psgen2

I forgot how to make smf forums read only for everyone so I created an user. Username : pscave ; Password : algoring

Everyone who wants to look at those forums can use this account.

Maybe we could open a new thread for the tools, if some people are interested, as there are some tricks to know to make them work properly.

I can say the main text files are in the EVENT.DAT files but the tools doesn't want to dump the english ISO files properly. So it would require to look a bit in the dump.py code, see how to decompile it (which would give .lzr files), then use the tools in \bin\ to decode the files then you would be able to extract the english text files.

(Or maybe the best would be to retranslate the game from french. Kyence herself said long ago that her japanese skills were not perfect and I also think she started the translation before algoring was made and so have some texts shrinked to fit in the original text limits of the game.)



But the easiest way would be if Kyence still have her files, I'll try to message her, never say never!

[darkwraith007]

Blaw; thanks again for your amazing contributions
It is probably best to go from Japanese to English because Japanese to French to English will produce an inferior translation.
Also it seems that translation isn't the issue but fixing the item crash bug is the issue.

Based on my limited rom hacking knowledge from using Temporal Flux with Chrono Trigger SNES rom, I have no clue how Phantasy Star Generations is laid out but I see two distinct ways to solve it.

Easy Method - Disable item drops after battle completely which bypasses the bug. One potential issue with this is event-specific items given after battle need some alternate method (talk to an NPC? spawn a chest with the item?) to obtain the item to make sure the game can be completed.

Hard Method - Figure out what code is causing the item drop bug and then burn/playtest on a modded region-free Playstation 2 console. Ideally using a 'softmod' called FreeMcBoot, but also potentially possible to test with 'hardware modded' version as well.

Honestly at this point, I feel that it might be better to disable item drops and then do testing to see if any event-specific items are obtained after battle and to bypass those into alternative methods (talk to an NPC, spawn a chest, etc) if possible. My search into finding someone who knows Playstation 2 coding/architecture has come up empty. Those that I already know in the modding scene who know things are already busy in programming jobs or other professional paid work and don't have the time/enthusiasm/patience for work like this.

As far as myself, I lack the coding knowledge to do a deep-dive of things without better editing tools being made available. If a proper editor was available (or something with a debug version of PCSX2) to translate executed instructions into human-readable code (aka not raw assembly language but something closer to Python in syntax) then I could figure something out. But I can't do a damn thing with Playstation 2 assembly language.

So I will check back in another month or so to see how things progress (or dont progress) and if anyone needs to reach me please poke me on Discord and identify yourself as a PSCave member. Thanks.

[Blaw-]

About the quality of a translation, I would like to say it's not always true, often but not always.

A translation, even translated twice, could be far better than a direct translation, for example if the guy doing the direct translation doesn't know the language enough to make a proprer job.

About the bug, does it happen on PCSX2 too? Because I never got the bug on it, or maybe my version is modified and I don't know it (and same, I never got the bug with the USB loader).

And the game can be completed without the item drops, items which are dropped are not required to complete the game.

I'm also pretty sure Tryphon explained what caused the problem, but I'm not sure if it was here or if it was on the french forum, which could help to fix it.*

But basically, for a coder, it should be pretty easy to fix. Just need to play the game with a debug version of PCSX2 and look what happen when the item drop is triggered (first on the japanese version, then on the english version).

Edit : The bug is explained here : viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3175&p=57378#p57377

He had fixed it but tweaked other things as the same time so we couldn't say it's a final fix.

[Blaw-]

I contacted Tryphon and he answered, so I'll see what can be done about it.

[Blaw-]

Tryphon said he'll look at it in a few days.

[TheSegaDude]

I can't contribute much here... but I will say I love seeing this activity. Thanks all for trying to get this rolling again.
These Phantasy Star Remakes are why I still have my modded PS2.

[uVSthem]

It looks like the crash bug has been fix in the French translation. Will the English patch be fixed anytime soon?

http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2301/