Our expectations on the response to CRW Metal Jacket were exceeded! (+Pachy98 Stuff)

So it’s been over 2 weeks since we released our English translation patch for CRW Metal Jacket, and let me tell you, the response has been well beyond what we were expecting. As the project page states, we were expecting the game to be a “weekend project” (which turned into about a month of real work after Rusty was completed) and just something that we did to kind of improve our general abilities with games on the PC-98 platform. The game itself is relatively obscure, not too long, and has a lot of little bugs and other things that feel unfinished or cut out. That doesn’t detract too much from it being a fun game with some solid gameplay, but it forced us to kind of moderate our expectations with how it’d be received when we released the translation patch.

Before we get too much into the response to CRW Metal Jacket, we thought it’d be fun and slightly topical to mention that Pachy98 has just been used to release an updated patch for Die Bahnwelt, a game developed by Glodia and released on Sharp x68000 computers! It’s a really great looking top-down action game set in a pretty neat science fiction world. Also, you’ll notice that I said Glodia developed the game, which is why I called this a sort of topical announcement as we just recently announced we were going to begin work on translating Different Realm: The Eternal Sage, also developed by Glodia. This is the first patch to use Pachy98 that wasn’t released by us here at 46 OkuMen, so it’s a neat thing for us to see. Find out more about it over at RadicalR and Non-Directional Translations’ site!

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Announcing a new project… Different Realm: The Eternal Sage!

For those of you who follow our group with any amount of frequency, this particular announcement will feel like it was a long time coming. When we started to explore our options for other games to work on when we were nearing the end of work on our first project, E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution, we came across a developer whose projects all seemed consistently well-made and well-received in Japan, but only one of their games (Emerald Dragon) had ever been ported to consoles and seen any kind of release outside of Japanese PC systems. So despite their obvious enthusiasm and love for their work, none of their games received any kind of attention from Western audiences aside from the aforementioned Emerald Dragon for the SNES receiving a fan translation in 2014.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, that company’s name is Glodia. One of their games in particular caught our eye as a super interesting RPG with a huge amount of lore surrounding the world itself, and we’re here to officially announce that we’re working on bringing that game to Western audiences with a proper English translation.

Different Realm: The Eternal Sage (ディファレント・レルム 久遠の賢者)

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Rusty around the web! Also a small update to the patcher

It’s been a few days since we released Rusty, and the response has been pretty great! You never really know what to expect while you work on these sorts of projects, but suffice to say all of our expectations were pretty much shattered by all of the positive reactions we’ve seen from press and individuals alike. Before we talk about that, let’s talk a bit about a few of the issues people faced while trying to use our patching process for Rusty.

First up, we accidentally included the x64 version of xdelta in our executable so anyone running the patcher on a 32-bit machine was unable to patch any of the files our patcher extracted from the Rusty disk images. Our bad. That’s been fixed. Another issue that we got a bunch of reports on was a bit more difficult for us to track down, but we did end up figuring out that a common build of the game is set to read-only. Whoops! We’ve included a better error message for that. Finally, we made the GDC Clock error message a little more clear (it’s translated in the game’s files now) so that people would know exactly what to check and where to look to get the game running. Not a huge amount for us to fix for this release, thankfully. Hopefully with this newer update to the patcher and the game’s files it’ll be even easier for you guys to patch and get the English version of Rusty up and running. You can get your hands on the new version over at the Rusty project page, or here:

Rusty Lite (Patcher Only) v1.0.1 – zip – 1060 download(s) – 9 MB

Onto the fun part of this post, let’s take a look at all of the things people have been saying around the web. The first responses to the release are usually found on Twitter, and there were certainly a bunch of people who retweeted our initial tweet about the release, and it was picked up soon after by @RPGSite and @Suprise_News. After that, a number of articles started popping up starting off with Indie Retro News, Siliconera, and even our friends down under at Kotaku AU wrote a nice article about it. Those are just the English publications. There were also a number of foreign articles written by Otaku Freaks (Spanish), RetroGaming History (Italian), and RetroVillage (Italian). There have also been a few videos posted on YouTube that have the patch applied already as well (Svati and Hengki).

All in all, it’s been a fun release and we’re glad that you guys seem to have been enjoying it as well. We’ll hopefully have some more things for you guys to mess with coming soon!

Rustea Sprincul has arrived. Our translation patch for Rusty is out!

So it’s been a few months since we released E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution and announced a whole slew of new projects that we’d start working on. Well, we’ve got something to show off for all of our work. Here, have a translation patch for Rusty!

Rusty Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.0.0 – zip – 2600 download(s) – 15 MB Rusty Lite (Patcher Only) v1.0.0 – zip – 978 download(s) – 7 MB Rusty Mac/Linux Patches v1.0.0 – zip – 743 download(s) – 471 KB Rusty Manual v1.0.0 – zip – 2633 download(s) – 7 MB

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Our E.V.O. (PC-98) translation gets an update and an easier patching process!

We’ve updated our translation of E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution! If you had trouble patching your copy of the game before, try it again with our new patching program, which works on many more builds of the game.

E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.1.0 – zip – 1506 download(s) – 25 MB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Lite (Patcher Only) v1.1.0 – zip – 1020 download(s) – 6 MB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Mac/Linux Patches v1.1.0 – zip – 719 download(s) – 507 KB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Manual v1.0.0 – zip – 3106 download(s) – 16 MB
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E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution (PC-98) is out!

We’ve done it.

This is the official release announcement for 46 OkuMen’s English translation patch for Enix’s E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution (46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron) on the PC-98 system. If you know what you’re doing, download the patch here and enjoy! Check out the project page for more information about the game as well as the links to the patch and the fully translated manual which has a bunch of cool and helpful information. There’s also more information about the history and process we went through in translating and romhacking the game itself, as well as references we found in the game.

E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.1.2 – zip – 18172 download(s) – 24 MB

If this is your first time playing a game on the PC-98 system, we recommend checking out our short emulation setup guide before playing.

A Third Project Announcement? You’re Damn Right

So I know what some of you may be thinking. Why announce three projects when you’ve barely finished with your first one? Well, we’ve taken a sort of do what you’re interested in approach to working on projects. hollowaytape tinkers with the romhacking and programming aspects he is having more fun with at the time, while kuoushi works on translating other projects that are simpler in terms of text dumping. That way we both have things to keep busy with and spend less time sitting on our thumbs. We’ll see how it works as far as finishing things, but it’s at least more fun that way.

Now to the meat of today’s announcement.

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Dawn of the Second Day of Project Announcements

Hope everyone’s recovered after our totally huge and shocking announcement that we’ve been working on translating Rusty even though we said we’d been looking into it as an option before. If that announcement didn’t particularly shock you, this one might not either. It’s still a fun announcement that we’re officially working on another project though, so let’s get right into it.

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Announcing The Several Days of Holiday Announcements!

Happy Holidays!

It seems like everyone likes to announce and release cool new things at the end of the year to celebrate the holidays. As we’re relatively new, we don’t exactly have a whole hell of a lot to announce or release, but I feel like we’ve got some things brewing that might be interesting or exciting to some of you!

With that being said, we’d like to start off a sort of 46 OkuMen advent calendar. For the next few days, we’ll be posting something new every day that we’ve been working on for you guys to look forward to starting in 2017! So anyway, here’s our announcement for day one…

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