Yep, we’re still around!

Things have been quiet around here, but I assure you we’re still at it.

Our Stuff

Appareden‘s translation draft is currently sitting at 79%, and all of that has been reinserted into the game. The worst of the bugs and crashes have been fixed, and the main assembly hacks have all been implemented, seemingly without breaking anything else.

We’ve begun work on translating and editing the images, too, after a painstaking process of ripping and unscrambling them all.

With that much of the game reinserted, we’ve been able to start an actual playthrough. Now the non-Japanese-speaking members of the team can see what the game is actually like! hollowaytape estimates he’s about 1/3 of the way through the game at this point. Here are a few things he’s seen along the way:

Just a reminder that Appareden has more text and images than our three previous projects combined. The game certainly feels much larger than the others – there’s plenty of exploration and optional things to do. So it may take some more time for us to finish, but we promise it’ll be worth the wait!

In other news, we pushed a minor update to E.V.O., Rusty, and CRW. No script or gameplay changes, just an update to Pachy98 v0.19.1, which fixes a few compatibility issues. If you had problems with missing DLL files before, try out the new version.

Other People’s Stuff

Back in October, the group P.O.BRE released a translation of 46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron into Brazilian Portuguese, based on ours. hollowaytape worked again on reinserting their new script, as well as setting up a custom font for displaying the custom Portuguese accented characters. While it’s surprisingly not the first Portuguese fan translation for the PC-98 (that’d be Marble Cooking, by the same group), it’s certainly cool to see it in a new language, and see it reach a new audience like this.

Also, a highly anticipated PC-98 translation came out in December – Brandish 2 Renewal, a dungeon-crawling action RPG by Falcom, translated by our friends Gu4n, preta, and JoseJL. It’s quite challenging but long and has a lot of depth, so give it a shot!

They’re also using Pachy98 to distribute it, so we’re glad we could help out in that way.

Finally, we learned about a new Japanese text-hooking tool by baka-neko called Font Based Character Recognizer (FBCR). You write a profile for it that tells it where text appears on the screen and what it looks like, and then it reads the game screen and extracts text from it to the clipboard. You can hook it up to various programs that read the clipboard and use Google Translate to give you a basic translation, which is pretty exciting! We’ve only used it a bit with Insiders, but we can confirm it does work with some configuration.

We’re hoping to experiment with it more soon, since these initial results are pretty promising. Having this initial rough idea of what a game is like would help discover new games that deserve a real translation effort.

These are exciting times for the PC-98 community! Lots of translation projects are ongoing, and some quite accomplished romhackers are crossing over to try their hand at PC-98 translations. If you want to see this as it happens, come chat with us and the other teams on the PC-98 Series Discord Server.