46 OkuMen is now two years older!

This actually happened yesterday, but between focus on real life and working on Appareden, we didn’t get this post out on the exact anniversary date. We’ll hit that date next year with something cool maybe. Or just another one of these posts, which should also totally count as something cool. Also, we didn’t post a one year anniversary post because we hadn’t exactly released any translation patches yet. Hell, we didn’t even have a group name until a month after that, and a website a month after that. That should give you an idea about how young the group really is.

In any case, let’s get to the meat of today’s post!

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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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Now that CRW’s out, it’s time to introduce our new patcher – Pachy98!

So if you downloaded our recent release of CRW Metal Jacket, you’ll notice that the patching process is a little different from what you may be used to. It doesn’t even resemble the patching process we ended up making for E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution or Rusty either. Well, that’s because we decided to strip it down and make it as lean as possible to pass the savings onto you. But mostly just to make it compatible with as many computers as we could. The other thing we did was make the executable itself generic and take a configuration file as an input so that we wouldn’t have to build a new patcher for every single release.

Since this tool is helping us with our releases, we figured it might help others interested in the PC-98 to release their patches as well, so we cleaned it up and slapped a name on it, written some documentation for it, and now it’s available for you guys as an early beta version.

Oh, and we’re calling it Pachy98.

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Time to visit Neo Japan and quell those insurrections. CRW’s English translation patch is now released!

Happy Canada 150 to all those Canadians out there. What better way to spend the 150th anniversary of a nice friendly mom and pop country than killing insurgents and terrorists in future Japan? Our translation patch for CRW Metal Jacket is now available!

CRW Metal Jacket Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.0.3 – zip – 21561 download(s) – 21 MB
CRW Metal Jacket Lite (Patcher Only) v1.0.3 – zip – 2196 download(s) – 5 MB
CRW Metal Jacket Mac/Linux Patches v1.0.2 – zip – 1790 download(s) – 626 KB
CRW Metal Jacket Manual v1.0.0 – zip – 1894 download(s) – 15 MB

Head on over to the Project page if you want to read more.

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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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