Bliss! frustration!

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#1

got my princess maker memorial box!

… PM3 is hiding all of its text from me. :frowning:

Well, not all. I’ve found and translated all the text in the little mouse-over displays that come up when shopping or choosing jobs or classes. Those are all stored in the exe and easy to find. But everything else is somehow escaping me… and if I can’t get at least the stats translated it’ll kinda suck to play… sigh.

(Haven’t even tried launching pm4 or pm5 yet.)

(If vague references to hexediting games I have paid for is naughty, kindly inform me and I’ll shut up.)

#2

Which OS are you using - with which locale-settings activated?

If it would happen to be WinXP:
Some japanese games require not only the SYSTEM-locale, but also the USER-locale being set to japanese. For example all my Will-games needed that setting for displaying japanese charactersets. Having the charatersets installed is not enough here!

#3

No, no, it’s not a matter of getting the Japanese displayed on screen, it does that fine - it’s a matter of finding the code embedded in the source files so that I can look it up and replace it with something readable.

for example, ‘82 CC’ is a hex code you will tend to see a LOT if you find text, because it’s shift-jis for the ‘no’ character. And once you find it, you can replace it with romaji or english.

It’s just that my ability to read Japanese is still at the level of ‘I recognise maybe five symbols by sight’… :slight_smile: and learning to hex edit was a lot easier than learning to read. sigh.

#4

Ah, then I fear you are indeed out of luck, because:

  • most of the narrative text is usually encoded in so-called scenario-files that sometimes hide the shift-jis-codes by using a kind of compression

  • the status-display should be a CG that has the inscriptions embedded into the graphic itself - and graphics are usually hidden in a ressource-file that also has a maker-dependent kind of encoding

Both are only wild guesses though, because I actually don’t have the memorial box myself. I originally planned to buy it myself, but a delayed release-date of another game that I wanted to order together with the memorial box ruined my plans.

#5

I’m sure it’s some kind of compression, it’s a matter of whether I can find sufficiently talented hackers to get at it. :slight_smile:

Been playing a little anyway… with scribbled down translations of the stats that are in katakana in the hopes that I will eventually learn to read them. The more complicated ones I’m ignoring for now. Practice and lots of fansites help figure out the stats, unfortunately she’s a talkative little thing and she keeps piping up with stuff and I have no clue what she’s on about… until I say yes or no, I have no idea if she was asking to take more classes or to cut class next week… :slight_smile:

(I have stuck PM4 into the computer just long enough to check that it runs, and it looks like it is one that will need the region set in order to run it, the text isn’t displaying correctly. But it can wait.)

edit - agth works on pm4. woot! Even without the location set. No such luck on 3.

Anyway, I’m happy with my box even if it will occasionally drive me mad with my lack of language. :slight_smile:

[ 07-12-2007, 12:56 PM: Message edited by: papillon ]

#6

I decided to learn Japanese. Since I was making crappy progress in this direction, I decided to enroll in classes at a community college. That helped quite a bit but I still have a looooong way to go.

The thought of learning how to hex edit a game makes me cringe. I may be a programmer, but I’m no hacker.

#7