[v1.0 RELEASED] Death Crimson 2: Altar of Melanito (English Translation Patch)

[ateam]

UPDATE (2024-02-13):
Patch v1.0 has been released! Click here to jump to the post.
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Hi everyone,

A little over a month ago, I replied to this thread here on the forums which discussed a potential English translation patch for the Japanese-exclusive "Death Crimson 2: Altar of Melanito". After spending some time with the game data, I've written all of the tools I've needed for complete text extraction and insertion, as well as numerous assembly hacks to make everything work smoothly.

Insanely, all of the game's text is stored directly in the executable itself! My tools essentially just move everything around and adjust all pointers so that I can fit as much English text as I need. Furthermore, I'll be taking advantage of the game's katakana and hiragana fonts that are always present in RAM to store additional text that doesn't fit in the executable. This is actually a very fortunate circumstance, as A) I no longer need either of those font sheets and B) they afford me over 12K in extra space.

I can't give any firm timelines on this project's completion, but I wanted to share with everyone a work-in-progress preview video. As always, I will be working hard to give this game the 100% polish that it (and all Dreamcast games) deserves. In addition to translating all Japanese text, I will be:

• Redoing the title screen's menu graphics (the original are seen in this preview video, which I find a bit hideous).
• Replacing the "Dream Passport" option on the title screen with an English-language web browser with baked in bonus content, like a 100% unlocked save, and perhaps some artwork.
• Subtitling all FMVs in English.
• Probably implementing a hotkey button combo for giving the player 255 credits at any point during the game (effectively infinite continues).

[fafadou]

This fabulous tool adjusting pointers, should be very precious for others translation project ?
How many time I spend with, during grandia 2 french translation project.

else fabulous job as always !

[cbnj]

Okay, this was pretty quick, and is great! do you ever had interest to make tools for recv game?
Also, i always use Google translate to translate text, do you use the same?

[ateam]

Okay, this was pretty quick, and is great! do you ever had interest to make tools for recv game?

Unfortunately I have no spare time to help others with tooling right now. Sorry!

Also, i always use Google translate to translate text, do you use the same?

I only use machine translation for testing, but I always work with real translators when it comes to actually publishing a full patch.

If you want to do something small (i.e., not too text-heavy) that won't suffer horribly from machine translation, I suggest a combination of Google Translate, DeepL, and believe it or not, ChatGPT. In fact, I've seen ChatGPT deliver more accurate results than all other forms of machine translation (when cross-referenced with Japanese-speaking friends of mine). Wild times!

Take "Death Crimson 2" here for example. It contains about 2,000 lines of dialogue, as well as hundreds and hundreds of additional text strings used everywhere besides the in-game dialogue/cutscenes.

You can also use Yandex OCR for Japanese character recognition, which can help you with graphics or for finding where text is stored.

[CORE316]

This is awesome news Thank You for your efforts

Not trying to be ungrateful or a pest but thought I drop these two Games that could do with a Translation sometime in the future maybe.

Space Griffon -V9
Hundred Swords

[cbnj]

ateam

Very well, ill give a check on those tools, thanks.

[Gromber]

amazing project, hope the problem with some lightguns can be fixed, not working with my eu lightgun in a pal dreamcast with rgb scart cable.

[ateam]

amazing project, hope the problem with some lightguns can be fixed, not working with my eu lightgun in a pal dreamcast with rgb scart cable.

Very interesting. Does anybody have a PAL console and a non-PAL light gun with which to test? Preferably with ability to try composite, VGA, and RGB separately. I just want to narrow down the light gun as the issue.

To increase the chance that I can address this, I'm asking those on Twitter/X to repost this:
https://twitter.com/DerekPascarella/sta ... 7819321653

EDIT:
Here's a quick test patch GDI I'd ask any PAL console and PAL light gun owners to try. Does it behave the same? Does it behave differently?
<LINK REMOVED>

EDIT 2:
I also found this thread confirming the issue with other users: https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/vi ... hp?t=15894

EDIT 3:
Nevermind trying the patch above. I was able to have someone test it and it didn't solve the issue. I'm really not sure what could be at play with the game recognizing the PAL gun, but refusing to work with it. I tried forcing 480p60hz no matter what cable or console is detected, as I suspected it may be a video initialization issue at play. It may still be, but I have no idea if my theory on the PAL light gun having its own quirks is totally insane, or grounded in an idea worth exploring further, haha.

EDIT 4:
Turns out guy testing was using a JP gun all along and didn't know it. I've got someone else who'll test though. I have to honestly state, however, that I have A LOT of work to do for this game, and I'm not optimistic about fixing the light gun issue for certain PAL combinations. Perhaps I'll ping megavolt.

[mistamontiel]

I thought this is the one largely free roaming around and lightgun was more afterthought

Very interested meself! Gooo Derek!

[cbnj]

A ligthgun... so there actually exist and some ppl owns a DC ligthgun... probably around 0.5 percent of DC owners have one!