Old Computer Appreciation Thread

Folly

Hi,

Was a bit curious if I was able to translate japanese text from a screenshot of a game.
( how are you translating @AdamBeGood ? )

Isolated the text > online OCR > online translator :

Isolated the text > tesseract OCR (open source) > online translator :

I was thinking, should it be possible to "under title" a game with translations this way.

I read about patches, but these are not made for all games.

Zering

@folly There are quite a few games on the PC98 that have been translated thankfully, but if your idea worked that'd be pretty amazing.

Folly

@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:

@folly There are quite a few games on the PC98 that have been translated thankfully, but if your idea worked that'd be pretty amazing.

Yes, I saw many for the PC98 (also the patches).
Well perhaps I will do some more tests. Would be an extremely nice feature in Retropie if this could be done. :)

Zering

@folly Indeed! So many of those games would deserve a translation but aren't.
Do you think this sort of thing would be within the realm of possibility? I imagine it would take a pretty big toll on the Pi's CPU no?

Folly

@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:

@folly Indeed! So many of those games would deserve a translation but aren't.
Do you think this sort of thing would be within the realm of possibility? I imagine it would take a pretty big toll on the Pi's CPU no?

Indeed, a big toll if all frames would have to be processed. Perhaps it's better to let the user decide when a translation has to be made. (by pressing or every 30 seconds or so)

Zering

@folly What about a situation in which the 'translations would be streamed from another device, ie. a PC or a phone?

Folly

@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:

@folly What about a situation in which the 'translations would be streamed from another device, ie. a PC or a phone?

Good idea, then the load is more on that device.

I have used a VNC connection with my PI to a tablet. Using the tabled as a display. I was able to play games. So this would be possible.

Zering

@folly What would it take to make something like this happen then?

Folly

@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:

@folly What would it take to make something like this happen then?

Well, if it could be done directly on the pi, then screenshots have to be pushed to tesseract-ocr, the created text then have to be shifted to a translator (online or offline (open source)), then put back to Retroarch as an overlay.

Ofcourse, that's a lot of work. Pfff....

Will try some. (but indeed, perhaps it's not feasible)

Zering

@folly I literally did not understand a word ^^
Is there anything you can work from? Surely somebody somewhere must have had a similar idea.

Folly

@zering

I will explain a bit better.

I didn't expect, but it could be quite easy when using just a screenshot made in the normal way.

manually did this test :

made a screenshot of "oilswell" with the screen "select game with joystick"
used tesseract to recognise and save the text from the picture
used "trans"(commandline google translate shell) to read the text file (it recognises my language and translates to that)
then I can use "xosd-bin" to overlay the text in the game. (tested this program and it works)

Will see if i can automate that. Curious what the result will be.
My script has to look , on the fly, for pictures, delete them, translate and show them. Seems possible !!!

Zering

@folly You're a true computer whiz! I've learnt more about this stuff just chatting with you than I have most of the time I've had the Pi.
I'm very excited to hear the results.

Folly

@zering

here is a picure from the test :

text size and color can be change, I think. (did not test yet)

AdamBeGood

@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:

@adambegood Figured out the C Issue. For this game, set your Joypad D-Pad to Mouse/Keyboard/Joypad Mapping to Arrow 3Button. Edit : Or is it Keypad 3-button? One of those two work.

Can I just say how much I adore the graphics on this system? That extra resolution is just gorgeous (same for the PC88 to a lesser extent).

Keypad 3-button! Perfect. Really gutted I didn't get there myself though. Great work.

I think it is a good looking machine, hopefully I can make some progress in Night Slave and Rusty now. :)

Folly

@adambegood

Nice to hear it works. Happy playing !

AdamBeGood

@folly I've just caught up on all this translation stuff! Would be amazing if it could be done.

I use patches or if it is a one-off like an instruction to change disks that I don't understand, I point a Google Translate camera at the screen. Very unsophisticated system over here!

Zering

@adambegood Excellent, glad you could get it to work! Today's been pretty productive, between Night Slave and getting the FM7 to run decently. Sadly I have to say my attempts to run X1 games in Mess have failed miserably but I'm going to try again tomorrow.

@Folly I take it the red text is the overlay?

Folly

@adambegood said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:

@folly I've just caught up on all this translation stuff! Would be amazing if it could be done.

I use patches or if it is a one-off like an instruction to change disks that I don't understand, I point a Google Translate camera at the screen. Very unsophisticated system over here!

Actually, I was thinking that you did it that way.

I don't know how the results will be. But it's worth a shot. Don't you think so ?

Folly

@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:

@Folly I take it the red text is the overlay?

Yep.

Zering

@folly Seems like it works, in theory. As most games require you to press a button to get new text, would it be possible to cut down the performance issues by mapping the script to a hotkey combination? Thay way you're only ever processing one frame at a time.