Old Computer Appreciation Thread
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@zering Let me try Cho Ren Sha again this morning, it was only very briefly that I played it yesterday.
I don't play Night Slave when Camille is up, it is for nap times! The hentai bit is very weird, I can't work out how it ties in to the game. The cut scenes are so long as well, there is so much text. Tried to leave my Google Translate camera on to make sense of it yesterday but it was gibberish mostly...
SD Snatcher sounds good, I haven't done any of them so I can't comment on the bad guy's motivation. My intent is to play a bit of all of the games I have collated in this recent, X68000, PC88/98 spree and then move on to focus on SD Snatcher.
I haven't played any Final Fantasy! Apart from Final Fantasy Legend on Gameboy, when that was out about 30 years ago. Started FFVII on PS Classic but then Pi tinkering has taken over.
Games to finish currently are -
Monster World IV - Megadrive
Final Fantasy VII - PSX
God of War: Chains of Olympus - PSP
HalfLife - PortsThose are the ones I've significantly started and now finished.
Intend to play through some shooters as well, I've finished Ikaruga and DeathSmiles recently, but need to run through loads more. I just get frustrated when I am dying constantly, but I won't get better unless I put time in and learn some patterns.
Edit: but how can you play Illusion City without it being completely translated? Isn't that super frustrating?
I've never heard of PC-FX! Seems like there isn't too much on it, 60 games or so. Was it easy to emulate?
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@adambegood said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:
I don't play Night Slave when Camille is up, it is for nap times! The hentai bit is very weird, I can't work out how it ties in to the game. The cut scenes are so long as well, there is so much text. Tried to leave my Google Translate camera on to make sense of it yesterday but it was gibberish mostly...
Whew, that threw me for a loop! ^^ Whoever named your toddler has good taste! ^^
There's no need for the hentai bits to tie in ; it's a PC98 game! ^^ You'll find there's often an erotic component to those games for seemingly no reason. I'm not sure which game it was ; I think it was Dragon Knight III ; you start out utterly naked and have to walk around town in your nakedness until you find clothes.SD Snatcher sounds good, I haven't done any of them so I can't comment on the bad guy's motivation. My intent is to play a bit of all of the games I have collated in this recent, X68000, PC88/98 spree and then move on to focus on SD Snatcher.
If you haven't played a Snatcher game before, I would recommend you play through the Sega CD version before you play SD Snatcher. The story is somewhat cut down in SD, as expected, and it's worth experiencing fully before you dive into SD.
I haven't played any Final Fantasy! Apart from Final Fantasy Legend on Gameboy, when that was out about 30 years ago. Started FFVII on PS Classic but then Pi tinkering has taken over.
That surprises me somewhat! Did you get (or get back) into gaming late, or were you a Sega/Nintendo player back then?
Final Fantasy is essential, VII and IX are some of the best games on the PS1.
Having said that, Final Fantasy Legend actually has nothing to do with Final Fantasy ; it's the first SaGa game, marketed as FF for the american market.Games to finish currently are -
Monster World IV - Megadrive
Final Fantasy VII - PSX
God of War: Chains of Olympus - PSP
HalfLife - PortsYou are going to have a blast with Final Fantasy VII. I wish I could be in your shoes, discovering that game for the first time.
Intend to play through some shooters as well, I've finished Ikaruga and DeathSmiles recently, but need to run through loads more. I just get frustrated when I am dying constantly, but I won't get better unless I put time in and learn some patterns.
DeathSmiles plays on the Pi 4?
Edit: but how can you play Illusion City without it being completely translated? Isn't that super frustrating?
6 out of eight disks have been translated, and that's seemingly all we're going to get.
I've never heard of PC-FX! Seems like there isn't too much on it, 60 games or so. Was it easy to emulate?
Yes and no. It's a console so it's just a matter of popping BIOS and ROMS onto the Pi, but in my experience it requires an overclock to run smoothly.
I'm not sure it's worth emulating unless you want everything running on the Pi, there's only a handful of games that are worth playing (God Fighter Zeroigar, Zenki Vajra Fight...). There are a bunch of RPGs I'd love to play, but they're untranslated and it seems the PCFX community has chosen to translate dating sims like Pia Carrot instead. I don't understand it, but I'm curious enough to try it. -
@zering Thank you very much, yep Camille Delta Bud. As much my work as anyone’s! :p
Are the Dragon Knights playable without being translated? Or have you got translations for those? I couldn’t see a translation from an initial Google.
Thanks for the advice on Snatcher - I’ll do the Sega CD version first then! That is good to know. That version is officially translated also, which probably helps with getting the total “gist”!
I was a Nintendo (and PC until I went to Uni and couldn’t afford a good enough PC) man back in the day - even up to GameCube, I wish I hadn’t been such a zealot. I missed out on a lot, when I also had the time to play. I didn’t have FF IX on my Classic, I’ll get that now. I do need to play FF VII. Not a fan of XIII? I hear it gets mixed reviews.
DeathSmiles works on mame2016 if you underclock the emulator. It’s not perfect but it is playable. Other later Cave games are also.
I just couldn’t start Illusion City knowing I cannot finish it. I think I’ll hold off PC-FX also, I don’t like having consoles with a couple of games on my Pi (thought they look nice enough). Also, my OCD means that I have to mess a lot with the theme to add a new system - so I have to really want it!
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@adambegood There was an official localization of Dragon Knight III on DOS, released as 'Knights of Xentar'. It works well on the Pi. I'm sure I've got a patch for Dragon Knight IV, but I can't find a track of it on the web so maybe I've made that up in my head.
Hey Nintendo's great! The Gamecube was a superb system, even against the PlayStation 2. You've probably played a ton of stuff I regret not playing back then. I completely missed out on Zelda, for example, and only played through Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past for the first time this year.
I've just finished SD Snatcher. Konami did it again. The game is tough at times but pretty fair, and overall fairly easy. Then comes the final boss. It's utterly ridiculous. He takes little to no damage, dishes out attacks that deal up to 190 points of damage (out of a maximum of 255), attacks every turn and almost never misses... It's tedious as all hell. But the game was excellent, I'm very happy I played through it. I think it's ahead of its time in many ways. For starters, it's HUGE. I'm pretty sure it took me +35 hours to play through, when most RPGS of the time can be played through in 20. The combat system is addictive, it kind of prefigures Hybrid Heaven in the way you can target different body parts on enemies and 'disassemble' them piece by piece. It's pretty brilliant.
And man, the music.
When a game has tedium, I generally leave it feeling a bit annoyed. But in spite of the tedium I'm quite satisfied with the experience. I suppose it helped that I didn't use save states for once, they tend to color the experience negatively. But I think it balanced the usual 8-bit RPG tedium with enough addictive gameplay and stunning presentation that it works out fine in the end. I will say the final dungeon of the game is insanely long (took me 6-7 hours), too long ; a chance to resupply halfway through would have made it a lot less tedious but I suppose it would have taken away from the urgency of the narrative.
Anyway, I recommend it. The narrative is the same as Snatcher overall but the story beats differ a fair bit, to accomodate for the radically different gameplay, which is great. It's an excellent compliment to the original game.
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Hi guy's
Made a repository for the translation script.
Here you can see the progress, if there is any :
https://github.com/FollyMaddy/retropie-translator(beware : it can have mistakes)
If you want to try, you can give it a shot, if you know what your doing.
For now I'm not going to work further on it.
While testing I detected that google has a limit (was expected).
So that's not really helpfull.But it is nice to have the basics in a repository.
EDIT:
10/11/2020 updated with bing script with separate text to speech synthesizer -
@folly Well I'll say well done anyway, there was bound to be some sort of limitation but if you hadn't done the work you wouldn't be aware of it.
Thanks for trying to make this work! -
@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:
@folly Well I'll say well done anyway, there was bound to be some sort of limitation but if you hadn't done the work you wouldn't be aware of it.
Thanks for trying to make this work!Indeed, thanks for your support.
Perhaps there is a way to get around it.
Well I don't know.Translation-shell has possible alternative engines :
- bing (working, but only text output)
- yandex (not working at the moment)
- apertium offline translator (didn't test, but has no Japanese)
Seems to be future work.
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@adambegood Just realized I completely forgot to answer your question about Final Fantasy. I don't think XIII is horrible, I just don't think it's good either. It's average in most respects. I find it aesthetically ugly for the most part, although it has moments of greatness and it was graphically impressive back on release. But the combat system, while fast-paced, is just too limited, the game is massively linear, and worst of all, the story makes no sense whatsoever and the characters are extremely unlikeable. I'd pass on it if I were you. For me the series reached its peak with VII and IX. X is also great. I never really played XII, but some people say it's incredible.
I'd recommend IV, VI, VII and IX to a new starter. VIII is probably a good place to start as well, but I can't recommend it myself as I think the game is horrible.
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@folly said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:
Perhaps there is a way to get around it.
Well I don't know.Translation-shell has possible alternative engines :
- bing (working, but only text output)
- yandex (not working at the moment)
- apertium offline translator (didn't test, but has no Japanese)
Seems to be future work.
The repository looks good, nice to have that all noted down for when the infrastructure to implement it catches up a bit. It's a great idea regardless!
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@zering I just wrote a proper response to this, and the early message also, but I lost it on my phone browser. Most vexing.
I'll go with what you're saying then and continue with VII as the jump-off. I have IX and the SNES ones also. I am getting a bit panicked about how little time I have and how many games, tinkering fits around work so much better than actually getting stuck into a game.
I've got some PC games working today - Descent 1 and 2, Mechwarrior 2 and Turrican 2. Oh and Xentar as you mentioned it! Adding some odds and ends to my C64 library also, as I had basically nothing in there.
Tinkering needs to end!
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@adambegood Tinkering never ends. Tinkering is fun.
As for the SNES FF games, I would actually recommend you play the GBA versions with graphics and music patches, at least for IV, which is very much compromised on the SNES (as opposed to the Super Famicom).
I tinkered a bit with the MSX myself today and finally got the saves in Metal Gear 2 to work through openmsx, by using a .dsk version of the game instead of a .rom.
I was wondering @Folly if you knew what the plus and minus of .dsk over .rom were? -
@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:
@adambegood Tinkering never ends. Tinkering is fun.
As for the SNES FF games, I would actually recommend you play the GBA versions with graphics and music patches, at least for IV, which is very much compromised on the SNES (as opposed to the Super Famicom).
I tinkered a bit with the MSX myself today and finally got the saves in Metal Gear 2 to work through openmsx, by using a .dsk version of the game instead of a .rom.
I was wondering @Folly if you knew what the plus and minus of .dsk over .rom were?As far as I know, Metal Gear 2 was originally a rom containing also an SCC chip, and quite a big one, rom-memory wise. In those days all those cartridge-roms were dumped so you could play them without inserting a cartridge.(you know why:))It was also very difficult and expensive to buy imported games. When running from a disk all the data from the disk is uploaded to the ram-memory of the computer. We had a SONY with 256kb memory. Most dumped disk versions would work fine on that computer. Philips had only 128kb. Most games were then made smaller, some of them then had no sound, for example. Metal Gear 2 can work on the SONY, but has to load very often from the disk and perhaps we had no sound. So my brother bought a 512kb memory cartridge, so now it worked pretty good. But then again you only had "PSG" sound. So we had a "salamander" cartridge with SCC. When the computer booted up, you had to insert the salamander cartridge after the "beep", then the computer was only using the SCC.(not running salamander) (It was somewhat tricky, you could ruin your computer while doing that :( ). So we built a switch onto rom-chip of the salamander cartridge. Now we could insert the cartridge when the computer was off and decide whether we wanted to use only the SCC or salamander+SCC.
Pffff.. what a story.
When I started this, I didn't think there was so much to tell.
Hope you enjoy this story :) -
@zering
Hopefully this gives you an idea of the sound issues that I've had on Cho Ren Sha. Let me know if it doesn't.I've got the GBA versions of the SNES Final Fantasy games now, thanks for that!
@Folly I love it! I can imagine the stress when you put the cartridge in. Sounds like you were learning early on how to tinker with systems.
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@adambegood Okay that is definitely not normal ^^
I'd guess it's either bios or settings related.
I assume you've tinkered around with any settings that might appear relevant in lr-px68k?@Folly That's an amazing story. Sounds like you were already tinkering more than playing back then too ^^
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@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:
@adambegood Okay that is definitely not normal ^^
I'd guess it's either bios or settings related.
I assume you've tinkered around with any settings that might appear relevant in lr-px68k?Done some tinkering but tinkering more now. Is your ROM "Chourensha 68K v1.01 (1995)(Famibe No Yosshin).dim"? Just in case that is a difference?
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@adambegood Nope, that's my rom.
I'd look at your bios and settings.
Are you having sound issues on any other emulator? -
@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:
@adambegood Nope, that's my rom.
I'd look at your bios and settings.
Are you having sound issues on any other emulator?Nah not that I've noticed.
I did see this same issue on Buster on X-68000 as well, but it is fine for most games. So annoying. I'll have a look at BIOS, can't imagine it is Settings as there isn't a lot there and I wouldn't have changed anything when I first encountered this issue.
Edit: I have all the BIOS with correct check-sum (v easy in this case):
iplrom.dat 72BDF532 7FD4CAABAC1D9169E289F0F7BBF71D8E BIOS file
cgrom.dat 9F3195F1 CB0A5CFCF7247A7EAB74BB2716260269 Font file
iplrom30.dat E8F8FDAD F373003710AB4322642F527F567E020A BIOS file
iplromco.dat 6C7EF608 CC78D4F4900F622BD6DE1AED7F52592F BIOS file
iplromxv.dat 00EEB408 0617321DAA182C3F3D6F41FD02FB3275 BIOS fileI've got a meeting now, I'll send settings afterwards to see if you differ at all.
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@Zering @AdamBeGood
I was already tinkering back then. Actually ruined my computer once with a bought selfmade eprom cartridge with "logo" on it. It had no enclosure. It was a lot more tricky. OOPS "the famous black screen". I had to mis my computer for 2 weeks.ChouRenSha looks very nice. Will try that one :)
Also have to try the Snatcher's they sound great !
Also made a nice discovery. I was curious if I made separate screenshots of a game with the same image, if the md5sum's would be always the same. Then you could make a database and add info to that particular image. For example "help" info or "cleaned translations". Did a test with 3 screenshots and all md5sums were exactly the same :) WOW. That makes me wonder, how much we could do with this knowledge.
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Well it seems my 2 TB drive has had some sort of failure, so now I need to back all my roms and bios up to a new one. I may be out of action for a couple of days. @AdamBeGood could the issue have something to do with the way you're outputting sound?
@Folly What could we do with that knowledge? Obviously you must have some ideas.
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@zering said in Old Japanese Computer Appreciation Thread:
Well it seems my 2 TB drive has had some sort of failure, so now I need to back all my roms and bios up to a new one. I may be out of action for a couple of days. @AdamBeGood could the issue have something to do with the way you're outputting sound?
A disk failure, that's bad to hear. good luck with backing up.
@Folly What could we do with that knowledge? Obviously you must have some ideas.
Not exactly, but you could play "sound help files, as an overlay", for example.
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