Fame, Fortune, and a New Release

Well, the day has finally arrived. This project is finally getting the type of mainstream media attention it deserves. With that, I expect we'll be the recipients of all the fame and fortune that come with such attention. I'm pretty sure that from now on, I won't even be able to shop for groceries without being recognized as one of the guys that brought CFC2 for the NGPC to the English-speaking masses. Oh, and the fortune is sure to follow.

Of course, I'm talking about the recent article posted over at GameSetWatch.com. I was interviewed by Alistair Wallis for a weekly column that he does. Here's an excerpt.

"To celebrate what is a pretty mammoth effort, we talked with Flavor about all the goings-on regarding the project, and received some astoundingly in-depth answers about topics such as his Card Fighter’s Clash fandom, why it’s all taken so long, and why the Lost Church is now a Rooster Church."

Head over to http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/05/quiz_me_qwik_card_fighting_with_flavor.php to read the full article.

Oh, yeah, there was a third thing in the title, wasn't there. Yeah, there's a new release. The graphical menus have finally been translated. You can find it at http://drop.io/cfc2english. I actually already have a couple of bug fixes that need to be applied to the graphics, so there may be a new update to the files in a day or so. I will probably only post an update to this blog entry when I upload the updated version.

We love to hear the comments, so if you're playing the translation let us know! Have fun!

The Day Has Finaly Arrived! Game On!

This feels like a big relief for me. I hope there aren't much for bug reports. I need to get back to real life for a while. Enough about me, though, let's get to the good news.

SNK Vs. Capcom Card Fighters' Clash 2 English Edition is now available for download. It runs on PSP, Nintendo DS, NGPC, GP2X, PC, Mac, and wherever else NGPC ROMs can be played. Without further ado, I present to you the download link for CFC2English.

UPDATE: Okay, there was a bug in the CFC2English release. I have now fixed it (I hope). This link should now contain the proper files. I'm sorry for any confusion.
http://drop.io/cfc2english

The CFC2English ZIP file contains an IPS patch. You will need to have the original Japanese ROM file of CFC2 (and some IPS patching software) to apply the patch. FYI, the SHA1 hash of the patched ROM should be 5CF9428A6864802D26F59C2364F476012896628A and the MD5 should be E324C1CEB54080AE5BE1065B91243331.

If you want to play it on the Nintendo DS, you will need CFC2English, CFC2EnglishDS, and the original Japanese CFC2 ROM (to apply the IPS patch to).

I know that the patching is a bit of a hassle, but that's the way I must do it. I will not release a full ROM. Though, I'm guessing that, by the time most of you read this, someone will have patched the ROM themselves and put it somewhere on the web.

Also, I have added the PSP version of the RACE emulator in that file drop. That should allow you PSP users to play any NGPC ROM. If you want to play it on other systems, I suggest looking for NeoPop or whatever other emulator is available for your favorite platform.

If you have any problems or questions, please leave a comment.

Oh, and if any of you happen to make any videos (like YouTube or whatever) of this stuff running, I'd love to see them.

Alright, it's obvious that you already know about this project, but there are others out there that don't. Some of them would love to play this game. If you are a member of any forums, mailing lists, or any other sort of medium that would discuss this sort of thing, please spread the word. I'd prefer that our hard work be appreciated by as many people as possible, so go out and spread the good news.

Testing, Release Imminent (I Hope)

There are some technical issues that I need to resolve, and I am waiting for some final files from one person. During this waiting period, testing has begun. I am hoping that the tests will go smooth and by the time I receive the files, CFC2 English will be ready for release.

I am planning to release this as an IPS patch which will require that you already have the original CFC2 ROM file. This is the typical approach for releasing translations, but please leave a comment if you have any issues with that or other suggestions.

Speaking of ROMs and what's going to happen when this is released, I know that there has been a fair ammount of interest in playing this game on an actual NGPC using a flash cart. Here is my suggestion. Go check out www.tototek.com. They guy that runs the show there has actually (years ago) made his own NGPC flash cart. As far as I understand, he never actually finished the project. He wanted it to be flashable via USB, but it never got that far. They have a forum there where they discuss new product ideas. Perhaps if they knew there was enough interest and that people would buy enough of the flash carts to offset the production costs they would actually sell them. It's just a thought.

I must let you know that I have been sidetracked lately with fixing up the PSP version of RACE!. It is now in a state that I think is ready for release. It seems to run all NGPC ROMs just fine, thought it does have a couple graphical and audio glitches with a select few ROMs. Hopefully, sometime in the next few days, I think you might find it in the usual PSP homebrew/emulator places.

Here's a little something that I think you might enjoy. I found this nice little CFC2 World Map when looking around the original NeoGeo site. If you click on a location in the picture, it will take you to a (Japanese) description of the location. It's kinda nifty, anyway.

CFC2 World Map

New Hardware and Emulation

Well, to be blunt, there hasn't been much progress on the translation side of things lately. There really isn't a lot left to do there, but I've been a bit distracted by other things lately. There are some real life situations that are causing my hobby time to get cut down a bit, but that's not the whole story.

I have recently acquired two new (to me) consoles. I found a cheap Dreamcast at a local shop, so I hope to get CFC2 running nicely on the DC. I did set up the development environment and build RACE for the Dreamcast. It runs CFC2, but it seems that it doesn't save the save-game progress properly. I'll have to look into that.

The other console I picked up, thanks to Craigslist, is a PSP. I traded some unused stuff for it, and I'm very pleased at how the deal turned out. I set up the psptoolchain and had only some minor issues getting RACE to run on it. You can see a video of it here. It has sound. It's hard to hear, because I didn't turn up the volume until close to the end. I don't know why someone didn't port RACE to the PSP sooner.

CFC2 English Running on PSP

I know that most of the votes (on the right) have been for Nintendo DS and Neo Geo Pocket Color. First, it will always be made to run on the NGPC, but that will require a NGPC flash cart. The other systems are just icing, but it seems that DS is probablly the most likely to be utilized.

Text Extension Success

I took a little vacation, so there was a period of inactivity on my part. Though, there was work being done by some of the others, so there has been progress since the last post. The variable-width font output code has been updated and is in the process of being tested. The problem here was that some text at the end of a string would get cut off. I had figured out which circumstances lead to this problem and came up with a workaround, but another coder has taken up the task of actually fixing the problem. He has also created a cool little intro that will be shown when the game starts up.

After vacation, I actually got something accomplished. When I announced that we reached the end of the storyline translation, I hadn't realized that this finally pushed us over the edge of available space for text in the game. Well, it filled the current buffer, anyway. I came up with a way to start using another unused area in the game to store the rest of the game text. It seems to work fine, now. It even looks like we will have enough room for the "origin text" to be included in the game. This, of course, is good, but it means more translating.

I have yet to decide what we will do with this origin text. My inclination at this point is to leave it out of the initial release and then see if someone wants to volunteer to translate it. Maybe Calden (our current translator) would want to do it, but so far it's not part of what he agreed to help with. If anyone else would like to try translating it, please go ahead and volunteer. Leave a comment and I'll let you know how you can help.

So, we're back at it and I feel like we're on the home stretch, now. There isn't much text left to worry about, and there are some bugs to fix up. I'll see if I can get a new video posted sometime soon. (EDIT: Soon = Now See video below)

CFC2 English on Nintendo DS Lite

Premature Party Time

Well, I worked on this for the last two nights. This work, combined with new translations from Calden have brought us to the end of the storyline. There are still about 5-10 storyline strings that we need to go back and fix because of some translation issues. Then, there are some non-storyline strings that are still not done. Of course, there also are some technical issues to work on.

It is exciting to finally reach the end of the storyline, though. There are some interesting things in the text, too. I have had to read almost all of the storyline (even parts that may never come up in normal play), but you guys will have the pleasure of "playing" the storyline. It's probably more fun to play it than just read it, but you might miss out on some stuff, I guess.

Oh well, it will be revealed in time. For now the news is that the time is nearing, and I'm excited that we have just reached this important milestone.

Not Dead

Well, unfortuntaly, I don't have much to say, today. I just felt like I should post and let you know that neither the project or myself are dead. You might say that we both took some time off for the holidays, though.

Here's the current status from my point of view. The file I have is now down to 278 strings of storyline left to translate. From what I understand, though, Calden has translated much of these 278 strings already. I've just not seen it. In fact, in his last message to me, he said, "I feel like I finished more than this. The story is done, all the rest is menu dialogue it looks like." ... "I am pretty sure I have one that is basically done, with a few exceptions. Cheers!"

So, that's great news. I just have to get that stuff from him and get to work inserting it into the game. Then, there will be some effort that needs to be put in to fix up some loose ends like the low-level stuff I mentioned last time.

Oh, and finally, "Neo Geo Pocket Color" JUST pulled ahead of "Nintendo DS" on the poll. It's now 36 to 35. I wonder if someone is stuffing the ballot box. :)

Happy New Year!

Nintendo DS Pulls Ahead

To tell you the truth, when I put up the current poll, I assumed that everyone would want to play CFC2 English on the Nintendo DS. At the time, I had been putting in some extra work to get CFC2 running faster on the DS. I really did want to see what people thought, but I was also hoping for some validation.

It actually took quite a while for the NGPC to drop back to second place. At the time of my writing this, the NDS is only beating the NGPC by 24 votes to 22. That's not much considering how popular the NDS is and how old the NGPC is. I am rather surprised by the percentage of people that want to play this on their NGPC. Yeah, it's probablly skewed a bit by the fact that most of the people that know about this project are NGPC-fanboys, but it's still interesting that NDS didn't come out stronger.

I don't have much real news to post. I was out of town for a while, and I haven't had a lot of time to hack on things. I do know that Calden has been translating text still. That's still coming along at a good pace, but I still can't say when it will be completed. Comic-Kaze has gotten back into the project a bit, too. He was one of the original CFC Translation Team members back in the day. He's been working on some graphic hacks. There were some seldom-used menus and such that were never translated. He did a lot of that graphic hacking back when the "WIP" version was released in 2001.

There's also another coder working on some low-level stuff. We are getting a nifty intro and some much-needed text output code fixes from him. That doesn't sound like much because I don't care to elaborate much at this point, but it's important to get done.

Finally, I wanted to touch on the status of the NGPC flash carts that I had mentioned in an early post. A guy called "Fire" posted a comment asking about them. Well, I tracked down the developer that's working on them and the word is that there's not been any new development on them lately. That's how these things go. I (personally) have had the knowledge and understanding of the NGPC required to create these carts for quite some time, but I don't have the proper tools and hardware design skills to actually make them. That's why I've tried to get others to take on the project, but it always seems to fade away after a while.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to write the comment and question, Fire. I'm glad you're FIREd up about the project. Unfortunately, at this moment, it's not looking like much of a Christmas present. Maybe you have a birthday early in the year, because it's just a bit odd for me to offer it to you as a Valentine gift.

Welcome Insert Credit Readers

Well, I just noticed (thanks to some new reader comments) that Brandon at InsertCredit.com posted an article about this blog. Thanks Brandon!


Announcement: Lost Church officially renamed Rooster Church
Calden, the translator, has notified me that the church in CFC2 is actually called "Rooster Church." While this seems a bit odd, it's not much more odd than it being "Lost." I mean, it's right there on the East side of town. You can't miss it. I can only assume that "Rooster" is some insider reference to something Capcom, maybe? If you know or have any ideas, why don't you leave a comment to let us know. Oh, and if you want to see the original Japanese screenshot, you can see a picture of the church from the official www.neogeo.co.jp site.

2 Weeks, 250 Strings

Well, there are approximately 535 strings of storyline left to translate. This means that, in about 2 weeks, the translator has knocked out about 250 strings. That's great progress, and if we can keep up that pace, it might be done by Christmas time. There's no deadline or release date set, but that might be a nice goal for another test release.

This progress is great, but we're running out of room in the game for all the English letters, because the English takes up more space than the Japanese. At the moment, it looks like the origin/flavoring text that shows up (as the second page) on the cards might get axed to make some more room. This text is often a quote from the card's character or some tidbit about the character. I think it's nice stuff to have around, but it's not an essential part of the game. It's removal will create needed space, and it will also mean that there's less text that needs translating. If you have a strong reaction to the removal of this, let me know.

We're getting low on topics to blog about. We need some more comments and questions so that we know what interests you and can have something new to blab on about.