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.

Introducing the Stars of CFC2

This is another real quick update. I wanted to upload this picture of the characters in the game. They can also be found (with Japanese descriptions) on the original CFC2 page archived from the old www.neogeo.co.jp site. This isn't really translation news, but it might help pique some interest and it helps us keep track of the characters. If you click on the image, you should get a larger (higher quality) view of it.

Teaser Video

I don't really have time to describe this, but it doesn't need much explanation. It's just a quick video I made of the current build of CFC2 English. If you care, I made it with Growler Guncam. I know the guy that makes the software, so I figured I ought to try it out. It's very slick. My tiny video doesn't do it justice.

New Poll, Emulation Talk, and a Bit On Strings

First of all, I wanted to mention that I put up a poll. You should see it over there on the right side of the page. Let me know how you'd like to play CFC2 English. Keep in mind that for some of the systems mentioned, you would need some way to play "homebrew" games on the system. For systems like NGPC, DS, and PSP, that might mean a flash cart or a modified BIOS or something. I don't think you'll ever see CFC2 English available at your local game shop. Wouldn't that be cool, though?

I've been putting some effort into getting it to run on the Nintendo DS. I'd say at this point, it's playable, but it's not full speed. It is, however, much faster than it was even a week ago. I have found some hacks that I can do so that specific sections of code don't get emulated. Since I have figured out what that part of code is doing, I can just build in the same functionality. Like, instead of emulating the NGPC CPU doing instructions that set a bunch of memory to 0, I can just do a memset(mem,0,count) and skip the code that would have been emulated.

Guys call this technique "static recompilation," but they take it to a whole other level. Some of them write code that turns a binary from an old arcade machine (or whatever) into C source code. Then, they can compile that C code into an executable to run on the PC (or wherever). I haven't done anything near that, but I've taken some pointers from their techniques and added in special cases for specific events that occur frequently.

I've also been doing some more hand optimizing of the emulation core. I am mainly doing this using inline assembly code for ARM processors like NDS, GP2X, etc. This gets a little extra speed out of the emulation because it's more efficient than the C code.

I know that none of this is actual translation news, but I feel that it relates to the project. I am anticipating that people will want to play this on some other handheld console (besides NGPC), and therefore the emulation of it is important.

I plan to get back to the actual translation work in the next couple days. I need to go through the new strings of text and make sure that they fit on the screen properly. I have created a tool that will notify me when strings are too long to fit on the screen. It spits out a list of strings that need to be fixed, and then I have to manually go and re-word the text to make it shorter or to fit in multiple lines. It's not very difficult, but it is a bit tedious.

Brief Progress Update

I just thought that it'd be a good time for a status update. Today I received the latest translation data from the translator. You can see a sample of it on the left. Well, the news is that there is only about 785 strings of dialog left to translate. That doesn't count everything that's still in Japanese, but it also counts some trivial things that don't really need any translation. I'd say it's a fair estimate.

To me, though, it means progress. Things are still moving along, and that's what matters. I have no idea how long it will take to translate the rest of this, but I do know that it's getting done.