A while ago I spent some time on patching Virtual Fishing. The project came to a halt as I needed a break. However, I’m planning to get back to it. So I figured I should share what I have done so far.

The goal of the project obviously is to replace the Japanese text with an English translation. The main problem is that the 16×16 Japanese characters use allot of space on the screen and can not simply be swapped to lain letters. So the plan is to add an 8×16 Latin alphabet, change the text drawing method to support the smaller letters and then patch in the translated text.

Some of that I already did. Well, the first thing I did is reverse engineer how the game draws the text and where the Japanese alphabet is stored. The attached image has been exported from the rom. As you can see there are already Latin letters in the rom but nothing I want to use.

I then patched in a Latin alphabet by overwriting some of the Japanese letters. I also changed the method that draws the text to use 8×16 characters. The resulting rom is of course messed up as the sentences themselves are still Japanese.

I located some sentences in the rom for testing purposes. Unfortunately, there are no big pointer arrays that point towards these sentences. That makes it a bit more difficult for me to dynamically replace them.

The next step will be to clean up what I did so far and make it more generic. After that I will start replacing sentences.

Right now I’m using some translations provided by awesome person Benjamin Stevens. I know Wyndcrosser was also working on translation, so there should be plenty of sources when it actually comes to translating.

Attachments:

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   orichars.png
   

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   sentences.bmp
   

This community is better because of thunderstruck 😛

True that, Eric.

I like how there’s a full set of cursive characters in there.

i’m assuming the programmers tossed in the english alphabet in the hopes of a possible future north american release?

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?u025g

it was planned

-Eric

I’ve been waiting for someone to tackle this for quite some time… Now that thunderstruck is on the case, I know the result is going to be top-notch 🙂 :thumpup:

I’m grateful to him for working on it, and also to everyone involved with the actual text translation.

Lester Knight wrote:
i’m assuming the programmers tossed in the english alphabet in the hopes of a possible future north american release?

Full-width Latin characters are extraordinarily common in Japanese character sets, not in small part because of the fact that English is used a ton in technical settings. Having said that, full-width characters generally aren’t too useful for English localization, and I’ve seen many cases where brand new graphics were put in to accommodate half-width or variable-width English scripts.

Though I have to say, the presence of a cursive alphabet does make me curious.

The cursive alphabet is used for the credits.

Yea, I think Ben got way further than I did. My issue was the 16×16 characters, if I couldn’t fix this, it made no sense to continue. Nice work man.

Always impressed. I wish there more homebrew titles to play too, I’ve knocked out a lot of them already 🙂

Hi Thunder,

Any more details on Virtual Fishing? I know you’re probably busy with Snatcher too 🙂

Wyndcrosser wrote:
Hi Thunder,

Any more details on Virtual Fishing? I know you’re probably busy with Snatcher too 🙂

I somehow wasn’t in the mood for vb programming lately. I usually take a break during the summer time to follow other hobbies.

I love my copy of Virtual Fishing but this would be so much better as I could play it without having to constantly look at translation reference print outs that I have.

After a longer break I decided to work on this again. I mainly cleaned up my patching tool, separating code and all that stuff.

I already have a Latin alphabet patched into the rom and rewrote a part of the code so that it’s using 8×16 characters instead of 16×16.

I now started writing code that checks if there is a translation for a given text. If so it will use the 8×16 characters and the latin alphabet. I’m trying to keep this as generic as possible in case there are is other code that needs rewriting.

After that I will add the mapping to the UI of the patching tool so that I define translations more easily.

Really looking forward to this. It’s the only Japanese game I haven’t been able to play.

-Eric

thank you thunderstruck. you have done a lot of amazing things for the vb community. your hard work is really appreciated.

Awesome stuff, Thunderstruck, you’re the man!

Thanks guys, I’m trying my best.

I had to overcome some problems but I managed to write my text replacement code. It generally works fine when I replace a single sentence. It breaks as soon have more, most likely due to the changes I made to the original method.

Will check tomorrow.

Figured out what the problem was. Just need a couple of changes in the original code. I can now replace many sentences in the rom without problems. The attached screenshot shows one screen I use for testing. Just ignore the messed up Japanese.

I replaced those sentences by getting their addresses from the debugger. Next step will be to automatically search the text in the rom.

Attachments:

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   screen.jpg
   

Holy crap that’s awesome. Great work, Thunder!

I am so excited to finally get a proper play of the game. Thank you for being so awesome to us, thunderstruck!

thunderstruck wrote:
Figured out what the problem was. Just need a couple of changes in the original code. I can now replace many sentences in the rom without problems. The attached screenshot shows one screen I use for testing. Just ignore the messed up Japanese.

I replaced those sentences by getting their addresses from the debugger. Next step will be to automatically search the text in the rom.

Very nice! You’ve certainly got some great patching work going on there.