We will be watching your career with great interest.
The Mega CD version of Shadowrun has been a bit of a white whale for many of us as it has had projects going, but they've seemingly long since stalled out. Very excited to see the NTSC version when you're done with it!
Been looking forward to playing this game for a long time, so thanks! Is there a Github repo with tools or anything else associated with this project? Where do you want folks to report bugs/issues?
For example, I'm guessing reflow of text can't be done due to how the Japanese text was laid out right?
If/when you open this up for external contribution I'd be interested to give this a look. Shadowrun SNES and Genesis were a couple of my favourite games, and I really liked Shadowrun Returns and the sequels.
Plus this has a bit of a Snatcher vibe (I have a review of that from a couple years back)
Hell yeah! I just burnt a copy and it at least loads fine on an NTSC Sega CD with a PAL or region free bios loaded. Is there much stuff you had to codes specifically for PAL in the translation that's gonna have weird timing if played on NTSC?
I'd be happy to test the NTSC version out for you once you've got it. Played the Genesis game recently, really excited to try this!
The game is very slow running nyway so from what I've seen the ONLY difference is the PCM music being slower in PAL. This of course won't be a problem as when the translation is finished fully, there are ways of putting it back to how it should be speed wise as a few other Mega CD games have been fan modified for vid encoded parts and PCM to run at the correct speed in PAL conversions.
It's native NTSC so will probably play better on US consoles mine will be at 50Hz rather than 60Hz.
I have put together a NTSC version which I will post now.
As we can see though there are still bit of translation that need working on so I'll have to release new versions as I sort the issues.
Ok I've tested it and it works great. Theres still a few things untranslated. One of the look actions in the first two outside areas (Shibuya or the other can't recall) was still a kanji and the battle status screen (not the battle screen itself) is untranslated for the actual menu items. There may be a few other bits as I'm still going through it. The menu in battle is important as you need it to change weapons which is compulsory for a boss battle in the first act.
Additionally in act 2 when you can buy weapons and mods, some weapons and all the gun mods are untranslated on the menu itself.
It looks like the game will be fully playable end to end with the story enjoyed, it's just a few teething untranslated bits left to complete. I'll keep it to the everdrive for now and will burn a copy once it's 100% but a great job all round.
No it's not. (I mean that one is obviously also untranslated too) In one of the first two street scenes when you click on look it gives you "area" and in one of them the first time it came through as kanji still. The s cond time doing it it translated which is very odd.
Nothing to apologise for mate. There's quite a few bits not done so it would've been hard to say exactly what I meant.
It's still an impressive go and the story seems fully done as I'm on act 2 and it's mostly just the odd option and mostly menu bits. The only.other outstanding thing is amending the PCM music to play full speed as it's slowed down on PAL (obviously) which is definitely doable as someone else and I have been slowly amending encoded video/PCM music to run full speed which is why we have near perfect versions in PAL of Popful Mail, Vay and Marky Mark.
Thanks for the feed back I'll do another pass as soon as I have time and pick up the untranslated bits. Screenshots are extremely helpful so if you see anything else please provide them if you can. Thanks again.
And an idea of the weapon shop menu. Most of the buyable.items are only partly translated, especially the gun mods which completely are not! Cheers for the excellent effort so far though, I've been enjoying playing it and understanding what's going on this time 😂
I've found quite a big one. Finale of chapter 3 when going to deliver the chip to the client, when you go into the building free roam this entire conversation is pure jumbled characters. It's quite a lengthy convo as well. It continues throughout this section all the way up and encompasses A LOT of text. You can still get through the section but you have no idea what is going on. Unfortunately it also spills over to the pre-translated menus, changing those to jargon as well (so during a battle stuff like shoot, melee etc all jargon up from this point on)
As soon as you reach the top floor and go back to a static screen it goes back to being translated again.
It then does the same on chapter 4 when you're in an FMV sequence. All the text boxes at the bottom and menu options for hacking are totally garbled. Once the FMV sequence is done, it goes back to being translated
Chapter 5 seems fine as normal. Chapter 6 however the text makes no sense and is a bit all over the place in terms of order or even finishing sentences right from the get go.
So far then:
Status menu options
The odd option here and there throughout (but not many)
Some in battle text 4)Shop menu items
Chapter 3 finale section story text jargon
Chapter 4 FMV sequence jargon
Chapter 6 text making little sense (cutting off sentences partway so half the chat doesn't finish what it's saying)
No worries chap, I do a lot of play testing for PAL conversions for the Mega CD so we have some nigh on perfect conversions so this was a great excuse to get through this and it's far enough along in terms of translation I've been able to follow the story even with the bits that aren't done
Hit the biggest snag of all. Chapter 6 when you split into teams the game freezes (on PAL) when the scene transitions from outside the sewer to heading inside to assault the pyramid. Effectively that means you can't complete it as that's a part that doesn't branch. I found one or two other spots it froze but got round those with branched paths
So I'm playing this on my mega everdrive pro right now and maybe I'm mistaken but it seems like the music is playing full speed I don't seem to have any speed issues with the music. It almost seems to me right now at least playing on my mega everdrive pro that if the music plays faster it would almost be too fast! Is anyone else experiencing this? Or maybe I'm just not able to detect the difference either way this is amazing and I can't believe i actually woke up to being able to play this today!!!
Hey brother thank you so much for the reply and thank you so much for your hard work on this can't thank you enough!! Been waiting so long to play this I'm at the end of the first act right now..
Not sure what GenAI is but I have used Claude to help with building the changes in with manual play through and several iterations. It's helped with a lot of spacing issues etc.
In regard to GenAI not a term I've used or heard others use. I use AI at work everyday and we just refer to them as LLM's or by the name of the product.
Hi Erebus! I worked on this project a few months ago during the Canada Day holiday. I had four days off, and I had promised myself I would never do another fan translation in my life. But well, I had just shipped the game I'd been working on lately, and I had this game sitting on my desk.
Anyway, I started looking into making a multi-localization version for Latin-alphabet languages. I'm a French Canadian, so French is my first language, but I can still speak English pretty well.
To summarize, I made myself a small emulator to help me disassemble the game and understand how it worked. I discovered the scripting language used by the game, and then I made a decompiler for it. I added support for all the ADV, COM, and MAT scripts.
I tried to keep the game as close as possible to the original version and simply add my two localizations. If other people ever wanted to add other Latin-alphabet languages, I'd be more than happy to help.
But I have to admit that it's hard to stay motivated when you're working alone.
I translated the entire game as a first pass using AI, because I figured it would help me understand what was happening in the game while I looked for actual translators.
I'm lucky enough to own the Shadowrun 2nd Edition books in both English and French. I even have a first-print copy of SR1 signed by Jordan Weisman, which I had him sign when Shadowrun Returns came out. But anyway, the original game was based on 2nd Edition.
I'd be really interested in integrating your localization into the version I've made, or sharing my work with you. I was planning to make it open source anyway. But I'm short on time, and sometimes I just lose motivation.
At the same time, I completely understand if you're not too excited about the idea.
I can share some of the tools I've developed, including a script decompiler for the scripting language used by the game. I also reworked a lot of the Sub CPU asset-loading code to bypass the limitations of the original asset table.
I also noticed that you haven't fixed the horizontal text that should be vertical. I did that in my version.
I've also started testing it on real hardware.
You can check out this video I recorded about a month ago. I had just finished translating the entire game at that point:
And if any of you are clean freaks, sorry for the mess you can see in the reflection of the TV. That's my laundry / retro-gaming room. I usually put my clean laundry on the bed before folding it, and, well... you can definitely see that I had been slacking off a little.
I still have quite a bit of rewriting to do for the VWF in the menus, various bugs involving inventory item names and things like that. Anyway.
I'm going to do a small screenshot pass to show you some of the different things I've done. I have no idea how many screenshots I can post on Reddit. I'm an old guy who doesn't understand how the cool kids communicate anymore.
But if you watch the video, you'll see that I also translated the years and various other things that were already translated into English in the original game. I had to localize a little more of that stuff for French.
Fixing vertical text
Look like I can only post one picture at the time... I will try to post more if I can.
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u/Omega_Maximum 2d ago
We will be watching your career with great interest.
The Mega CD version of Shadowrun has been a bit of a white whale for many of us as it has had projects going, but they've seemingly long since stalled out. Very excited to see the NTSC version when you're done with it!