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@Pawlicker I think Falcom becoming more popular in the West is going to contribute to the rise of popularity of the PC-98 since that was one of their main platforms along with the PC-88.

But with that said, why hasn't anyone made any fan-translations of any PC-88/98 Falcom games? That sounds like a no-brainer.

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@xianc78 Likely due to all the EN localizations of them. Some people have wanted to do it, but you need to understand how the system works, a bit of assembly to modify the engine for half width, and whatnot.

Otherwise you end up with the Oasis translation of SD Snatcher, which was one of the first of it's kind and featured very stilted text due to them having to cram stuff into full width.
https://www.project-melancholia.org/oasis_interview.html

The first pic is the OASIS translation, the second is the later fan translation with engine hacking done for more text.
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@xianc78 Also text space too, which in this case was an issue aside from the full/half width common on PC-98 translations:
"Also, a very big challenge was the problem of space. Character space. Remember that we had a handicap that professional game translators nowadays do not have: we had no source code! We could only REPLACE 20 bytes of Japanese text with 20 bytes of English text, we could not recompile and make it 40 bytes. For SD Snatcher, this was okay – you had 2 bytes per Japanese character (mostly katakana and hiragana are used), and a Romaji (English) character used only one byte. Since these are phonetic ways of encoding, we were mostly okay when it came to space. However, later translations were much harder, especially Microcabin titles like Xak 2 – they used much more kanji, meaning 2 bytes for one WORD (kanji are ideographs). This resulted sometimes in very 'creative' writing or SMS like abbreviations. We had no other choice."

Essentially, a major issue was this.

The PC-98, due to how the text system worked, also has a full/half width issue. Many Japanese text was rendered in full width for readability, but the English PC-98 font also has both full and half width. The full width is LARGE AND SPACED OUT and used in things such as the boot ROM setup screen and some TSR splash screens.

You'll notice how large the INT text is on the PC-98 setup screen, while the copyright is half width and much more readable. Certain fan favorites with socketed ROMs also have an English BIOS patch, and this makes all the text half width except for the SW listing on the screen.

So you have to modify the engine to display half width text and not full width to display more on screen and be more readable.
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@xianc78 The other issue, as the Oasis translators found, was text compression. It's mentioned in the article, but I'll quote this from the 98 Discord.

You basically have to read through in Japanese, a compressed version of the story, with words jumbled around to try to make sense of it script wise. The engine uncompresses this and renders it on screen. This saved space, but led to issues with making a translation because only the authors know what the words are.
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@xianc78 One more story about why text width is important: localizers had it easy. They had the scripts and raw source code to modify the text parser.

The problem is if your RPG revolved around trading like with Pokemon. Generations 1 and 2 notoriously broke if you linked a JP cart to a USA one, because the text parser and more were changed so the trade started, but you'd get some hilarious glitch Pokemon as a result. Generation 3 fixed this, and Generation 4 had this as a deliberate feature with GTS. This is because among other things, the engine and text parser were modified to display both locales.

I used to fuck with this back in the day because you could get some wild results from it.
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