@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.
pc9821xpsetmenu_2.jpgIMG_5141.jpg
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.
hqdefault.jpg
SD-Snatcher-Disk-1-T-En-by-Project-Melancholia-0.92_0001.png