MSX translation scene info needed, for RG article

I'm writing this from memory, so before you publish it, please check the facts. I'll look up the mentioned news posts and old e-mails (if I still have them) later as well, to make sure my memory is correct.

The MG2 translation started in January 1997 and was released on the MSX fair in Tilburg 1997. I don't remember the exact date, but it was somewhere in April. So development time was three months.

It started when I read a rumour that Oasis didn't translate MG2 because they couldn't find how the text was stored. That sounded like a challenge, so I experimented a bit with the ROM image, inserted my own text and posted about that on the comp.sys.msx newsgroup.

Takamichi replied to that post, asking me whether I was serious about translating MG2. Although I didn't originally plan to go that far, it sounded like something both fun and useful. Before long, Takamichi was sending me translated text fragments and I was integrating those in the ROM. Since I cannot read Japanese myself, it was hard to know exactly what English fragments correspond to what Japanese fragments. To make sure we were talking about the same thing, I put labels like "TXT076" throughout the game.

From a technical point of view, I get the impression most translations (including Oasis', as far as I know) are made using hex editors. I felt we needed more flexibility, so I designed a simple language and wrote a compiler for it. That way, the complete data structure for the texts was generated for the translation, including all pointers to messages. Therefore if we shortened one message, we automatically got more space for other messages. We were also able to use some empty space and remove unreachable messages. Later, when we needed even more space, I introduced a compression algorithm which stores often used strings (like "SNAKE" and "OVER" ) only once and refers to them using non-ASCII characters.

Takamichi tried very hard to translate the Japanese text as accurate as possible, deciding which exact words fit the original meaning best. He also did research to get the correct military terms. And he translated the manual and converted it to HTML, which is pretty rare for translated games.

I'm tired now, so I'll write more later. If you need more info, you can ask here or mail maarten at treewalker dot org.

So, to follow events: Mr Lardenoye founded FutureDisk which covered Japanese games, and afterwards he and Mr Bouwland started Oasis, working on several big titles? What was there first game? In fact, what was the earliest game to be translated in the MSX scene? Is there any one game that you can say “kicked the whole thing off”?

Minor detail, but still... afaik, the FutureDisk was founded by Koen Dols mainly (he was editor in chief), and Dennis joined along as a writer and did some other editing work. The FutureDisk was a disk magazine that did allround MSX news coverage, with a focus on the Japanese market (mostly games). FutureDisk and Oasis weren't really related, apart from Dennis (and later t00b) being in both Oasis and FutureDisk.

And of course, much MSX software is being translated from Japanese to English for the upcoming WOOMB service. For an official (re-)release (and for which I am mainly responsible ).

Well, that's because MSX is the homebase computer for Japanese gaming in general. It could indeed be the case that fan-translations started in the early 90s. Is SD Snatcher the first project Oasis did? Or did they practise a bit translating smaller japanese games?

I don't know if it's really the first fanpatch for MSX, but it was certainly the breakthrough in the Dutch MSX scene. At least for the Netherlands it was indeed the genesis of fan-translations. Since we're talking pre-internet times (at least for most of us) here, the MSX scene wasn't quite as international as it is today, so I don't know if any fan-translations were made back then in other countries.

It was however the first patch made by Oasis, which then consisted of Dennis Lardenoye and Ron Bouwland. From the tales Dennis told me in later years, they worked using just a disk editor. They loaded a modified character-set into VRAM, and just browsed the disk image looking for texts to translate. They later got help from Xelasoft, who made the patch-disk and the new copyprotection routines.

I don't know how Ron's Japanese knowledge was, but I do know Dennis had told me later his Japanese was still so, uhm, untrained, that he had to use a dictionary for most of it. He basically 'interpreted' the text, instead of really understanding 100% of what he was reading. All in all though, the translation came out pretty accurate on a whole.

After the success of the SD-Snatcher translation (more than 250 copies were sold on the first fair!), they quickly started working on other titles as well. At some point Ron left Oasis (in fact, I think he only did SD-Snatcher) and Marcel Kok and Eelco Slaaf joined. Especially Marcel helped to increase the quality of the translations a little, since he was a 2nd year Japanology student. (if Japanology is a word that is )

I was somewhat part of Oasis (kinda like their mascotte ), and tried getting SNATCHER translated by helping with the technical side of things. Unfortunately though, the SNATCHER translation ran into a lot of problems as well. One of the translators never actually finished the disk he was supposed to translate, and the technical problems were too numerous to even mention. Even with some form of compression, it was very hard to actually fit the english text in the original space.

The only thing I actually did manage to finish was a translation of Big Strategy II, as it was commonly known in the Netherlands. I did this translation together with Marcel and Dennis, since I could only read kana. On the final fair day, it turned out that the patch itself didn't work on a number of computers, so we ended up having to give out patched system disks instead. The campaign texts weren't actually translated until later.

All in all, Oasis must've done like 10-20 fan translations, including some (partial) manual translations called 'Guide Books' (it usually had lots of other info apart from the manual). There was a short period where people would translate Oasis's translations into other languages to sell those, but that didn't last too long (fortunately). After that though, the fan translating scene really got started and a number of different projects were done by other people (from other countries).

Takamichi, a nice Japanese fellow, is probably one of the best-known translators outside of the Netherlands. He did the translations of a number of games, including SNATCHER, Metal Gear 2 and Illusion City. The technical aspect of Illusion City is being handled by Adriano da Cunha, who's doing an absolutely amazing job. Daniel Caetano and Dante Nishida did the technical aspect of SNATCHER.