The NEC PC-FX

[Ben]

You should try joining the forums over at http://www.romhacking.net. They are always crying out for people just capable of being able to read and translate Japanese text.  They do the coding so you wouldn't have to worry about that.  They usually get a text grab from each game then someone works their way through it all then they format and re-insert.

I might consider it if I know I'll have more free time down the road.  I tried getting involved with a translation group years ago and it went badly because I didn't have the time to work at the pace they wanted.  I wish more people would just post full text dumps, then if someone picks up on them and gets it done great, if not it's no big deal (I think the issue is the group wanting credit for being the first to complete a game in a lot of cases, and not letting someone else gain notoriety from their work).

[zapiy]

Is there not a way to get that raw data? So you can do one anyway?

[Ben]

Is there not a way to get that raw data? So you can do one anyway?

It varies by console and your knowledge of coding.  Princess Crown for the Sega Saturn has been translated for around 20 years and there still isn't a patch for the iso that I know of because of how hard it is to pull text from Saturn games, the original translation was done by someone playing through the game and taking screen caps which were then used to do the translation.  By comparison, there are software utilities you can download to dump text from quite a few SNES games.  That's why there aren't too many SNES games left untranslated at this point but the Saturn's amazing JRPG library remains untranslated entirely.

I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows more about the NEC PC-FX, I have no idea about how hard it is to get text out of those isos.

[Papa]

I had this system long ago and began to miss it, so I bought one at a great price off of EBay with Dragon Knight 4.  I love the system and played it a lot before, but now I plan to learn a little Japanese to help me through some of the games I couldn't really get into back then.  I like strategy and RPG games a lot more now than I used to.  I had Zenki and played it a LOT.  This time it was Langrisser that started me wanting one again.  That and all the beautiful anime girls running around everywhere!  :35:

[Shadowrunner]

Cool, I'd like to get a PC-FX some day and I've been saying I would like to learn a little Japanese to play through some games for years now. Let us know how it turns out

[zapiy]

Same as you guys, would be a dream purchase. What are the going rates these days, assuming you can find one.

[Ben]

If you guys ever take a notion to do it, you can pick up enough Japanese to play through most games with some cheap study at home resources.  Rosetta Stone will teach you basic conversational proficiency along with hiragana and katakana and there is an RPG called Project LRNJ you can get for a $20 download fee that teaches most of the common kanji you need to know to play JRPGs.  Rosetta Stone disc only versions are pretty heavily discounted now because they're switching to an online model like Adobe to combat piracy so the older versions are a great deal, the only issue with it is that it teaches by immersion and you might get stuck picking up the grammar.  There is a Youtube Channel called Puni Puni Japan that covers most of the basic grammar you can use if you get stuck and you could always buy a grammar dictionary to go along with it, there are a bunch of free software kanji dictionaries so buying one of those isn't really necessary.  A few good links:

Puni Puni Japan - https://www.youtube.com/user/PuniPuniJapan
Project LRNJ - https://lrnj.com/
Kanatest (kana learning tool) - http://clayo.org/kanatest/
Kanatest for Windows - http://sourceforge.net/projects/delugeb ... /kanatest/
Tagaini Jisho - Kanji dictionary plus study tool - http://www.tagaini.net/
Exhaustive list of counter words if you get stuck - http://www.tofugu.com/guides/count-anything-japanese/

The one thing I'd mention about Rosetta Stone, I've helped a few people I recommended it to that got stuck in the past, and what tends to lose them is when it introduces counter words.  The Japanese language is really weird in that they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 different counter words and they have weird variations on those words by context.  An example would be counting people; you use -nin, but only for three and up.  One person = hitori two people = futari three people = san-nin four people = yon-nin, etc.  You just have to know hitori and futari. It gets more complicated, like with animals you use -piki for 1,6,8,10 -biki for 3 and -hiki for everything else.

[Shadowrunner]

Thanks Ben, some great resources there. If I do I will be coming back to this to get me started

[zapiy]

Great info. and i would love to learn Japanese properly but the time i would need to dedicate, its just not viable in any sense of the word for me.