
How Three Kids with No Experience Beat Square and Translated Final Fantasy V - wallflower
http://kotaku.com/how-three-kids-beat-the-odds-and-translated-final-fanta-1794628286
======
herval
A long time ago, I translated Civilization 1 to Brazilian Portuguese.
Eventually (like, 15 years later?) I got to work for a guy that worked on CIV
I, and he told me they just found my translation, fixed some stuff and put it
up as the official one (I put it in the most popular BBS at the time)

Good times.

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soylentcola
Wow, what a flashback! I remember following various translation teams and
their progress while in college and playing all sorts of SNES games I'd never
gotten to play as a kid (via zSNES). I remember the drama of the early leak
and the eventual "proper" release. Realizing that it was 20 years ago caught
me by surprise.

~~~
dlevine
Yeah. I remember playing through all the FF games (and a bunch of other RPGs)
that hadn't been translated into English when I was in college in the late
90's. It's great that most of them have been remade since, but there is a lot
of nostalgia in playing the originals on emulators.

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ABCLAW
Projects like this caused me to fall in love with tech as a kid, and my
subsequent career arc was largely premised on the notion "how do we bring this
type of amazing innovation into safe legal waters and allow it to flourish". I
played FFV. I played a ton of fan translations. Heck, I completed the entire
SNES rpg catalog, both JP and ENG. Thanks for sharing this.

~~~

Re: Translation and Fan-mods in general. Many game developers fail to
recognize that their works inadvertently become platforms, and that the
platformization of stellar works is both the cause and effect of their
spectacular success. There are a ton of crystal clear examples of this
phenomenon. Unfortunately it is tremendously common that developers and
publishers chop their own legs out from under them when attempting to re-seize
control of these platforms to monetize them. Often their attempts destroy
value, and terminally damage their brands.

~~~
derefr
What good is brand value if you can't monetize any of it?

~~~
ABCLAW
There's a false dilemma stemming out of the word "any". In reality there's an
equilibrium between giving and taking.

If you don't monetize enough, you can't stay afloat as a developer and you're
left with a brand asset for sale upon liquidation.

If you take control of community produced goods in order to take the entire
pie for yourself, your fanbase will slow or stop producing incidental free
value for your projects and your core evangelists will begin jumping ship to
greener pastures. This doesn't kill you immediately, but it also doesn't
position you for long term growth.

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luckyt
Wow, the modifying assembly code part was impressive! I wouldn't even be able
to find the dialog drawing routine amid thousands of lines of undocumented
assembly, let alone modify it. It's amazing that a high school kid could
figure it out.

~~~
angrycoder
To get an idea of how rom hacking works, check out this video from doublefine:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0)

Its mostly setting watches and breakpoints in the emulator, not digging
through code. My mind was blown the first time I watched it.

~~~
digi_owl
The early stuff he shows can be done on most emulators as a way to cheat. Done
it ever so often when i get bored with a game. Sometimes locking the health
value will freeze a game though as developers use a cheap refill animation on
leveling up or beating a boss, and you end up with the animation getting stuck
as the emulator keeps resetting the value.

I have never owned one, but i think gamesharks and others work similarly.

~~~
notamy
Yes! Gamesharks / Action Replays / similar gave you an "instruction set" of
sorts that was interpreted as instructions of sorts - write value to address,
do if value at address is X, and so on. When I was messing with one on the
Nintendo DS a few years back, you were actually able to write ARM (and THUMB,
I believe) ASM and compile it to the target system (NDS) that could be loaded
through the Action Replay. I'll have to check if I can dig up my old notes on
this stuff when I'm home...

~~~
voltagex_
I'd really like to read your notes if you find them. I'm assuming the Action
Replay could be used for the first bypass/homebrew loading exploits, then?

~~~
notamy
I'm not sure; I never got that involved in it. Back when I was involved, there
were some communities entirely centered around taking apart individual games
and figuring out how to tinker with them. Things like loading up the unused
tracks in Mario Kart and changing the colours etc. to make "custom" courses.

Here's one of the main pages I used as a reference at the time:
[http://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html](http://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html)
Even without ASM, you could still write to arbitrary memory addresses, jump
around with conditionals, patch, copy memory, and all sorts of things. The
linked page also touches on the basics of ARM/THUMB ASM tinkering. I seem to
have lost my notes, so this is all I can get you :(

~~~
voltagex_
Thanks anyway. I really like reading about these "unofficial" devices.

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iaw
>“It’s hard to express how big of a deal it was at the time,”

Every so often I meet someone who worked on something that was influential on
me as a youth. I'm glad I got a chance to read this, playing the rom it was
always a mystery where it came from. A lot of us owe Myria a debt of
gratitude.

------
FullMtlAlcoholc
Translating a video game was also one of the primary ways that I learned
Japanese. Playing through Chrono Cross while grokking the written form was
tremendously rewarding.

To this day, I still choose Japanese audio for games if available.

~~~
Kurtz79
I find mind boggling the amount of games that have been released only in
Japan.

Even series popular in the West like Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Ace
Attorney, Fire Emblem have had Japan-only releases, I cannot even imagine how
many lesser known titles are lost to western audiences.

Probably Japan is kind of an outlier, but I guess other countries with a large
enough market to support games developed for local (not global) audiences
would have a similar phenomenon, I wonder if there is some hidden gem
developed in China, Korea, India, Brasil that we will never be able to play...

~~~
sotojuan
It's way worse if you were European. Did you know that the first OFFICIAL
release of Chrono Trigger in Europe was the 2009 DS remake?

~~~
voltagex_
Same in Australia, I think. I owned a ridiculous setup with a NTSC->PAL cart
converter and an old CRT just to play Chrono Trigger, at one point.

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borkt
I am so happy to see this article. I used to play the Japanese release PSO
with Barubary a LOT and heard bits and pieces about the FFV translation. At
the time they were at UCI I believe and I was just in 7th grade. Baru always
seemed incredibly skilled and was extremely patient with me and helped me
learn some basic coding, such as creating custom names for items that worked
online. It got me into engineering in general and though I ended up working in
Materials Engineering rather than software it was an excellent influence on me
and pushed me to learn by reverse engineering. I always imagined Baru would
end up somewhere with a career in Video Game development and am thrilled to
see it is true.

~~~
segmondy
I wonder if it's the same barubary. I started a psx dev group in the 90's
gridlock. I just finished high school and this kid barubary joined and his
work was amazing. Most of us in the scene went into the industry. I didn't cuz
I didn't want 80hr weeks.

~~~
gadgetDev
PSX dev was lots of fun and challenging at the time with so little
documentation. Still something I'd love to get back to if I have the time.
Someone spun up a site a bit ago called psxdev net that's pretty active. Btw,
gadget from gridlock :)

~~~
segmondy
Hey mate!

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tannhauser23
I remember playing this when it came out! It was such a magical moment. It
completely blew my mind that there was a SNES Final Fantasy game that we were
never meant to play - I think I only found it accidentally when I was browsing
ROM sites. I thought it was a homemade hack or something. I never imagined
that it was a real game! Haha what a great memory.

------
jimmies
Holy shit, this bring back memories. I did something similar with the Harry
Potter series about 15 years ago - beat the publisher to translating the book.
Doing that, strangely, is _the one event_ that shaped my life the most.

I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by
renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese
kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half-
blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the
"blessed" translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole
book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about
4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular
forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a
16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My
timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter,
post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day
rinse and repeat. People _loved_ it and many started contacting me to help
with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do
nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it
with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy.
The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version.
The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who
had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would
bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more
than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time.

Book 6 wasn't a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much
better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the
fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission
and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed
the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of
attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real
nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters
churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one
night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist
asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something
illegal?" I was scared shitless and _fucking deleted everything_ , thinking
this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the
journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and
the same reporter sent another email...

"I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won't
rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview.
You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I
want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming
out tomorrow."

I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose
a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter
and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing
part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the
interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked
the discussion whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do on many online forums. I
had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I
registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It
turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton
and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I
saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would
otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at
that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his "vice-
president" role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event
and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I
admire and probably won't ever know otherwise.

By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my "gap year"), I decided
not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it,
though.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my
> indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation,
> we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted
> it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in
> big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal
> mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do
> you know you're doing something illegal?"

What illegal thing were you doing? If Terry Brooks can translate Tolkien from
English to English without running afoul of copyright, I don't see what
copyright would have to say about translating from English to Vietnamese.
You're certainly not infringing on the author's original wording.

~~~
khedoros1
> What illegal thing were you doing?

Unauthorized use of a copyrighted work. Translations are included under the
category of derivative works, and those have a requirement of lawfulness. They
have to be somehow licensed or authorized from the copyright holder of the
work they derive from.

The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be
considered derivative works.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be
> considered derivative works.

First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal. But I'm certainly
willing to believe others are unoriginal too.

Second, when nobody can read a book without noticing "hey, this is exactly the
same story as this other book, but with different names", what's left that
both

(1) distinguishes it as "not a derivative work", and

(2) doesn't also automatically apply to any translation into a foreign
language?

I have seen it said many times that copyright will not protect ideas, only the
particular form they have taken. Without a pretty gigantic loophole, those
terms would provide absolute protection to a translation, which necessarily
cannot use _any_ wording from the original.

~~~
khedoros1
> First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal.

Maybe. It's been a long time since I read the series. I remember getting to
the third or fourth and realizing that the plots of later books also seemed to
crib off the earlier ones.

(1) The story isn't exactly the same, just noticeably similar. The
presentation is also significantly different, with a different premise for the
setting and such.

(2) Copyright laws (Berne convention and US copyright law) specifically note
translations as being afforded copyright separate from the original work, but
falling under the "exclusive rights of authorization" that govern the original
work.

------
smaili
Great read that brings back some good memories.

As an avid FF fan, I never quite understood why SquareSoft decided to not
bring over some of their games to the US market. If anyone happens to know the
reason(s) - please share!

~~~
Avenger42
For _Seiken Densetsu 3_ , Wikipedia links to an article that stated: "...the
game's North American release had been canceled by Square's American branch
due to programming bugs that they deemed impossible to fix in a timely
manner."

For _Final Fantasy II_ : "the long development time, the age of the original
Japanese game and the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System [...]
led Square Soft to cancel work on the Final Fantasy II localization in favor
of the recently released Final Fantasy IV"

Similarly for _Final Fantasy III_ : "...Square was focused on developing for
Nintendo's new console."

~~~
scott_s
On SD3, I read that the "bugs" are mostly because English text took up more
space than Japanese. From an article by Jermey Parish [1]:

 _" Seiken Densetsu 3 was among the first games to receive a fan translation,
and Neil Corlett's localization crew was fairly open about the difficulty of
that process. SD3 was a huge game on a cramped cartridge, and the Japanese
version -- already benefiting from the density of kanji text -- employed a
custom compression system that would have made it practically impossible for a
localized version of the game to fit within the confines of the ROM without
the removal of massive chunks of content. The simple fact is that SD3 was
likely never intended for localization, because the process would have been
impossible."_

[1]
[http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-Sec...](http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-SecretOfEvermore)

~~~
digi_owl
Yeah i recall various ROM patches coming complete with special fonts so they
could fit the english text into the boxes etc of the original game ui without
having to hack in extra pages of scrolling or similar. Kanji allows for some
very info-dense UIs.

~~~
JoshTriplett
The same thing applied to Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2): the original
translation had to drastically simplify/cut details from the English
translation to fit into the dialogue boxes, which used a large fixed-pitch
English font. There's a ROM patch ("Variable Width Font edition") that changes
the dialogue font to variable-width, and uses the additional space to improve
quite a bit of the dialogue.

------
gregpardo
I learned how to program in the Rom Hacking scene and was involved with a team
that released 4 patches for games.

The amount of dedication and hours our team put in was incredible. I think I
managed around 30-40 hours with high-school.

Also, a lot of the reasons some games never made it stateside or came way late
was often financial or political. The US versions of these companies often ran
slightly independent from the Japanese game studios and the RPG adoption was
not huge in the early console days here yet.

------
shriphani
I love stories like this - right from Sneferu in ancient Egypt to a driven
high-schooler - drive leads people to great things. And when we see the output
we are just left to wonder what fueled it and how we can harness that same
drive.

------
gumby
title should be "...Square _Enix_ and...". The company "Square" ≠ "Square
Enix"

~~~
DerekL
No, the article is correct. This was before the merger with Enix, and the
company was called “Square”, and sometimes used the name “Squaresoft”.

~~~
gumby
Thanks

~~~
Icerain
Squaresoft was the american subsidiary. The name didn't came out of nowhere

------
roflchoppa
reading about how all these guys were meeting up in IRC's just to hang out
makes me miss the old web. Anyone know any welcoming IRCs?

------
apetresc
I hope this observation doesn't come across as bigoted or insensitive in any
way, but I find it interesting how common transgender people (like the star of
this article) are in the emulator/rom dev community. I can think of four or
five other very prominent examples just off the top of my head – and it's not
a very large community. It's certainly a greater proportion than the general
population. Honestly I can think of more trans-women coding emulators than
biologically-born women. I just wonder why such an unrelated-seeming
correlation occurs.

~~~
ska
Many online communities historically have been bigoted and misogynist.

If the effect you observe is real, perhaps it's just the reflection of a
community that attracted and kept more people over the years because it wasn't
(as much) like that?

~~~
apetresc
I have no direct experience, but I would be surprised if that were true.
Emulator development is the perfect intersection of, like, three different
communities (low-level tech, video games, and open source) that are (at least
on HN) perceived as extra-unwelcoming to women. I don't see why combining all
three would cancel that out.

I would also note that writing an emulator is not something you just stumble
into because the people are friendly or whatever. It requires an extremely
honed set of quite niche skills. I think it takes something more to become
successful at it than just "I guess I'll stick around because everywhere else
is even meaner."

~~~
zorked
Is that really the case? I think Silicon Valley is perceived as _specially_
unwelcoming to women, not necessarily every computer subculture out there.

My personal guess is that as a traditionally underground community the
ROM/emulator scene was more welcoming to certain groups due to the use of
pseudonyms. It's easier to not draw attraction when you don't walk into an
office every day and meet people face to face.

~~~
digi_owl
At this point i find it hard to separate honest problems from SJW shit storms
over bike sheds.

That said, the valley's VC fueled death marches, and the resulting bravado and
"machismo" probably do not help.

