Let’s translate old video games! How do they even work?!
summary
Translating the Lunar series reveals concrete tactics not vague promises: text search uses bgrep to find Shift JIS byte sequences, several games use a fixed two‑byte Shift JIS variant, one stores text as raw font indices into a 16×16 4‑color tile set, and some strings live in custom encodings rather than compression. The translator writes replacement tools, verifies replacements on console images, and publishes the utilities and scripts on GitHub so the hacks actually work.
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Start
- 1:26Acknowledgments
- 2:20Encodings: the lay of the land
- 5:05"Almost" Shift JIS
- 7:03Let's look at the font...
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