Illusion City in English

Enlighted (4130)

09-12-2003, 22:17

Sup All?

Most of you had prolly seen it, but a bloke called Adriano Cunha (Brazil) had started making a Portuguese version of Illusion City. They'd done quite a nice job, even made it MSX2 compatible(!) and created a nice text routine, so I thought I'd go ahead and translate it to English. I mailed Adriano, started working on the translation, even finished it as far as the Portuguese was done, and then nothing...

Now, if anyone knows Mr. Adriano and can get a hold of him, it would be nice if he could mail me the info he has (mainly tools) to see if I can do at least some work on the game. I'm sure that there's some japanologist out there willing to help so we can translate this fab game... Well, anyone know where to find this guy?? See ya'll...

Sonic (Who took my name on this forum?!?!)

By Sama

Ambassador (2070)

10-12-2003, 11:49

Well, translating Illusion City is still one of my great wishes. But I had some contacts about Adriano's translation before and he never seems to answer his mails about this project.

Which reminds me, isn't there anyone out there who can easily adapt text routines in Japanese games to English texts, in a way like Adriano did?

Adriano's translation hasn't been worked on since about October 2001 iirc. It wouldn't be such a bad idea to begin from scratch making an English version. But there has to be someone who is able to make such a text routine as Adriano did, I'm afraid...

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

10-12-2003, 12:28

Once openMSX has a decent debugger (or another emulator) things like that will be easier to do.

By Sonic_aka_T

Enlighted (4130)

10-12-2003, 20:45

Well, the thing is... Why invent the wheel if it's already been invented? Adriano has already done the following:

1) Made an excellent text routine with a descent font.
2) Allowed for extended text beyond the original space.
3) Found out how to edit the GFX and already did so.
4) Made the game MSX2 compatible (Be it with 7MHz)
5) Did a lot of translating to Portuguese (Which I already translated to English)

So what would be nice is if Mr. Adriano would be so kind to just give out the source code and tools so that others can pick-up where he left off. All we need now is an address or phone number...

Sigh...

Toby

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

10-12-2003, 21:18

Some collaboration would be great indeed... But unfortunately the experience with other portuguese translations is kinda, well... Let's just say we haven't seen a finished english version of any of them yet.

By snout

Ascended (15187)

10-12-2003, 21:45

I think the best approach to get this and other Portuguese translations to English is send an email in Portuguese to the Brazilian MSX Mailinglist....

By k0ga

Expert (77)

11-12-2003, 16:41

Well, the thing is... Why invent the wheel if it's already been invented? Adriano has already done the following:

4) Made the game MSX2 compatible (Be it with 7MHz)

He say in his web that Ilussion city doesn't use any feature of Turbo-R, and I must to say that music replayer of this game is made for work only in a turbo-r (it's easy make to work in rest of msx) because it read from real time clock of this msx model.

By Parn

Paladin (854)

11-12-2003, 18:58

AFAIK, realtime clock (RTC) is a MSX2 feature, but not very useful to music players. Are you sure you really mean realtime clock?

By adrcunha

Expert (117)

11-12-2003, 20:19

All in one reply:

I allways reply the e-mails sent to me. I don't refuse to answer nobody.
But I can't reply an e-mail if I lost it, and sometimes it happens.

The project is not dead. It's not a one-person task, and all the people involved in
this project (mainly me and Takamichi) have many other things to do.

Translating from portuguese or english to any other language is a piece of cake.
Translating from japanese to any other language is hard.
Translating IC is not an easy task. Not easy texts, not easy code. Of course, if
you want to do a dirty job, it becomes a bit easy. But I hate dirty jobs.

Not having a perfect debugger or perfect emulator is not an excuse to not do things
or do them bad. We say in Brazil: "those who don't have a dog hunt with the help of
a cat".

About portuguese translations: Shalom is not finished yet, but it's not my project.
Young Sherlock, one of my translation projects, is finished. The translated version even
was extended to save/load game from disk. And all this with the same requirements of
the original game. Another project that I helped finish was Parodius (that don't have
a portuguese version, just the english version).

The music routine of IC don't really need a TR to run. Get the portuguese version of IC
and you'll hear the music without any problem on a MSX2 machine. And it also doesn't use
the MSX RTC. Its uses TR timer, but it's quite useless. I still don't understand what
Microcabin was trying to do...

If anyone wants to start his own IC translation project, go ahead. I will not help because
it will be against my own work, and it's not dead (if it was, of course I would help a new
effort).

Finally, since you guys seems very excited about this topic, I'll let some ideas planned
for the future here, so maybe you can calm down and wait next releases of IC:

- english version (yes, there will be one, as I planned when I started the project);
- MIDI musics without needing MIDI module or MIDI sintethizer
- *PROBABLY* the diskette version will require only 256KB RAM (FM musics) or 512KB
RAM (MIDI musics)
- harddisk version (probably will require 512KB RAM with FM musics or 768KB RAM with
MIDI musics)

Regards,

Adriano

By Manuel

Ascended (19685)

11-12-2003, 20:38

Adriano: just stating the completely obvious: you rule.

'nuff said.

By k0ga

Expert (77)

11-12-2003, 20:54

AFAIK, realtime clock (RTC) is a MSX2 feature, but not very useful to music players. Are you sure you really mean realtime clock?

I am talking about real time counter register 0e6h, isn't present in msx2. It is used in the driver for waiting necesary time between two fm access (us is said in msx turbo-r specification, NO WITH NOPS LIKE MAKE OTHER PROGRAMS)