Thousands of hours of work spanning 7
years, all for the Falcom fanboy in you! Ah, but who gives a shit, right? Not YOU,
THAT'S for sure! ONCE a warez free-for-me freeloader, ALWAYS a warez free-for-me
freeloader! "I ain't donating jack shit for this, biotch! Just make another
damn patch already or finish Felghana for Christ's sake! THEN I'll think about
donating... well, maybe, AHAHAHAHAHA!!"
The phrase 'break a leg' was originally coined by Chuck Norris's co-stars in Walker, Texas Ranger as a good luck charm, indicating that a broken leg might be the worst extent of their injuries. This never proved to be the case.
"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys
Details
Well, where to begin... This project has had so many setbacks, but finally,
persistence paid off. It was originally started off by Akimaru, my good pal, but
I later took over as he could no longer continue it. Let's see, I purchased an
original Ys IV disc from www.tzd.com back in '94 I believe it was and I always
kept the experience with me. I always lamented I couldn't enjoy it in English,
but that all changed with the romhacking position I was now in post 2001. Never
in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd one day help bring it to the US shores.
Sure, by today's standards, it's an average action RPG, but it really was a gem
of series back then which is probably harder for today's gamers to appreciate. I
still remember finally managing to beat it thanks to DeuceBag's FAQ, a criminal
who'd one day turn out to actually help translate for the project. Anyway, I doubt
I could ever fully convey in words all the tribulations and joy that I experienced
in undertaking this project. Sadly, I didn't keep a more tidy log of things to
provide a better history, but I added a lot to the ReadMe for now.
Screen shots
6 Pages:
,
,
,
,
,
Overview
Two years after defeating Darm and bringing peace to Esteria, Adol returns to
the town of Minea with his companion in adventure, Dogi. Everything seems fine
as friends are reunited and the people hail their hero, but there’s an unseen
evil looming in the air. As Adol goes to the seer Sara, she tells him of an even
greater darkness in the land of Celceta and asks the red-haired swordsman to go
there and seek the truth behind this mystery. Thus, Adol steals away unnoticed
in the middle of the night to embark on his next adventure.
In Celceta, Adol will learn of the Romun Empire’s ambitions, fight the
mysterious Clan of Darkness that seeks to ressurect their long dead leader, and
discover the ancient history of Celceta itself as well as its connection to the
land of Ys. The last survivor of a forgotten race of winged beings holds the power
that may bring back darkness to the land, and only Adol will be able to stop it.
Merrrrry Christmas folks!! Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to finally
take the time given the occasion to report that 8+ years and 2 failed attempts
later, this dubbing project has FINALLY been completed thanks to a fella,
BurntLasagna/Mike, stepping up to the plate and going all the way!!! Hallelujah!
3rd time's a charm, right? Well, hard to believe, but it finally happened!
Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas! Guess what? The Ys IV Christmastime patch, version
.95, is here! w00t!!! Talent on loan from Goooooddddd, baby. =) Oh and don't
mind the version value. This is completely translated, but I'm essentially not
marking it 100% in case someone finds any line that deserves a tweak or two (I
expect feedback from you lazies in exchange for this release). Also, you'll
wanna know to come back for when our ADPCM dubbs go public. Anyhow, pull that
Turbo Duo out of the closest and dust it off or get your emulator ready for
another adventure with Adol Christin!! And away we go: YsIV(US)v95.cab
Addendum: Forget about the dubbing project. That idea is over with.
-Sunday, October 24, 2004
After working with Justus, I now have 8 ADPCM audio clips (of the 232 in
total) that inserted fine. I haven't felt like updating this in awhile even
though a lots been going on. To bring you up to speed, he came onboard the
project awhile ago offering his sound engineering services. He found a pretty
good female voice for the Karna character which I think works out nicely. On the
script end, it looks like a new patch release is imminent if I get everything I
want in the readme file. It'll be good enough to be called a RC1 at this point
as I don't foresee any future tweaking need. Any dub patch will be separate and
released sometime in the future.
-Thursday, September 23, 2004
All ADPCM audio for the voice acting has been dumped using Dave's tool. With
this, we're possibly thinking of doing dubs. It'll all depend on what DeuceBag can
do, so we'll see. It's gonna be tedious...
-Wednesday, August 18, 2004
UMMMMM! WOW! After Dave found the code related to the font, we worked on it
for awhile and finally, it happened!!! As you can see, full lowercase support is
now enabled with no bugs thus far. Fantastical!! <Howard Dean>Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!</Howard Dean>.
-Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Thought I'd throw this up. I've been trying to hack the font routine these past
few days. I discovered the font tiles weren't compressed after all. There
happens to be space for a full ASCII alphabet set, but figuring out how to hack
the code is another matter. D-boy helped with getting me the Courrier font, and
Dave Shadoff will hopefully take a look at the code. I've decided to try and
learn some PCE ASM so I'll see what I can do myself. Hope is on the way, it
seems, with regards to this issue...
-Sunday, August 1, 2004
Patch version .57 released. Minea Town and Promalock are finished; technically,
4267 strings are unfinished out of a total of 9929. Massive duplicates result in
the high percentage rate, so it doesn't mean script wise, it's 57% complete
(Don't let it fool you is essentially what I'm saying).
-Sunday, July 25, 2004
DeuceBag finished the Ys4 script today and so I began some string insertions for
the first town of Promalock.
-As of late
DeuceBag is around 67.1% or more past reviewing Shimaru's original translation
work and finishing off any untranslated strings... I've released the first patch
ever for this wonderful title that translates locations, weapons, and items....
Just a teaser, if you will, but something to keep the hope alive :).
Tips
What if I told you getting to play this game in English was as easy as
simply extracting the patch archive? MagicEngine supports two of my PPF patches
directly to avoid having to go through the hassle of ripping an original Ys IV disc,
patching it, and reburning it! Just follow the simple instructions below:
Download the latest
MagicEngine v1.XX emulator and extract it to some permanent install folder of
your choosing. Note: This feature is not supported with earlier versions. You can
purchase a license for a mere €15 EUR if you haven't already.
Download the
YsIV(US)v95.cab file listed below
and simply extract it in the same folder as pce.exe, your MagicEngine folder.
You really just need the "YsIV-ISO.ppf" file to remain with pce.exe. That's it!
Now, simply load your original Ys IV disc into your drive or mount an image
of it with Daemon Tools if you prefer to run it smoothly/quickly from the hard drive.
Boot the game and voila! Guess what? It's all English! It's being patched-on-the-fly
saving you all that headache of ripping/patching it yourself as mentioned.
Downloads
Ys IV English Dub v1.1.zip
- The long awaited dubbing patch making this game finally playable in 100%
English 8 years after the 1st failed attempt! We did it!!! You must apply both
this and the text patch for now!
YsIV(US)v95.cab - PPF-based
English text patch for an Ys IV ISO/WAV/CUE image file set.
YsIVScriptHTMLData.rar -
Please use this to proofread the script and email me back any
recommendations for improvement. Thanks.
YsIVADPCM.zip - This will
dump all the ADPCM sound clips from an Ys IV data track. The data track
(track 2) must be ripped in MODE1/2048 form, and you must edit the batch file
included to point to whatever name you then give the track file thereafter.
YsIVhack.rar - Eh, your choice
to try using this/if you want it or not. This is a perl script, so you need
Windows Perl runtimes installed. This will hack a MagicEngine or YAME save
state file so when you load it next time, you'll have full EXP, Gold and all
weapons/items. If using MagicEngine, save state compression needs to be turned
off and you need to figure out which save state file to use which will be named
by the CRC32 of the data track. The last modified date can help you figure that
out. So this is as is. No support on this.
Credits
(El NightWolve)
Project Manager/Programmer/Hacker/Script Editor, etc.
(Plus, the guy missing the most hours of sleep here... :)
It's OK, I'll catch up on my sleep when I'm dead.)
Neill Corlett
Programmer/Hacker; originally started work on this game and
left us the Ys4 decompression code along with some notes/code
analysis. The first to dump the script!
David Shadoff
Programmer/Hacker; wrote the Ys IV compression code and font hacked
for 8x12 lowercase support!! Also, amazingly enough, he handled
the ADPCM dump/insert utilities to allow for re-dubbing.
Akimaru (Mika Peurala)
That crazy Finnish guy who provided some quickie translations
and was the original founder of this project along with Neill.
Shimarisu (Rachel)
Our first translator. She's a loyal & hard working Ys/Falcom fan
that's been a great asset. After a PC crash, she managed to recover
her lost translation work which covered about 94% of the script.
Jeff "DeuceBag" Nussbum (AKA "The Flasher") - Or, to be accurate, WWWJDIC
Just a two-bit criminal that deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law and never should've been allowed to work on the
project.
Derrick Sobodash (D-BOY)
Courrier font tiles & font conversion tool. His knowledge
on fonts was indispensable. Bravo, D!
I'm around as well. I check back about once a week or so. Just got Ys I and II chronicles for PSP and I'm liking it. Wish they used some parts of Atlus' translation from the DS game, but some of the new writing is funny (there's a reference to a Hall and Oates song in the beginning of Ys I that amused me)