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 Deuce's FAQ, a man 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. Sad 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

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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.

(By Ranzor)

Links

• Ys IV Rpgfan Review
• Deuce's Ys IV FAQ/Walkthrough
• Hudson Soft's Listing
• PCECP Listing

Progress

-Saturday, December 25, 2004

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 Deuce 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

Deuce finished the Ys4 script today and so I began some string insertions for the first town of Promalock.

-As of late

Deuce 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:

1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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

• YsIV(US)v95.cab - PPF-based English patch for an Ys IV BIN/CUE or 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

• (aka 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!
• Dave 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.
• Deuce (Jeff Nussbaum)
  Final translator that handled the reviewing of Shimarisu's work and finished off any remaining untranslated strings.
• D-BOY (Derrick Sobodash)
  Courrier font tiles & font conversion tool. His knowledge on fonts was indispensable. Bravo, D!
• mjmmx (Mike), ViperD
  BETA testing/script corrections.