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What changes

The story you were not told

The scenes that the US script rewrote are the reason this patch exists. Cain, the masked knight who kills the king of Guardiana, takes his mask off at the Prompt gate and remembers who he is:

Nova, in the headquarters at Guardiana, tells Max how he got there:

And Adam, the mechanical soldier at Metapha, explains why Darksol wanted the two brothers in the first place:

The prologue on the farm, the epilogue with the girl and her grandfather, the wall carving that recruits Musashi, the Prompt villagers with their dialect, Mishaela's snobbery, the robot Chaos stuttering in capitals: all of it is translated from what the Japanese ROM says, not from what the US ROM says.

The names

This is the "faithful" choice, so every name that the localisation changed goes back. Names that only differ in spelling (Pelle for ペイル, Diane for ディアーネ, Torasu for トーラス) stay as they are, because they are the same name. The table lists what the patch actually rewrites, in the dialogue and in the menus.

Spell names in the magic menu are limited to six letters by the window, so Detox, Dispel, Shield, Muddle and Desoul keep their US names even though the Japanese are Antidote, Anti-Spell, Spell Wall, Illute and Soul Steal. Class abbreviations on the status screen are unchanged. Item names are two rows of eight letters each in the item window, which is why the toothpick became "Tooth Pick".

What stays

The battle messages ("Lowe attacks!", "Inflicts 12 points of damage"), the menu prompts ("Use whose item?"), the treasure-chest messages and the debug flag strings keep the US text. They say the same thing in both languages, and they are the strings whose tags the engine is fussiest about. The only edits there are the name substitutions above.

How it was made

Shining Force stores its text Huffman-compressed, one tree per preceding symbol, in nine banks of 256 strings, with a single length byte in front of each string. The US ROM is 1,572,864 bytes and its text area is full: the English of 1993 was written to fit the space, which is one of the reasons it is so much shorter than the Japanese. English that says what the Japanese says needs about forty percent more room.

So the patch expands the ROM to 2 MB and moves the script into the new space. The decoder is copied to $180000 with its two PC-relative pointers rewritten, the 212-entry tree table and the tree data follow it, the nine text banks follow those, and the jump at $010048 that every text call goes through is repointed at the copy. The bank pointer table at $13E906 gets nine new addresses, the header's ROM-end field becomes $1FFFFF, and that is every byte of the original ROM that the script relocation touches. The item, spell and enemy name tables are rebuilt at $1F0000 and reached through the game's own pointer block at $0203B0, and six ally names are rewritten in place in the character table.

Two things about the text engine shaped the translation. The dialogue window is three lines of 196 pixels in a proportional font, and the engine wraps a word only when a glyph crosses the edge, so line breaks have to be placed by hand or the words split. Every translated line was re-wrapped from the width of each glyph in the ROM's font table. And each string has one length byte, so no string can compress to more than 255 bytes; the Japanese speech at the spring in Metapha, eleven pages long, had to be tightened twice to get under it.

The other trap was alignment. The US script is not the Japanese one with the text swapped: the localisers inserted two strings, at 0621 and 07A9, so from there on the Japanese line for any US slot is one, then two, indices behind. Translate by index and the last third of the game would have every townsperson saying the previous townsperson's line. The mapping was worked out by matching names and tag patterns and then checked by hand at every place it shifts.

The translation itself was done in twelve batches against a shared glossary of names, places and terms, with the US line beside the Japanese for context only. Each batch was then checked mechanically: same placeholders as the Japanese ([Hero], [Name], [Item], [Num]), same number of timed pauses in cutscenes, every page short enough for the window, every character present in the font. A handful of pages that wrapped to four lines were rewritten by hand, and the opening prologue was cut to the two lines its box allows.

Applying the patch

Questions