FINAL FANTASY IV RE-TRANSLATION / REVISION v2.0b J2E TRANSLATIONS http://members.aol.com/j2etrans/ j2etrans@aol.com --------------------------------- CONTENTS 1. TRANSLATION HISTORY 2. WHY RE-TRANSLATE? 3. J2E STAFF 4. WHAT WE DID SO FAR 5. WHAT WE WOULD LIKE TO DO 6. KNOWN BUGS 7. OTHER THINGS TO KNOW 8. APPLYING THE IPS PATCH 9. HOW YOU CAN HELP 10. COPYWRIGHT PERMISSIONS --------------------------------- 1. TRANSLATION HISTORY The FF4j translation was much more than just any ordinary translation. What started off as several different independant translation projects in competition with each other has become one of the biggest translation projects/group on the net! Through working together J2e Translations has achieved great goals that have, and will continue to revlutionize the translation scene! For a little history, most of the small FF4 translations started around August of 1997. These included several groups known as the Silicon Travelers, HELLSTORM TRANSLATIONS, and more! All of these groups had mainly decided to translate the japenese version of FF4 mostly to gain ROM-HACKING experience due to the lack of translators in the scene at the time. These groups had been using the american version of Final Fantasy 4, known as Final Fantasy 2 here, as a base and reference to thier FF4 translations. Anyways, at the time the 3 biggest FF4 translation groups were HELLSTORM TRANSLATIONS, a solo translation carried out by Anus P., Blasted2/Necrosaro transaltion group, who else coulda been in it??, and the Silicon travelers, headed by P-Funk. Around the end of November/beginning of December was when big things started to happen. Appearently at the time The Silicon Travelers seemed to have died out, and Anus P. joined up with Blasted2 and Necrosaro to form a completely new translation group known as J2e translations. Also at that time we managed to get other people to do some great things for us. We had contacted Ian Kelly, the man responsible for creating the useful FF4/2us differences document, only to learn that he had been translating FF4 for someone else already. But after talking for a bit, we managed to get some help, and Ian Kelly had decided to translate the scripts for us as soon as we got them all dumped! Also at that time, we had met a guy named Joke, responisble for translating FF4 to Thai. This guy was a great guy. He was able to use FF2us's code for Dual-Tile Encoding and incorperate it into FF4j! What Dual-Tile Encoding enabled us to do was store 2 letters as one byte in the rom, thus letting us have as much text as we needed without needing to expand the rom size! So while Ian Kelly was translating those scripts we decided to take the text from FF2us and paste it into FF4j, thus giving us a temporary patch to release! A little bit later however, we had learned that The Silicon Travelers was alive and well! Although now the only 2 members of it were P-Funk and Rydia, another useful translator! So we had finally gotten ourselves competition again, especially since P-Funk was learning ASM HACKING at the time! But we had then talked with him and got him to join J2e with us. This meant we now had an ASM HACKER, and another translator! also because of the fact that Dark Force was responsible for teaching P-Funk ASM, we had also managed to get him on our team! It was at that point that we had decided to drop DTE in our translation and use ROM-Expansion to fit all the text in. Although Rom Expansion wasn't needed at the time because of DTE, it had allowed us to use FF4's original Dual-Tile Encoding to print out 2 tile vertically instead of 2 tiles horizontally. What this let us do was bring a new 16x8 font into the game rather than the old 8x8! The person behind this was Anus P. He had also made it so that the old 8x8 font was still in the game. Shortly after all this, and the main scripts had been translated, J2e had revolutionized translations once again by devising new script insertion methods which a couple of well known groups have adopted from us. The program used to make these insertions was a program created by Necrosaro. Originally it was designed specifically for FF4, but has recently been released to the public as "Thingy". Although the program the public has doesn't support script insetions it is still a very useful tool. These script insertion methods allowed us to make changes to the scripts easily, and it was less time-consuming. Once the main scripts were in FF4, however, Dark Force had introduced us to a guy named Trainspotter. He is an expert in japenese translating, and script revising. That's when the FF4j translation became a translation/revision. He had perfected the scripts to sound alot better and make the overall game play more enjoyable! And then we had to deal with alot of bugs in the game, and here we are, finally releasing it! --------------------------------- 2. WHY RE-TRANSLATE? Why would we re-translate a game already translated here in North America? Simple... Square Soft did a HORRIBLE job translating this game! They had used bad english, and had censored out many important parts of the story that were in the japenese scripts! Also FF2us was taken off FF4j easytpe, which was alot easier than the hardtype version which is what we translated. Also in the easytype version many things (like items and stuff) were censored out, but with this translation you get everything that was origianally meant to be in FF4! including the ever famous Porno Mag! hehehe --------------------------------- 3. J2E STAFF Anus P. -Text replacements in rom -Script formatting -Font designer -Some small pointer code modifications Blasted 2 -Text replacements -Web maintainer -Font designer Necrosaro -Text replacements -Script formatting -Script insertions -Tool programmer Dark Force -Assembly code modifications P-Funk -Assembly code modifications -Text replacements Ian Kelly -Translator Trainspotter -Script revisor -Translator Rydia -Translator UnaFarmer -Translator *THANKS* J2e would like to thank the following people for their help demi draken J3D! Jeff Bolz J-Man Joke Magitek Kn. Ryuushiki Pan Thermopyle Toma XIII Sephiroth ZsKnight And the Silicon Translators --------------------------------- 4. WHAT WE DID SO FAR -16x8 font AND 8x8 font -monster names expanded from 8 characters long to 10 characters -place name windows expanded from 12 character max to 23 letters max -battle text dialogue window expanded -main text expanded from 32KB blocks to 64KB -Menus expanded out --------------------------------- 5. WHAT WE WOULD LIKE TO DO -fix yes/no menus -fix blue legend screen -expand out commands, magic names, attack names... whatever! -expand out the Row/Def menus --------------------------------- KNOWN BUGS -The yes/no menus when visiting an Inn are not displayed correctly yet. This is because the way that text is stored seems to be really encoded and so far we havent found anyone who has been able to crack it yet. right now rather than it actually saying "Yes" and "No", it looks more like this; Y N hey, its the best we could do! -The blue mysidian legend screen is also messed up. This is because it wont let us put the amount of text we want into it, but we're looking for ways around that! -When you are in an area where you can't save, the "e" on the word "Save" in the menu screen is still highlighted. oh well... -Also when you are in the Saving screen deciding which slot you are saving your game into, if you decide not to save and want to cancel, "Cancelled" will appear in the box that says "Save", however, the "S" will remain making the box say "SCancelled" when you decide to cancel saving your game. --------------------------------- 7. OTHER THINGS TO KNOW This patch is NOT our final patch! We probably wont have a final patch ready for a while either. We have decided to take the more RPGe approach to this and release an almost near-perfect patch now just so that you can enjoy this great re-translation/revision rather than wait another few monthes for us to finish up on all the little touch-ups here and there which we would like to fix up. But never the less, this is a 100% translated patch (exept for the damned freaken yes/no menu!) so don't be complaining! Also the scripts were revised after they were translated, so you are not getting the direct japenese translation, BUT you are still getting the whole story and it makes a hellof alot more sense too! And one last thing to know; it is highly recomended that you you do not continue playing this game from a previous savegame. It is really recommended that you play from the beginning of the game, not only to get the whole story, but because of the nature of the new font, the characters names might not look good if you continue from a savegame used from FF4j or FF2us. --------------------------------- 8. APPLYING THE IPS PATCH Download the FF4j original rom, then make a copy of it if you would like. The get the patch "ff4j2e20.ips" and then get SNESTOOL to patch the ips to the FF4j rom. SNESTOOL is fairly easy to use. Just select "apply IPS" and follow the on-screen instructions. --------------------------------- 9. HOW YOU CAN HELP If you see any errors in our script (bad spacing, bad text wrapping, ect...) please tell us so we can get right on it! --------------------------------- 10. COPYWRIGHT PERMISSIONS This patch was created through the hard work of the many people at J2e and we would appreciate it that you do NOT distribute the patched rom. You must distribute this patch with everything included in the ZIP file, including this file you are now reading! Thanks, and enjoy!