Japanese language Ultima-7

[Jeff Wisgo]

Hello,

I am a huge fan of Ultima 7 and was looking to play it again, this time in Japanese. I own the original game but I was wondering if you know of any patch that changes the language to Japanese.

Thanks!

* Long live Exult and Ultima 7 *

Jeff

[WWWWolf]

Not that I know - I'm aware of complete Italian and Russian translations of U7BG and French U7SI translation (http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Fan_translations). There are several other translations under way - personally I'm currently working on a Finnish translation.

I don't know Japanese myself so I'm not very good on this front, but I'd be terribly interested knowing exactly how well Exult handles multibyte character encodings. My guess is that it doesn't handle them terribly well - if not, there's the 256 glyph limit per font that might be problematic. Translation tools do support all of that stuff, though - at the one I wrote does UTF-8 just fine and translates it to single-byte encoding just fine (though admittedly the solution is less than beautiful)...

Another problem is that in Ultima VII the fonts are stored as graphics; I was in pain when I added just two new upper and lower case characters to all fonts for the Finnish translation (truth to tell there's still a few fonts that don't have them =), and I have to specifically compliment the guys who did the Cyrillic character set for the Russian translation. That must have hurt. =)

Sorry for rambling, it probably didn't help, but all I'm saying that it's possible someone could translate if they were motivated enough, though it'd probably require a few new tweaks to Exult itself and it's not as simple as just throwing in a usecode/gumps.vga/fonts.vga patch.

[DK]

Hello,
should be very interesting translate Ultima VII in Japanese (be aware, it's about 1MB of text!).

A partial solution could be using only the katakana and hiragana syllabaries (plus some symbols), so, they should fit into the 256 chars of the font.

Of course, using only the syllabary, the text lines would be very long; better using also kanji; but it require space in the font and multi-encoding in strings data.

So, to support full Japanese language (kanji + syllabaries + symbols) I think Exult need some modifications (of course incompatible with DOS version):
- create an unicode bitmap font system (or switching to TrueType is simpler? but only for resolution greater 320x200, of course)
- change data string in the function to a multi-byte encoding (UTF-8)
- and very likely, in some functions (greater 64KB), opcodes wil need a conversion from 16bit to 32bit


In this page, you can see a version of Ultima VI (for FMTowns) and Ultima VII (for Super Famicom), but I do not know if they really are in Japanese (screenshots are too small).

And, according to [these screenshots, seem exist a Japanese version of Ultima Underworld.
[Edit by Dom, deleted the link since that forum post is mainly about torrents for games - to be fair, DK contacted me about it since he wasn't sure about this link himself ]

[WWWWolf]

Ultima VI's FM-Towns version has apparently English and Japanese text *and* had full speech in both languages (there was a page about this in the Origin Museum), much cooler than the PC version in my opinion. Also, Ultima VIII was translated to Japanese (I don't know anything about this aside of the screenshot in the Pentagram pages =)

By the way, is it possible to switch text fonts on fly with just Usecode? If so, it'd possible to use two or more font shapes at the same time; one for katakana/hiragana and more shapes for kanji. (A not-so-educated guess: No, or alternatively it'd require some extremely creative usecode gymnastics to pull off... but I've not looked at the code side in Usecode so I don't know how much of this functionality is in Usecode and how much in the engine side.)

[Petrell]

It appears that, including underworlds 1&2 and savage empire, all but ultima 7 pt1 & pt2 (plus martian dreams and VIII's speech pack) were fully tranlated to japanese. See Ultima collectors guide at http://www.ultimacollectors.info/

For screenshots of Ultima 1 - 5 in japanese see Ultima Collection Japanese Version at http://www.bonz3.net/ultima/index.html

besides the japanese text, the graphics were quite different as well

Cover of japanese complete ultima collection : http://www5.airnet.ne.jp/c-unit/ultima/ ... c_clue.jpg (includes english Ultima VII pt1 and pt2 with expansions).


WWWWolf : how's the translation progressing? Havin fun with 'ääkköset' ja 'öökköset' are you?

[Dominus]

I do own the playstation version of Ultima Underworld and I did provide the UW Adventures project with screenshots for this and somewhere on that site the zip is still availlable (probably the link to it is also mentioned in our forum somewhere).

[WWWWolf]

Petrell: It's progressing slowly but steadily =) the translation tool currently says 40% done, but that could be misleading because it doesn't take into account the size of the text chunks (i.e. a spell effect usecode has one line, LB's dialogue has a couple of hundred...). I've lately been focusing on the NPCs that are relevant to the main plot, and there's dozens of NPCs that do not relate to the main plot. There's *lots* of people in this game...

A lot of work to do, but I've translated all of Trinsic, almost all of Paws, many many NPCs in Britain and Jhelom, and almost half of the books (I think).

The most murderous part of the translation is the localisation. Farmers have to sound like farmers and tax collectors have to sound like tax collectors. Plus, I'm not really a poet, translating the poetry is very challenging but also rewarding.

[Luke]

C'mon.. how hard can it be. All there is to translate is 'Name', 'Job', and 'Bye'

[Dominus]

suuuuure...