I don’t know if this warrants a lengthy explanation or if a quick and short statement would be best. Anyway I decided to go with a bit of explanation. Only read on if are in the mood for a bitter, old man’s ramblings.

To clarify in advance - this only concerns the projects I’m directly responsible for. This means Devil Children, Haruhi and the SMT remake. Some others I’m not sure I ever announced officially. I’m still unsure about what to do with those. Kingcom’s projects are completely unaffected by this, you don’t have to panic over Tales of Innocence or SRWJ. There are obviously some delays on those, but they are still progressing and this really isn’t the right blog post for more about that.

there’s more to this entry »

Posted by KaioShin at 10:51pm
74 Comments »

The last news update scored over 100 comments, so I guess you guys deserve another one. Next update will happen if this news gets over 9000 comments.

Progress has been steady on most fronts. The Project Overview page has been updated, but here is a run-down of the most important developments:

Super Robot Wars J

Editing is complete! Deets did an exceptional job in finishing the whole mammoth script in such a timely fashion. Now he moved on to work on editing images (he has a talent for that too!). Notice the “Shield Defense” graphic in the screenshots next to this. There are only very few images left to edit (and hack). This project is really close to being done now. Beta testing should commence within the next few weeks. (No we don’t need any testers, thanks).

Super Robot Wars F

Speaking of super robots, F did also make a huge leap in progress since the last time. Tyria is almost done translating, all that’s left are a few entries in the character database (Bonus content giving an overview of the characters and shows that appear in the game). Once he is done he will start to get cracking at SRW FF soon. In case you didn’t know - SRWF is only the first half of the story, F Final tells the other half. You can import your end savegame from the first game and carry over all stats, money and items to the new game. A translation of F alone would be pretty unsatisfying, but don’t worry, we will translate both.
Since the script is in such an advanced stage, Kingcom also started hacking the menues and made good progress. The project should get even more attention once J is released. By the way, Deets also signed up for editing again and already edited the first scenario! Rock on Deets!

Oriental Blue & DQM 1+2

This project is also progressing smoothly. More menues are done, what’s left are mostly minigames. Tom edited the script like 20 times in the meanwhile too, so it should be pretty polished. Speaking of Tom, the script of DQM 1 is completely translated. Kingcom also started hacking many menues. I played it for a bit already, and the first game is really quite playable already. More progress on this one is on the back-burner though until Oriental Blue is finished.

Tales of Innocence

The Tales of Innocence project is also going absolutely great. The script translation was finally completely finished a few days ago! After a massive marathon session of translating the last skit was translated well ahead of schedule. The script is being edited now. Another project that should enter beta testing very soon.

Kingcom also spend a great deal of time on his assembler called armips. While working on our projects over the years it was clear that goldroad/spasm and the other available assemblers for our target platforms were shit. So he wrote his own! After a ton of features were added he finally made a public release some weeks back, you can read about it (and download it if you like) at this thread. You can also see the feature list there and leave feedback if you like. I’m sure he’ll be glad to know if any other soul besides him uses it.

That’s it for now. There probably won’t be another news update until a release is ready (the 9000 comments thing was a joke). I’m sure though this time it won’t be another three months. Stay tuned.

Posted by KaioShin at 9:35pm
252 Comments »

Dear readers, this will be a BIG update. Not only do we have lot’s of news, no, to commemorate the event we also have a ton of pretty pictures to look at. We hope you enjoy them.

First off, we have a new project to announce, one that should please especially our long-time fans who are with us since this was just my personal little site about my newb attempts at hacking Caravan Heart.

Dragon Quest Monsters 1+2 (PSX Remake)

The hacking is currently being handled by Kingcom and none other than Tom (who also translated Caravan Heart) is working on the translation part of it. So far the project is already going very smoothly. As you can see in the screenshots a VWF is already implemented and working. Menu hacking is a different beast and will surely cause some headaches later on, but when did we ever let that stop us? I’ve been told the translation is progressing smoothly, although Tom will be moving to get a new job soon, so progress might slow down for a few months.

Xenosaga I+II DS

Yes we know, it’s been ages since we talked about this one. Translation is steadily going forward though and we also got a help offer from another translator, so things might move along even faster soon, if the original translator gives the OK. Here are some screenshots of translated scenes from the game:

Oriental Blue

Oriental Blue has been completely translated for a little while now. The news about that was eaten by the server crash, so here it is again. Kingcom also continued hacking work on it, so it’s getting closer to completion all the time. There is still a fair bit of stuff to be done (lot’s of minigames that’ll surely require lot’s of annoying image hacking) but this project is propably the second closest to completion apart from SRWJ. Speaking of which, it’s still in editing. We now started to edit the chapter graphics too.
Anyway… back to Oriental Blue. Yeah it’s going great and to apologize for the lost news entry here is a bunch of screenshots:

Devil Children - Ice Book

This one has also been translated for quite a while already, but the hacking of this game can only be described as a neverending nightmare. So don’t give me too much flak for slacking off on this one. It will be finished though, even if I’ll lose my soul in the process (not unlikely). We noticed we never showed any menu screenshots of this game either, so enjoy these. I paid for every single correctly menu label and every single correctly printed string with blood.

Tales of Innocence

Absolute Zero’s throughhim413 made a few special progress reports. Instead of just writing about it, he created two videos with commentary by himself. Pretty neat, be sure to check them out:

Progress Report 1

Progress Report 2

And before you ask, no I won’t do such a thing for any projects here. My accent is why too thick for you to understand anything anyway =P

Also… Could anyone create a new site theme for us?

Together with this news, the Project Overview page has also been updated. There has been some, ehm, critique, that we shouldn’t make such a page if we don’t update it often. It’s purpose is not to give you 0.01% exact live updates updated directly whenever we receive 2kB of text from one of our translators. The page is intended for new visitors who want to get a overview over all the projects combined into one page instead of reading up on all the news entries of the last two years. In that spirit we’ll probably update it only when we also have a front-page news like this.

Last but not least, we have a little request from you. We’d really like to have a new theme for the website. Is there a fan out there with webdesign talent who could help us out with this? Both Kingcom and I are pretty much n00bs when it comes to web stuff. As you can see on the Xenosaga screenshots, the current theme has some problems with pictures for example. 800×600 really isn’t up-to-date anymore, we’d really like a 1024×768 optimized design. There isn’t much we can offer in exchange for any help, other than access to our betas when they are done (might still be a few months off before we get to the first).

It would really be kick ass if someone could create something for us. We don’t have any fixed ideas on how it should like, I guess the only parameters are that it’s a Wordpress theme, compatible with the newest version of Wordpress and that it should handle pictures better than our current layout. Leave us a comment with a valid mail address if you’d like to help.

That’s it for today, thanks guys and look forward to more news whenever it’s ready.

Posted by KaioShin at 12:43pm
116 Comments »

Welcome back to the site. If you visit the site regularily you’ll have noticed that it was completely unreachable for about a week. This was caused by a complete data loss on the romhacking.net server were this page is also hosted. You can read a bit about what happened at this news site. To summarize it briefly, the webhosting company hosting that server and thousands of others was attacked by hackers. We’re back in action again now at least after Nightcrawler, RHDN’s site admin took care of the most imporant underlying technical issues. Some things still aren’t working, such as E-mails being sent from the server, so I disabled comments on this site for now to be on the safe side. I’ll let you know when comments are enabled again.

The last backup of RHDN and this site was from early April, so every post and comment since then has been lost and they can’t be recovered. I salvaged the FAQ post at least from google’s cache and turned it into a page, which you can access through the navigation bar.

This incident was only related to the website, rest assured that it didn’t affect any hacking work. We all have our files stored locally. I hope you didn’t thought we were all hit by meteors. Although at our current luck level it might not be so unlikely…

Update: Comments are enabled again for this post and from now on. I decided against opening them up again for all the old posts, they are old news anyway.

Posted by KaioShin at 2:46pm
62 Comments »

Woah, has it been three months already since the last post? Time sure flies by. We meant to write something for quite some time now, but you know how it is… there’s stuff to do, games to play and translations to finish. Despite our silence work has been steady and progress has been amazing on many fronts. I’d hope at some point you people would trust us on that instead of declaring us dead.

So what’s up?

Script translation and preliminary editing of SRW J is complete! Hackingwise the game has been very advanced for a long time already. We have a new editor on the team who is giving the whole script a second edit to make it shine as much as possible. His name is Deets and this second edit is also already well under way. I realize many of you would be happier with a raw beta release now and a polished translation later, but we decided against it. We’d like to present you with a truly professional translation that’ll make us proud and all of you happy. Please have some patience and bear with us, the end result will be worth it.

Tales of Innocence is also going excellently. The story event portion of the script has been completely translated leaving only the skits left to go. I’m damn excited myself to see this finished soon. For more information and screenshots, see Absolute Zero’s site.

In other, even greater news, I have the honour to announce three new projects to the public. Yes ladies and gentlemen, three! They have been worked on in the background quite some time already (one of them for half a year), but we feel the time is finally right to make them official. If you follow the comments and the board at romhacking.net you might have already known about some of them.

Oriental Blue
This GBA RPG is a spin-off of the famous Tengai Makyou series. Tom will be translating it and Kingcom is taking care of the hacking. It has actually quite far progressed already, with the translation progress reaching past the 50% mark.

Super Robot Wars F
After Tyria finished translating SRW J it was time for a new project of course! He’s currently translating the PSX version of SRWF. The hacking is still in early stages, but there has been great progress already. Compared to SRW J the script isn’t even that big, so maybe this one won’t take Tyria too long.

Super Robot Wars D
Another SRW? Yes, we’re totally serious. This one won’t be translated by Tyria however since he is obviously already busy. Another translator who’d like to stay anonymous at this point, is handling this script. It’s the predecessor to SRW J, so it’s not as spectacularily looking, but most people agree it has the superior storyline among the two games.

That’s all for now, rest assured there has been steady progress on all of our projects. If I didn’t mention one specifically, assume that no news is good news. Not all of our translations are as insanely fast as Tom or Tyria. We’ll bring up these projects again when they reach major milestones.

Posted by KaioShin at 9:17pm
37 Comments »

The Romhacking Aerie wishes every loyal fan and casual visitor a Merry Christmas!

Unfortunately we can’t offer you any surprise releases, but at least we have some news for you.

The Devil Children project got a huge progress boost - The preliminary formatting has been officially finished as of yesterday! I’ve played through the whole game and formatted the text along the way. We now have a very clear picture of what work is left to be done and we’ll get right to it. Beta testing for this project will start soon!

In other news, Super Robot Wars J is now translated up to Mission 45 (of 52). We’re very close indeed. Don’t forget there is still lot’s of editing to be done before it’s ready for beta though.

Last but not least, be sure to check out Absolute Zero’s blog today for a surprise on the Tales of Innocence project.

We’d like to thank everyone who commented on our site so far for the continued support. Our work wouldn’t be possible without you guys! Stay with us and you won’t be disappointed.

Now, go celebrate Christmas with your family and enjoy the holidays.

Until next year,
KaioShin

Posted by KaioShin at 1:46pm
48 Comments »

Tom has been on steroids recently and completely finished the script translation of Devil Children: Ice Book! This is a major milestone for the project and one that’s sure to point the way for more good news. Next up for this project will be finishing the hacking and formatting the text (sadly no auto formatter for this one). I already started on the later part a little bit, but there are also still tons of hacking issues to sort out too.

There already has been major hacking progress recently. Kingcom rewrote the game to use 1 Byte text instead of 2 Byte SJIS, which fixed our lingering naming storage issues. It destroyed just about everything else, but hey, it’s all a matter of time. Furthermore the naming screen has also been hacked. That’s a major step since it should be one of the most difficult to hack menus in the game. Other menu fixes are too numerous to list, but we’re getting there.

It’s coming along nicely!

Another matter I’d like to address is that we get asked a ton about what’s the progress on Project XYZ. We write updates on this site for a reason, to keep you informed. When we don’t mention a project than there is propably nothing exciting to report about. Most are in translation, and translating takes a lot of time. We can only hack one game at a time, so sometimes we make a ton of progress on one game and not a single bit of progress on other projects. This is completely normal and doesn’t mean we abandoned any of the other projects. It also doesn’t affect how long it takes for the other projects to be released, since the part that holds them up is usually the translation and not the hacking. When there is something to report you’ll read about it here. So please, reduce the redundant “Nice news but how is the other one?” comments.

Last but not least there is apparently a bit of confusion about which persons are working on which project. Otherwise no one would ask Tom how the translation of Xenosaga is going … To redeem that we created a project overview page. There you’ll find the people that are associated with each project and where the project stands.

Project Overview Page

That’s it for today and I hope you’re as excited about DC as I am! Progress form my side will be a bit slow for a couple of days, but you can blame that on Fallout 3. Absolutely the best game released this whole year so far. Shit! It’s that good >_< I need days with 30 hours each please…

Posted by KaioShin at 9:03pm
47 Comments »

It’s been a while, isn’t it? We didn’t die, quite on the contrary, we have a ton of progress to report on several projects’ fronts. We just didn’t feel like writing much. Fortunately you aren’t e-mail bombing us when we don’t post something for three days unlike the poor Mother 3 guys. *ahem* On to the news!

Image editor post:

I’d like to thank everyone who volunteered to help. A lot of people sent in the first batch of trial images, that really surprised us. The second one was a bit harder and only two people replied with an edited one. I guess we were pretty demanding after all. In the end we decided to give the post to death_seraph. Welcome to the team! I’ll try to have screenshots with his work in action soon.

Super Robot Wars Judgement:

Unfortunately, the editor we had presented to you in the last update left shortly afterwards due to time constraints. Not all is lost though, since we got a competent replacement just a few days ago. The new editor is YuushaFan, a friend of our translator Tyria. The very good news is that he seems to be as insanely fast as Tyria. I’m positive we’ll see lots of exciting progress on the editing soon.
The translation is progressing smoothly as well. Last I heard everything to mission 20 or so is already translated. Kingcom hopes to crack the last few remaining hacking issues soon as well.

Devil Children:

Translation is about a good 70% done. Story dialogue is already completed, what’s left is misc stuff like devil descriptions. Tom promised to have the translation finished soon! I have been working on the hacking again too, fixing a ton of minor menu problems. Kingcom helped out too, so we’re looking at good progress here. The game is a convulted mess though (only programming wise of course), so there is still lot’s to do.

Tales of Innocence:

Hacking should be mostly complete and the translation is progressing smoothly. You can find more detailled progress reports on Absolute Zero’s blog.

Xenosaga & Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei:

No news is good news. Translations are progressing smoothly.

Magical Vacation:

One of the two translators vanished. I don’t know what’s up with him, but I haven’t heard from him or seen him online in 2 months or so now. Anororn is making slow but steady progress though. The translation might progress somewhat slower, but it IS progressing. If someone else would like to fill the blank and help out with the translation contact me.

I’m also still looking for a translator for the Shin Megami Tensei GBA remake! If anyone is interested, you know where to find me. The game is awesome, it really needs to be translated!

Posted by KaioShin at 12:14pm
30 Comments »

KaioShin here, long time no see.

I was enjoying my extended period of laziness when Kingcom finally threatened to take away my loli porn collection, so I was forced back into action. I’ve resumed work on Devil Children since the translator will be finally ready to start translating the script soon.

The main reason I’m writing this news post is to bring to your attention that we’re really in dire need of an image editor or two to help us with our projects. We’re both not artsy types of people. Just thinking about Photoshop gives me a headache and I’m not sure if Kingcom has ever even used it at all.
We’d like someone to join our group as a permanent image editor for helping with our various projects. The work would involve creating small graphics, usually with text, for us to integrate into the translations. The size can go from a small 16×16 sign to a whole title screen. If you’re good with text graphics and you’d like to help, PLEASE contact us.

What we could offer someone as a member of the group:

• Access to early WIP and BETA builds of our projects
• Our projects get done faster
• A warm fuzzy feeling for helping out
• Do I dare say it… fame?

If you’d be good for the job you propably know what the work involves. We aren’t slave drivers (unless Kingcom gets a mean streak again) and are really quite nice guys to work with. Just get in touch with us and you’ll see.

If you’re interested drop us a comment and a means to reach you and we’ll contact you with instant messaging or IRC details.

On another more project related note, we also uploaded a new video about SRWJ to Youtube. As you might recall from the initial project announcement it was planned that no other than Gideon Zhi would be the script editor for the project later on. But since he has been really busy for months now and he even started to outsource his own SRW projects to other editors it was clear that we’d need to find someone else if the game were to be released sometime in this millennium. We now found a promising volunteer who will try his hand at the editing of the 3MB monster script. As a sample of his work he already edited the introduction of the game. The new video on youtube shows that ingame. Enjoy!

Last but not least, there have been volunteers for the translations of Magical Vacation and Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei! The scripts have been sent out, let’s hope for the best and good news on those projects front’s soon.

Posted by KaioShin at 6:29pm
15 Comments »

I’m proud to announce the latest and most recent project, Tales of Innocence! It’s a collaboration with throughhim413 from Absolute Zero, who also translated Tales of Phantasia for PSX last year. Even though the project is still a young one, a lot has already been accomplished. But see for yourself on the screens at the bottom!

Additionally, KaioShin decided to take care of finishing xdaniel’s Kururin Paradise translation, so he is working on something, too, now. The game has a fair amount of graphics that need editing, and if anyone would like to help with them, we would be very grateful.

But now it’s time for the screens!

Posted by Kingcom at 2:20am
28 Comments »