Translating Necros Fortress

[washbear]

Necros Fortress is a 1990 turn-based RPG on HuCard. It's based on a line of candy toys, but it's actually a quite competent game designed by the studio that'd later do the Far East of Eden and Sakura Wars series. Probably the most notable feature for the time is that it has very fancy battle animations. There's seven chapters and a lot of playable characters: the Mercenary, Knight, Amazon, Magician, Elf, Samurai, Beserker, Dwarf, and Marine.

I've got a CoreGrafx, but no CD system for it. I'm a shmup-head, but also a RPG-head, and wanted a turn-based RPG on HuCard. I've got quite a lot of experience reverse engineering PC games, but never did a romhack before. The first step was figuring out the character set, which seems to be a one-byte encoding with uppercase latin, digits, hiragana, and katakana, with a combining character for dakuten marks. Eventually lowercase Latin characters should replace the Japanese ones, and the rendering width should be reduced a bit.  I uh... don't speak Japanese. But a lot of game translators in the 90s didn't speak English. Maybe it's more authentic that way.

Here's a few screenshots of what I have so far:

[Necromancer]

Ah, neato.  I love me some translated RPG goodies.  I'm not very familiar with this one (the language barrier probably scares me off) but I'm looking forward to giving it a go.

Thanks for the effort and for posting about your project.  Keep us updated!

[Paranoia Dragon]

Necros Fortress is a 1990 turn-based RPG on HuCard. It's based on a line of candy toys, but it's actually a quite competent game designed by the studio that'd later do the Far East of Eden and Sakura Wars series. Probably the most notable feature for the time is that it has very fancy battle animations. There's seven chapters and a lot of playable characters: the Mercenary, Knight, Amazon, Magician, Elf, Samurai, Beserker, Dwarf, and Marine.

I've got a CoreGrafx, but no CD system for it. I'm a shmup-head, but also a RPG-head, and wanted a turn-based RPG on HuCard. I've got quite a lot of experience reverse engineering PC games, but never did a romhack before. The first step was figuring out the character set, which seems to be a one-byte encoding with uppercase latin, digits, hiragana, and katakana, with a combining character for dakuten marks. Eventually lowercase Latin characters should replace the Japanese ones, and the rendering width should be reduced a bit.  I uh... don't speak Japanese. But a lot of game translators in the 90s didn't speak English. Maybe it's more authentic that way.

Here's a few screenshots of what I have so far:

Oh neat, are you Pennywise? Saw this on another forum. This is one of many games I have an interest in. There's three things I'm really hoping for though, that I hope will be tweaked. The flashing in the original game seems out of control and needs to be toned down somehow, that's the main thing. But it seems like the battles need to be sped up a bit in general, and the encounter rate looks unusually high. Are these things that you have done or are planning to do?

[Mathius]

I've surprisingly never heard of this one before. Looking forward to it.

[washbear]

Oh neat, are you Pennywise? Saw this on another forum. This is one of many games I have an interest in. There's three things I'm really hoping for though, that I hope will be tweaked. The flashing in the original game seems out of control and needs to be toned down somehow, that's the main thing. But it seems like the battles need to be sped up a bit in general, and the encounter rate looks unusually high. Are these things that you have done or are planning to do?

I'm not Pennywise, would you mind dropping a link in a PM?

For the gameplay changes, I haven't dug that deeply into code yet except for patching in English text. I'm aware of the problem with the flashing though, disabling it could maybe be added as an option. I'd be cautious modifying the encounter rate since such things can effect game balance and level progression - maybe a separate romhack could be produced (or again, as an option).

My notes and some basic tools for working with this game can be found on my GitHub: https://github.com/alarixnia/necros-fortress-en

[Naniyue]

This one should be relatively easy to translate, since it just uses hiragana and katakana, with no kanji.

[washbear]

This one should be relatively easy to translate, since it just uses hiragana and katakana, with no kanji.

Yeah, the hardest part is keeping the jokes while keeping the ROM size within acceptable limits. This game is very silly.

[Paranoia Dragon]

Did you get my pm?

[washbear]

Did you get my pm?

Yeah, I got it. I'll continue working on this until we get more news from Pennywise.

[Paranoia Dragon]

Did you get my pm?

Yeah, I got it. I'll continue working on this until we get more news from Pennywise.

Roger that! Looking forward to it! I understand how introducing or altering things can add new problems. Bare minimum, I hope the flashing can somehow be adjusted because it's pretty crazy. Thankfully I don't get seizures, but still. And then maybe speeding up the battles could be an option? They look a little bit on the long side.

Also, just so you know, your work is very very much appreciated! Comparatively speaking, so little is done on the pce compared to other consoles.

[washbear]

Some more recent bits.

[Paranoia Dragon]

Some more recent bits.

👍