Silviana English Translation Patch History ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 091213 Initial release Overview ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a translation patch for the MSX2 game Silviana. In addition to being a full translation, it also makes numerous enhancements to the game in order to increase your enjoyment. There is also a dual-language feature of sorts. Applying the Patch ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hopefully included with this document is a patch file in the IPS format. This patch utilizes run-length compression, which was not part of the original IPS standard. Therefore, it is possible that some patcher programs will not work with this patch. Every copy of this game that I've seen in the wild is based on the same cracked source disk. This patch might work with the uncracked version, but this hasn't been confirmed. Playing the Game ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Once you've patched the disk image, simply load it in your favorite MSX emulator or write it to a floppy disk to use on a real MSX2 system. It requires an NTSC MSX2 (or better) and 128k of RAM (originally only 64k). The controls are as follows: Button A / Space Confirm, use equipped item Button B / Enter Cancel, inventory screen F1 Save game to RAM F2 Inventory screen F3 Equipment screen F4 Treasures screen Shift-F5 Save game to RAM & disk Escape Pause game To run the game with Japanese text, you need to modify the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to add a second argument which should consist only of the letter 'J'. You could also accomplish this by pressing Control-C repeatedly after MSX-DOS loads in order to halt the batch file. (There is probably an easier way to disable it but I don't know what it is.) When control returns to MSX-DOS, type "TYPE AUTOEXEC.BAT" to see the command used to start the game, then retype it and add a space and the letter 'J'. Be aware that only some of the text will be in Japanese. Warning: it is not recommended to extract the files and run them as a virtual disk. I have had problems with some emulators apparently building the simulated disk image wrong sometimes. In addition, certain emulators will refuse to write back any changes so you won't be able to save the game. Q & A ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: This patch doesn't work! What do I do? A: Try using a different emulated machine, preferably one that meets the system requirements listed earlier and that can run the original game. You may also have better luck using a different emulator. Q: Silviana or Sylviana? A: Without an official romaji rendering, there is no way to tell for sure. Both spellings are "real" names in the West and are legitimate renderings of the Japanese. There are other possible transliterations as well. One of the files on the disk use the former spelling so that is the one used for this translation. However, I would not necessarily consider that to be conclusive. Q: What do Gamma Eyes do? A: If equipped, they will protect you from one trapped chest/bag. List of Changes (not exhaustive) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Text in the opening pictures was translated and the graphics were repacked English section of font was improved Minor graphical fixes to a few of the icons Some error strings were translated Lots of unnecessary delays were reduced or eliminated Additional input options can now be used at the main menus New Game / Continue options were swapped so that Continue is at the top Numbers moved around in the inventory screen for aesthetic reasons Equipment screen modified to show more text The previously unused (in-game) B Button now accesses the inventory F2/F3/F4 now work more intuitively and with added convenience All 30 characters of the text display line are now available for use Dual-language feature added Translation Notes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Probably the biggest flaw of this translation is that item and equipment names are restricted to eight characters. Hence, almost everything got abbreviated to some degree during translation. Fixing this is certainly possible, but some of the other parts of the various displays would suffer and it is more work than I wish to invest in such a short game. Most of the abbreviations should be intelligible when viewed in the context of their icons, but a few of the less obvious ones are listed here. St = Statue Flw = Flower Fth = Feather R = Ring D = Doll Hacking Notes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This was started as a toy project, but ended up being fairly complete. As you can see from the changes section above, quite a lot of improvements were made to the game, and I believe it to be superior to the original. As you may have noticed, the RAM requirements for this game increased over the original amount. The reason is that there is very little obviously-unused memory during the main part of the game. While it might be possible to scrape together enough space for the translated strings and code hacks, they would be scattered all over the place and certain system areas would probably have to be overwritten. It was much easier and safer to simply store the string data in an unused RAM page and overwrite the Japanese strings with the code that was written to facilitate this hack. I admit that the additional RAM requirement is a demerit. Most of my translation patches have dual-language features where the original Japanese script is kept intact and can be activated under certain conditions. This game is no exception, however it is more of a side effect rather than a planned feature. The original string section was kept but moved to paged RAM so that it could be used in place of untranslated strings during development. Because of this, it was not hard to add a command line option to disable the English strings and use the originals. However, this only applies to some of the in-game strings, not items and other text. Variable-width is surprisingly easy to do in certain MSX2 video modes. Unfortunately, doing it the easy way was noticeably slowing down the text scrolling and I didn't have the fortitude to do the messy hacks necessary to fix it. It also might not have looked good without being applied to all the other in-game text, which was a daunting task. Still, you do get some variable-width text in the opening, since it uses pre-rendered graphics. Several programs were developed to unpack and repack the picture data and to render the text directly into the bitmaps using the same font as the game. While I sometimes endeavor to fix original bugs present in games, I often leave them alone if they aren't likely to get blamed on me. This game has an interesting defect where continuously switching between the equipment and treasure screens will deplete the stack. Returning to the game will unroll it. I'm not sure how many times you'd have to do this to disrupt the game, but it seems harmless for anyone not intentionally trying to break it.