Looking to translate software... where to get started?

[tcaud]

Hi, I'm looking to translate some softs and make the PC-98 more easy for Westerners to use. The main stumbling block I'm having is the hex editing... I either can't seem to find a hex editor for JIS or I can't configure one for use as such. Can someone help me with this?

[tcaud]

Particularly I'd like to translate Pc-98 DOS/Shell. I think that would be pretty easy for starters, and quite useful. I nearly formatted my HDI the other day without realizing it.

[kobushi]

Bz is a great hex editor for working with Japanese.
https://github.com/devil-tamachan/binaryeditorbz

Good luck with your efforts.

[tcaud]

Bz only shows text one byte at a time, which prevents it from interpreting byte pairs as Kanji. Need to see the text as two-bytes per character. After reviewing the options at RHDN, I'm quite persuaded that the software I'm looking for does not exist (well, almost... I'm sure it's available but not for free, and not within the price range of a hobbyist).

[kobushi]

Bz only shows text one byte at a time, which prevents it from interpreting byte pairs as Kanji. Need to see the text as two-bytes per character.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, because Bz can do that.

[tcaud]

How do you set it up for that? I looked all over for a switch thereto. I'm using 1.8.5 for Win32 from Github.

I found this software called Sakura Edit, which does Kanji, but it insists on breaking at line feeds so it's useless for hacking.

[kobushi]

Did you change the character set to SJIS? For PC98 it's almost always going to be SJIS.
I assume you already have a Japanese font such as MS Gothic or IPA Gothic on your computer. Maybe you need to set Bz to a Japanese font manually?

[tcaud]

Done and done. I'm not sure what the issue is. Are you using the latest version or an earlier version? Maybe the latest versions have a bug?

[kobushi]

Nope, the latest version works fine. I just checked (1.9.8.5)

And when you specify a Japanese font, also be sure to specify Japanese script (not Western) at the bottom of the dialog box.

[tcaud]

I did that.

I pretty much gave up. Making my own hex text viewer now anyway. This one will be in HTML 5 and will make use of an image for its character set so that it will be cross platform and OS-native multiple language support will be unnecessary. I had hoped to use the Anex98.bmp set for this but I realized it didn't match up with Shift-JIS. I can't seem to find a mono-spaced character set graphic for Shift-JIS that I could programmatically pull characters from. Can anyone point me to one?

[SkyeWelse]

Nice to meet you tcaud!

Good to see some others that are also interested in translating some interesting PC-98 software out there. I'd like to invite you to join our PC-98 Discord server: ttps://discord.gg/FZVyrtk

We have a #pc-98_Translation_Discussion channel there where our group 46 OkuMen mostly hang out, but we also have Nana who is another PC-98 translator /hacker there as well as a hacker by the name of Josejl that is part of another Romhacking group that I'm a part of called Heroes of Legend who recently assisted in a Brandish 2 Renewal PC-98 translation. Perhaps your questions could be answered in real time there if you wanted to check it out.

-Thomas