Announcement ~ Welcoming SRW2 Back Into the Fold
Super Robot Wars 2
# Posted on Oct. 4, 2013, 12:18 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

Over the years I can think of exactly three projects I've ever completely dropped - that is, three projects I removed from the website entirely. One of those was the Japanese version of Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest, which is now being done by these fine folk here. The second was Granhistoria, an odd little RPG published by Banpresto on the Super Famicom, but I'm not going to be talking about Granhistoria... at least, not today. Today I'm announcing the triumphant return of the Super Robot Wars 2 translation.

I've honestly been poking at SRW2 on and off for quite some time. Several years back I was given a hack to help with some extra text space, though I don't believe this ever found its way into the current build of the translation. I'd redumped the game's script at around that time and would mention it offhand to people who might be interested, but it was never really a priority.

So last February I re-redumped the script and gave it to TheMajinZenki, who was responsible for the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Royal Stone text translations. (He and I have a few other things brewing by the way, but nothing I'm really willing to talk too much about just yet.) He returned the script to me a month later, and I immediately set to work trying to get it back into the game - only to discover that one of the text banks was badly over-size and that the routine printing said text was shared by a number of the larger graphic elements of the game, so my usual trickery would not work. It was back to the old slash-and-burn tactics of pruning it bit-by-bit until it finally fit into its bank. This is thankless work, and at the time I was busy with my last semester of higher education and still working a full-time job, so SRW2 was not a priority. I also wanted to see if I could manage some kind of workaround for the text, but everything was coming up blank.

Well, this past Monday I sat down with the file and pruned it 'til it fit. I'm not proud of some of the cuts I had to make, but the perfect is the enemy of the good as the saying goes and SRW2 looks pretty good as it is. Then over the next two days I got the rest of the text inserted and hacked up a couple of routines, and now the project is very nearly done; all that really remains is for someone to come in and clean up Zenki's script a bit and we'll be ready for testing.

So! Hopefully this will be out soon. I've been poking a couple of hornets' nests in the hopes of getting an editor to come chasing after the script with all the fervor of an angry hive but so far nobody's really bitten. We'll see how things progress from here.

Incidentally, those of you who've played both older and newer SRWs will appreciate a fairly small hack I performed on SRW2 to get the robots' battle theme music to stay after combat scenes end. This will be provided with the patch as an optional accessory, and as a bonus it doesn't even need the translation - if you prefer playing the game in Japanese for whatever reason, the music patch will still work. I'll be providing a patch to reverse the hack as well.