Hello one, hello all! We're back, and somehow — I'm just getting reports of this now — it's already spooky season? How the hell did that happen, man. Wasn't I just writing about Screaming Mad George's pinball nightmare a few months ago? Did spending the first three weeks of September in Asia where it was like 90 degrees and wetter than the inside of a mouth throw off my seasonal radar? Quite possibly. But here we are barreling towards the end of the year nonetheless.

I've fallen woefully behind in my optimistic plan to play a bunch of fan translations this year, though there's still some time left before I declare that plan a failure! I'm hoping to sneak in Cabal Translations' London Seirei Tanteidan by year's end, and am greatly looking forward to Hilltop's "Fan Translation Direct" which aims to celebrate human-made patches whenever it comes together.

On that subject: You may have seen on social media that longtime translator Eien Ni Hen tragically passed away in recent weeks. I didn't know her personally, and wish I'd had a chance to interview her about her decades of selfless work in bringing Japanese games to English audiences. But if you'd like to get a sense of how meaningful her contributions were, please read this:

Found in translation: the selfless legacy of Eien Ni Hen
For those who followed the English fantranslation efforts of Japanese RPGs since the very first days, back when the idea of playing localized versions of Final Fantasy V, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean and Seiken Densetsu III seemed too good to be true and teams like RPGE and DeJap were like wizards inhabiting a different plane of existence, this scene was never just about perusing patches, but also about acknowledging and celebrating the people that made all of it possible.
Magnvs' RPG JourneyMagnvs

I'm reminded, not for the first time, that I really need to play TearRing Saga one of these days. I'm more interested in where series creator Shouzou Kaga went with the strategy series after leaving Nintendo than the series proper has gone with the last couple Fire Emblems. That those games have a western presence at all is largely thanks to Ein Ni Hen.

In this issue we've got a story about a cult fave 2000s RPG getting the translation it deserves, as well as a check-in on the cutting edge of current-gen console emulation.

Hopefully by the time we're back in two weeks I'll have something spooky cooked up for the season. Until then — stay squashy. 🎃

💸
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The Big Two

1. PlayStation 5: Set to hyperdrive

And I thought ShadPS4 moved fast.

Since my July 19th issue of ROM, Get ready for PlayStation 5 emulation, progress in getting Sony's current-gen console games running on PC is moving like it's the bus from Speed with a turbo on it. It's the unstoppable train from Unstoppable. It's Jason Crankam in Crank: High Voltage. It's, uh, going really fast.

I'm marveling at it just a bit, even though it isn't actually shocking. There are a few obvious things spurring this rate of progress. Anger over Sony ending PC ports, and then even more anger of it planning an end to physical discs; the impending release of a high profile, console-only game in GTA 6; the underlying technology at work being more about translation than full, bottom-up hardware recreation in software. A quick recap on that front from last time:

"Since the PS5 is an x86 system much like a PC, the primary task here is translating system calls and APIs unique to the PS5 into ones Windows (or Linux, etc) can understand. ShadPS4, WINE and Proton are also compatibility layers."

But of course those are only partial explanations, and there's one more that dwarfs all of them. PS5 emulation development is going absolutely Ape. Shit. on AI.

LLM coding agents have made their way into plenty of emulation projects as they've settled into place as a normalized tool in the software development world. But to this observer's eye, at least, PlayStation 5 emulation is the first to be born into this new AI era. And without mature, organized projects with established safeguards to manage the influx of tokened-up novices and torrents of pull requests and custom builds, it's absolute chaos.

Here's a representative conversation from the PS5 Emulation Discord just yesterday:

User 1: "There are literally 500+ builds out there with everyone using AI to fix specific games and make them run faster."

User 2: "The problem is its really hard to merge these large changesets and keep the emulator on course architecturally. on the other hand i dont see much guidance on what you SHOULD be doing so everyone just shoots off in different directions."

User 1: "Oh it’s a cluster fuck. We need leadership and a chain of command but it’s the wild Wild West. Is what it is I suppose. Hell I’m a developer with AI lol. Everyone is."

Spend a bit of time in the Discord and you'll see tons of custom forks of popular emulator KytyPS5; there are nearly 600, according to its GitHub page. The other big name, SharpEmu, has more than 500. New kid on the block AnyPS5, which calls itself a "tool for automatic PS5 executable porting to Linux and Windows," has already whizzed past 275 (it also works basically the same way as the others, despite how it's presented).

Those numbers don't necessarily mean anything — long-established emulators have thousands of GitHub forks belonging to contributors who port their work back into the main project or are trying out something custom — but for projects this relatively young, I think it's still broadly telling of what's going on. Tons of folks in the Discord are spinning up game-specific forks to get a few more playable frames in a game like Wolverine or Demon's Souls by setting Claude loose on the code. This has been a gold mine for YouTube channels that put "game name" + "FPS!!!" in their titles, and inevitably leads to a bunch of people in the Discord help channel asking why the game actually only runs at 3 fps for them.

Does the "work" behind these game-specific branches then feed back into the core emulator's progress? So far it's hard to tell. SharmEmu, at least, does seem to be making slow and steady progress — with "slow" here still being really damn fast compared to the development pace of a decade ago.

A couple recent posts from SharmEmu's lead developer:

KytyPS5's compatibility site boasts significantly more entries, and its developers have started posting weekly updates about which games have become playable — in the sense that you can at least get past the main menu. That doesn't mean they run well, or are bug-free, a distinction not really brought up in your typical AI thumbnailed YouTube gameplay vid.

My takeaway right now is that it's all just kinda chaos. And as impressive as the rate of improvement currently is buoyed by AI, it's hard for me to get too excited about PS5 emulation. For now the hardware demands are too high and the list of desirable exclusive games is too short; the idea of hunting down a custom fork for a few extra FPS in every single game is far less appetizing than it was when, like, Primehack was the only fork that mattered.

The thing I can't stop thinking about is what this says about the future — for Switch 2 emulation, or whatever ends up being the next big thing. What's the right way to grow and shepherd a project when anyone can "contribute" AI compute? Do you go closed source? Forbid AI code contributions of any kind? Just let the chaos reign and merge in the quality stuff that maybe floats to the top?

I have no idea, but I have a feeling growing pains won't come close to capturing what a pain in the ass it's going to be.

2. The big Ar Tonelico 2 retranslation: "Please, play the game that changed my life"

FioraAeterna doesn't mess around. I know that from interviewing her more than a decade ago about her contributions to GameCube emulator Dolphin, so when I saw she'd released a new patch for PS2 RPG Ar Tonelico 2 featuring an "artisinal human translation job" of more than 550,000 words and "countless bugs" fixed, I thought: Yeah, that sounds about right. I knew Fiora was a fan of developer Gust's long-running Atelier series before I even knew Ar Tonelico existed, but according to the wonderful throwback 2000s website she built for this translation, it's never too late to find a game that changes your life.

"Our translator played Ar Tonelico 2 for the first time in 2023 (in Japanese) and quickly became obsessed with it. She then recommended the game to all her (English-speaking) friends, only to rapidly discover the hard way that the game she had blindly passed out to her friends was… a drastically different game than what she had played," Fiora writes. "I've spent over a year of my life working on this translation, and I did so because I wanted to share with all of you a game that was deeply important to me and changed my life in a way no other work of art ever has."

Project Metafalica 2.0 — Ar tonelico 2 Retranslation
A complete retranslation and remaster of Ar tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica for PS2, with bugfixes and QoL features.
Project Metafalica 2

This project borrows from "an enormous amount of technical work" previously done by fans for a 2016 retranslation project, but Fiora argues that one didn't go far enough: it was attempting to fix an unfixable English script, the result of a rushed release that punched up a "very earnest, genuine game" with "everything from sex jokes to quips about 'emo hair.'"

"At the time, translating visual novel-length games into English had basically never been done before, and the amount of time and budget they were given was grossly insufficient for the task," she writes. "On top of that, almost their entire previous localization experience was with parody games a tenth the size, like Disgaea. If anything, it’s a wonder they managed to release the game at all."

Project Metafalica goes significantly beyond reworking the script. In addition to those heaps of bug fixes, it also re-adds jumping in combat, something you could do in the first game, and makes it possible to pull up the text history for "almost the entire game."

It's somewhat uncommon for fan translation patches to support multiple releases of a game, but this one supports all of them. US, EU, Japanese, even the reprinted Japanese discount copy. The international releases deleted something like half of the Japanese voiceover for space; the patch restores that text. Which is ideal, since the written text now diverges starkly from the English dub.

And here are the sorts of features that skilled hackers and translators go out of their way for that I love. This is the level of care that AI-driven translation projects are wholly lacking:

  • The rendering and spacing of many font glyphs have been improved from the original game. Some new glyphs have been added that the original game didn’t have, too.
  • “Lazy” text playback mode is now much faster; its speed should be comparable to the original Japanese game (Japanese has fewer glyphs than English, so it needs to be made faster to keep the same perceptual speed).
  • Typesetting has been greatly improved across the game script and UI.
  • The font spacing has been made a bit denser to allow for more room for better translations.
  • A variety of changes have been made throughout the game’s UI to accommodate longer names and larger amounts of text. For example, item images in crafting skits have been moved up slightly to allow for larger text boxes below.
  • Autoplay textboxes in NPC conversations have been retimed for more comfortable viewing.
  • Fixed a bug that caused Japanese characters to be loaded into the font cache, resulting in glitchy text when using upscaling in PCSX2.

Looking out for emulation, specifically! Glorious.

There are fixes to the battle system and overall balance; mechanics are better explained; some conditions where you could lock yourself out of a quest have been reworked. There are even a couple save points added where they were "conspicuously lacking."

Compared to so, so many translation patches I've looked at recently where someone claims to have hacked a game, jammed in some unedited, poorly spaced machine translated text, and then released the patch as if it's done — with clearly no meaningful testing done to ensure it works worth a damn — this is truly nourishing. And if it seems like an insane amount of work for one person to do: it would be! But unlike so many of these AI translation projects that could be so much better if their creators just... tried to make some friends in the scene to collaborate with, this one was a proper team effort. Check out the long list of hackers, editors, and supporters who contributed on the credits page.

Finally, here's the best patch note of them all:

  • Textbox arrows now render correctly when characters are lying in bed.

Helllll yeah. Claude could never.

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Patching In

Dolphin on Android gets cross-platform netplay – Previously only available on PC, Android Dolphin players can now get their online gaming on and even play against folks on desktop — though with some caveats. 1. "Using NetPlay over mobile data is not recommended. Even if you can get it to work, the packet loss and latency are not particularly suitable for lockstep multiplayer." 2. "Most phones use ARM processors, and Dolphin uses different JITs depending on the host CPU. While our ARM64 and x86-64 JITs are very similar, they are not completely identical, and those JIT differences are likely to cause desyncs." Hit up the progress report for a bunch more updates, too.

ShadPS4 celebrates Shadoween – "the glory goes to the huge amount of GPU fixes that improved so many games, some of them are really playable now," lead dev Shadow says of v0.19.0. The emulator's online support also now includes PSN trophies.

Eden gets fixes for Nier Automata, Biomutant and more – Switch emulator Eden hasn't had a major release since June, but its developers have nonetheless been hard at work on fixing issues for a number of games that had crashes or performance problems. Biomutant didn't boot, Nier Automata had graphical issues on Android, Ender Magnolia had a notable crash, while multiplayer in Absolum, Overcooked, Dave the Diver, Diablo 3 and Hyrule Warriors had various issues. Those have all been addressed, while the team is also working on implementing post-processing shaders in a future build.

Core Report

Go MAME Racer, goooo – Namco's 1995 Speed Racer game will be playable in the next MAME release, 0.290, thanks to developer cam900... and AI. Longtime dev David "mamehaze" Haywood described how MAME devs are using the tech in a recent YouTube comment:

"When the tools are used appropriately they can be incredibly useful for the type of research we need to do in MAME... The code isn't fully written by AI. The reason some of the stuff I mention hasn't gone in yet is exactly that. It's being used to guide, provide a better understanding, and suggest code fixes, but there are still humans working with that output. Writing an emulator is all about understanding the correct logic, how a board would work. With tools that can analyze large amounts of data and compare many, many more cases than would be possible by hand, it's easier to find that logic, which means the people writing the code can implement it with greater confidence." He and developer Andrea Bogazzi also collaborated to fix the background tilemaps in IREM's Beyond Kung-Fu prototype.

Jotego updates Konami cores with sweet sweet sounds – Thanks to some long-awaited reverse-engineering work, Jotego's team have been able to properly recreate the output of Konami's 054539 sound chip that "powered X-Men, Run and Gun, Premier Soccer and dozens more." Jotego's core lineup has also expanded to support Toaplan platformer Wardner, too.

Translation Station

Summon Night Swordcraft Story 3's translation lands after 10+ years – With a custom website and some nice words from some of the folks who worked on the project over its decade and change in the oven. "Everything has been translated by people who know Japanese and English. Then proofread several times by native English speakers," they write. There were stops and starts, but they finally finished — just look how many people are credited on the download page! While I don't know the series myself, I feel confident in saying this is pitch perfect GBA art.

Enter the Spectral Tower if you dare – A proudly AI-free fan translation of a PS1 game infamous enough to rival Ancient Roman and Innocent Tears, and sure enough SnowyAria is involved in this one too! Not as primary translator this time around, though: most of the credit for the project goes to hacker Tasos500, translator thequadehunter and graphics editor NicheTopic. "At one point, a thief stole all my items including the sword I had equipped, and when I got lucky and killed him he didn't drop any of it," writes Bluesky poster MakeMonsters. "Perfect game, no notes."

Time may change me, but I can't strange time – Pennywise and Cabal Translations are back with a deep cut: the Famicom adaptation of 1986 anime film Time Stranger, itself based on a novel. I watched this movie and gave it three stars on Letterboxd, and now can't remember much about it! I was more into the slightly trippier GoShogun: The Time Étranger, a totally unrelated film whose characters have shown up in Super Robot Wars from time to time. Also totally unrelated: Digimon: Time Stranger. I think they took a magic school bus back to Nobunaga's time in this one? Might make for a pretty cool adventure game, tbh.

Good pixels

More Summon Night pixel art!

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