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Japanese bookstore simulator translated into English after 24 years
- throwawaaarrgh 5y agoIs there a Visual Basic that compiles for all platforms? Man that would be a killer app. As a teen, I hadn't even formally learned BASIC, but somehow I was able to cobble together programs with VB, and it gave me confidence that I could learn more.
- xkeysc0re 5y agoThere really is a huge gap left behind by the decline of VB. I've been designing a few games with Godot recently and I've really come to enjoy how intuitive it is for building interfaces and getting prototypes up and running. However the proprietary scripting language (GDScript) itself is rather limited. Having a solid WYSIWYG form builder backed by e.g. Python that generates binaries for a number of target platforms would be incredible. I may be in the minority but I really enjoy proper desktop software over SaaS web equivalents.
- billfruit 5y agoLazarus might serve the purpose, its based on Pascal, which in most respects a better system than VB.
- syockit 5y agoThe closest you get to having a RAD IDE for WinForms is probably Lazarus, but it's based on Pascal. For BASIC, there's a project called WinFBE which seems to be in active development.
- bdowling 5y agoWas this done with the permission of Kairosoft? Kairosoft may not approve of an unlicensed translation of a game that they still distribute on their web site, for various reasons including that a poor quality translation may tarnish their business reputation. (edit: Nothing about permission in article.)
- andrewzah 5y agoI strongly doubt a fan translation of a game from 1997 is going to reflect on or tarnish -anything-. Fan translations are very common, and without them games would be forever unavailable to people who don't speak that language.
- bdowling 5y agoKairosoft is a company of about 20 people with capitalization of 100 million yen (not sure what that means exactly). [0]. They make games for current game consoles including Nintendo Switch and Sony Playstation 4, and games for iOS and Android. [1]. That's not the kind of company that doesn't care about its reputation or protecting its brand image and trademarks. Kairosoft also produces English translations of many of its games. [2]. According to this photo from the article, the translation appears to be incomplete and leaves much of the text appearing as strings of question marks. [3] I don't believe that a company that produces dozens of games, including for current systems and many translated into English, would approve of an incomplete fan translation of one of its games. [0] https://kairosoft.net/company/ https://kairosoft.net/company/ [1] https://kairosoft.net/game/ https://kairosoft.net/game/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairosoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairosoft [3] https://rhizome.org/static-media/uploads/bookstory5.png https://rhizome.org/static-media/uploads/bookstory5.png
- staticman2 5y agoI don't see how this is harming anyone even if it's a bad translation. And if doing things without an author's permission upsets you don't ever take a look at fanfiction.net.
- andrewzah 5y agoThis reminds me of the fan translation projects for games like Ace Attorney from Japanese -> Korean. They also found a way to extract the game strings and put them into a google doc. It was super cool. So I went through all of the hassle of modding my 3ds to change its language to Korean (Nintendo only allows specific languages per 3ds region), and patching a romfile of Ace Attorney. Then Nintendo released Ace Attorney 1-3 on the switch and pc, so that was great timing. It's still annoying on the switch as the game supports Korean, but only if you set your system language to Korean; hardly ideal if anyone else uses it. At least with Steam it can be configured per-game.
- dclowd9901 5y agoYes, totally this. I really wish there was some way I could contribute to the project (they don’t accept donations). Such a nice community of people too.
- pkdpic_y9k 5y agome too, they had me at "japanese bookstore simulator"
- firexcy 5y agoThere were similar efforts in the Chinese fan-translators community, and Ace Attorney is distinguished by the huge amount of texts, not to mention the peculiar culture references that are borderline untranslatable. The time for grassroot game translations may have peaked with the introduction of official remasters in Chinese and the increasing barriers in dumping and reverse-engineering ROMs, but the contributors deserve to be celebrated for their creativeness and hardwork. They are practicing online collaborations before the era of online collaboration.
- softgrow 5y agoI tried to do something similar with Traffic Confusion https://web.archive.org/web/20021203070116/http://hd.st90.arena.ne.jp/mp/products/traffic/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021203070116/http://hd.st90.ar... I started using a resource editor on the Windows exe to extract resources and substituting in translated ones. Was all by hand (clicky-clicky-clicky) and really needed to be scripted.
- Nition 5y agoUI designed purely in WinForms!
- xkeysc0re 5y agoI love it. The enterprise-y look is perfect for a business sim.
- raverbashing 5y agoHow hard would it be to have a VB VM interpreter in JS I wonder?
- patcon 5y agoThe vibe and high described here feels really familiar. I'm involved in civic tech organizing -- communities of engaged citizens (yes tech, but also activists, public servants, lawyers, designs, and any engaged residents) who get together every week (usually in person) to pitch and work on continuing civic initiatives at "civic hacknights". Often these efforts involve some tech, but it's not a rule they must. On a good night, it's electric: some guy who's a construction foreman might join a group working on supporting emergency shelters, led by an amorphous group of whom its unclear who's leading and who's "volunteering". (There are some white dudes, but not ALL white dudes.) Maybe they've been visiting emergency shelters doing interviews, and some projects even lure some folks with experience in the problem domain (i.e. living on the street) to take on meaningful roles and learn. I have a hope that someday all civic action will have analogous citizen projects to complement official efforts, both intersecting in unexpected ways. Unexpected like, we've had public servants come out of their government day jobs to "launder" code into the community, meaning another community member takes over the codebase, while the staff goes back into city government to spend down some political capital in "liberating" some data to drive "that new community app that sprung up" (air quotes). On the good days, it feels a little bit like this article conveys, and I can kinda feel the leading edge of what a future civics might be, once government is truly built openly and is more permeable to the citizenry <3
- bigyikes 5y ago> There are some white dudes, but not ALL white dudes Can you clarify what this statement means?
- 867-5309 5y agoreminds me of the dodgily-translated Pokemon Gameboy roms from circa turn of the millennium
- xrd 5y agoThis game (actually this write-up) makes me reconsider how I've long felt that Visual Basic was a pox on the computer industry.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoVB is definitely easier to learn and run. Cf with powerbuilder, oracle form 4 (so many bugs I recalled), forget what is the third one then. The thick client vs CICS ...
- namuol 5y agoI recently re-installed Kairosoft's "Game Dev Story" on my Android phone because I needed a good distraction from the world. I had to uninstall it years ago because it was shocking how easily I became hooked! I had no idea they were making games all the way back in 1997, but it makes perfect sense in hindsight: Game Dev Story is a masterful execution of this type of game and might even be a Magnum Opus of sorts for Kairosoft. Even if this type of game is not your cup of tea, it's interesting to check out if you're familiar with the history of video games. If it wasn't getting late on a Sunday night, I would be booting into Windows to give Bookstore Story a try, but I know if I do I might be up until 3 am...
- bemmu 5y agoWhoa, initially missed that this one is also from Kairosoft. They now have a huge library of sim titles like these, available not just on iOS but PlayStation and I’m sure many other platforms as well.
- namuol 5y agoTheir games are so inspiring. The formula they employ is so much simpler than the typical "tycoon" or "sim" game (in a good way) and practically begs to be applied to all kinds of different scenarios like farming, restaurant management, film production, animal breeding, all manner of manufacturing... If I ever get back into game development I will probably wind up trying to apply their formula to something novel.
- pvitz 5y agoThanks for pointing out that both games are from the same company. "Game Dev Story" is highly addictive and I also had to uninstall it some years ago because of this...
- shasheene 5y agoFor translation, using a Weblate instance makes a lot more sense over using Google Sheets https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate hosted.weblate.org is only free for open-source projects, but it shouldn't be hard to find alternative hosting, or launch a Docker container in the cloud??
- jka 5y agoThe key is probably to make the community onboarding and experience as easy as possible, to allow for spontaneous community translation projects like the one in the article. It's nice to see that the Weblate project itself provides some guidance (and checklists) around community-building: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-4.6.2/devel/community.html https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-4.6.2/devel/community.ht... (perhaps expanding that could be one meta-method for improving the accessibility and suitability of Weblate for situations like this. agree that hosting -- or having something available online that works already -- can often be an obstacle to adoption too)
- Animats 5y agoIf you're looking for something old to restore, here's something I started - restoring one of the very earliest pieces of science fiction. This is "The Sky Pirate", by Garrett P. Serviss, better known for "Edison's Conquest of Mars". That one was intended as an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells's 1987 "War of the Worlds". "The Sky Pirate" was serialized in newspapers, and never published as a book. I brought back the first 3 chapters from Library of Congress scans of microfilms of newspapers from 2011. The Library of Congress ran those through an OCR program. The result needs much cleanup. Here's the first chapter, cleaned up.[1] Here's the prologue: "The sea pirate has long been a fascinating figure of romance, but the march of progress has driven him into well deserved retirement, and he has now been replaced, in fiction at least, by the sky pirate, who is even more mysterious, more daring and more romantic than his predecessor. Read and there will unfold before you the extraordinary story of Captain Alfonso Payton and his airship, the Chameleon; of William Grayman, the richest man in the world; of his beautiful daughter, for whose ransom $10,000,000 was demanded; of Lieutenant Allen of the revenue service, of wonders by wireless and of fierce battles above the clouds." It gets worse. The writing is terrible. The plot is lame. The characters are one-dimensional. I got through seven chapters before quitting in disgust. There's a reason that nobody, in a century, ever republished this. So I put it on Github.[2] After 110 years, it's clearly public domain. If someone wants to finish the job, fork the project on Github and go for it. Thanks. [1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/Sky-Pirate/blob/master/src/chapter01.pdf https://github.com/John-Nagle/Sky-Pirate/blob/master/src/cha... [2] https://github.com/John-Nagle/Sky-Pirate https://github.com/John-Nagle/Sky-Pirate
- rightbyte 5y agoCute story. Maybe you are not the first one to compile it from the issues, but others came to the same conclusion?
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoCould it be a century old piece of fanfiction?
- bussiere 5y agoforked but i saw a barn and noble version : https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-sky-pirate-garrett-p-serviss/1127856309 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-sky-pirate-garrett-p-se... I'am curious to know if the barn and noble is a legit version.
- yreg 5y agoThere is something magical about these massively multiplayer Google sheets where a large amount of strangers collaborates on the same goal without outside communication. I've experienced it when Eliezer Yudkowsky — after several books of content — put the hero of his story in a nearly impossible situation to get out of. He challenged his readers to find a solution within 60 hours otherwise they get the bad ending. Observing the organic collection, deduplication and rating of ideas in the sheet was an interesting experience. [0] HPMOR (the story) — http://www.hpmor.com/ http://www.hpmor.com/ [1] Final Exam (the chapter with the assignment) - http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/113 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/113 [2] The Spreadsheet – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17-zbmElKXWv9nqcsDzopcRIxisbw2zKb5O3fAtXaA4I https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17-zbmElKXWv9nqcsDzop...
- qwerty456127 5y ago> BookStory is written in Visual Basic 5, a programming language developed by Microsoft in the mid-90s. I econstituted the .exe file’s machine-only instructions into human-readable source code with the help of a decompilation tool Because these were not machine instructions, that was virtual machine code. VB always was kind of like Java. > I figured I’d need a copy of Visual Studio 97, the original software used to write it. I replied to my tweet seeking a copy and a kind, pseudonymous internet stranger sent one. Surprisingly, it installed and ran successfully on Windows 10. I wonder if it could actually fit in an Excel file - all versions of MS Excel (I didn't check 2019 and 365) include a seemingly untouched VB5 IDE letting you embed VB code within your spreadsheets.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoSuch a lovely story. So great.
- nottorp 5y agoDoesn't stuff like this infringe on 30 million intellectual property laws and is punishable by death in the US?
- butz 5y agoConsidering that some reverse engineering projects have received DMCAs on GitHub, it would be better to publish only a patch file, not full game, even if it is freeware.
- joelburget 5y agoFor those looking to run this on a Mac, the following seems to have worked for me (M1, Big Sur 11.2.3): ``` brew tap gcenx/wine brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine-crossover brew install winetricks winetricks corefonts vcrun6 vb5run native_oleaut32 vcrun2010 richtx32 comdlg32 comctl32ocx wine BookStory_en.exe ```
- xkeysc0re 5y agoOh sweet - thanks for this. I will add it to the README
- butz 5y agoAnd here's what happens when one uses Google Translate to translate a video game: https://legendsoflocalization.com/funky-fantasy-iv/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/funky-fantasy-iv/