PC Advanced Daisenryaku 2001 Translation

PC Advanced Daisenryaku 2001 Scenario Translation Guide

by Nebelwurfer

Overview

Advanced Daisenryaku 2001 Complete version has over 200 scenarios. It would take me years to translate all of them. So I am hoping that posting an article on how to translate scenario files will encourage others to help out.

It will be a long time before I tackle the Eastern Front or North African scenarios in the German campaign. It will be even longer before I work on the British or Soviet campaigns. So if you want to play these and tell what is going on translating them yourself is the only option for now.

Required Tools

In order to translate AD2001 scenarios you will need to get two tools first. These are the XVI32 Hex Editor and the JWPce Japanese Text Editor/Dictionary

Choose a Scenario to Translate

All Scenarios are located in the EXEC/SCENARIO subdirectory of the AD 2001 Complete Version Install directory. Before modifying any of the scenario files, it would be a good idea to make a backup copy of this directory. Then if you accidentally corrupt one of the files with the hex editor, you can recover and try again without needing to re-install the game.

Notice that all scenario filenames have a prefix before the scenario name. The following table lists the meaning of the prefixes.

3 digit number German Campaign Training Scenario (Translated)
Sp German Campaign Spanish Civil War Scenario (Translated)
2 digit number German Campaign post Spanish Civil War Scenario (Some Translated)
U German Campaign USA Scenario
D Alt History Defensive Scenario
E Extra Stand alone Scenarios
S Soviet Campaign Scenario
UK British Campaign Scenario
Nw ??? Scenario


Suppose you have decided to translate the British campaign scenarios. The first one is "UK00LaPlata.SCD". As you would expect, the higher the number in the scenario name, the later in the campaign the scenario occurs.

In your work directory where you have made copies of the original scenario files, open the UK00LaPlata.SCN in the XVI32 Hex Editor and scroll all the way to the bottom. Scenario briefings, debriefings, and faction entry and exit notification text is located at the very bottom of each scenario file.



AD2001 Scenario text is stored in Shift-JIS format. Regular single byte ASCII characters can be used, and will take up half the width of a two byte Japanese character when displayed on the screen.

The circled byte values are Carriage Return/Linefeed characters that are used to mark the end of each row of text. This is very helpful in fitting the translated English text back into the same space in the Hex file.

It is too difficult to work with the Hex data directly. We need to save the section of the file containing just the scenario text to a different file so that we can open it up with JWPce. To do this, position the cursor on the last byte in the file as shown in the graphic then select Edit->Block Mark from the menubar. Next scroll up to the beginning of the Scenario text as shown below.



Place the cursor in the position shown then select Edit->Block Mark again. The entire area from the bottom of the file to the second selection point will be highlighted in Red. Then choose File->Write Block. You will be prompted to enter a filename. I tend to use the same filename, but add a .txt extension. So name this file UK00LaPlata.txt.

How did I know to place the cursor where I did? The scenario text has no 00 bytes in it. Once I saw the first 00 byte, I knew that the top of the Scenario Text had been reached.

Now open the UK00LaPlata.txt file with JPCwe.



Ah... that's better. In order to translate Japanese, you need to distinguish between the three alphabets used in Japanese printed text. These are Katakana (marked in Green), Hiragana (marked in Brown), and Kanji (Blue characters).

You can view a table of all Hiragana characters by pressing the button circled in Red. When you do so you will see the following window pop up:



Scroll down one page by clicking on the down arrow button and this window will display all the Katakana characters:



Katakana characters are used to phonetically spell out foreign words, names, places, etc. One thing you have to watch out for is that Japanese has no "L" sound. So the city of Lillehammer might be phonetically spelled out as RiRiHaMa.

Hiragana characters are used to phonetically spell out Japanese words, or to add verb tenses after Kanji words like "-ed", "-ing" etc.

Kanji characters are the pictographs that are based on Chinese pictographs, with some minor differences. Almost all Kanji words are composed of two Kanji characters. The second character modifies the meaning of the first character. This would be a very tough task to unravel using a paper Japanese-English dictionary. Fortunately JWPce has a built-in dictionary we can use.

Lets start with the text at the top of the JWPce window. This marks the start of the Scenario Briefing that gets displayed when you first enter a Scenario. There is some Katakana text after the open bracket. Highlight the first 4 Katakana characters before the dot then hit the F6 function key. You should see the following window appear:



Cool. There is a dictionary entry that matches the selected text. When I am translating, I insert a blank line after every row of Japanese text. Then I fill in this row with the translation. So go ahead and insert a blank row after the first Japanese row and type "[Total".

Note: JWPce defaults to Kanji text entry upon startup. Since you want to enter ASCII characters, you need to press the "A" button on the toolbar before attempting to enter text.

Highlighting the 6 characters in the second Katakana word on the row and pressing F6 reveals a blank. This word is not in the JWPce dictionary. We will need to figure out the word by looking at the individual characters. Highlight the first Katakana character in the second word and press the magnifying glass button with a Kanji character inside on the toolbar. You will see a screen like this:



So the first character is the "Ji" sound. Continuing on with the other characters we eventually spell out: "Jiya-MaNi-". The characters that look like minus signs tell you to draw out the sound of the previous character. After thinking about it we decide that the closest word to these sounds is "Germany".

You can use the same dictionary look-up methods on Kanji characters. Using the Magnifying Glass button on the first two Kanji characters shows "Anti" and "Germany" respectively. Using F6 when selecting the following two Kanji characters shows "Entire". Using F6 after selecting the final two characters on the row shows "War".

Rather than talking through all the lookup steps for the succeeding rows, I will just present the translated text that I came up with already filled in.



The final step is to go back to the Hex Editor and replace the original Japanese characters with the translated ones. First, unhighlight the selected range in the XVI32 Hex Editor by selecting Edit->Block Unmark from the Menubar. Work from the translated text in the JWPce window and pay close attention to the end of row markers in the XVI32 Hex Editor.

Note: If you hit the Delete key or Backspace key while editing text in the Hex Editor, you will corrupt the Scenario file. I know it is easy to do, and I have been burned many times when I wasn't paying attention. Be careful.

Here is what the Hex Editor window looks like after the translated text has been re-inserted. Note that I padded the ends of lines with space characters where needed.

Contact Nebelwurfer HQ