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| Author | Technical questions regarding localization (Read 22890 times) | ||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
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on: April 01, 2025, 11:54
Greetings everybody, recently I've provided the German translation for the excellent new Angry Robots! puzzle game. It was pretty forward ResEdit string replacement work, given everything was elegantly set up the Macintosh way. Fun experience! It motivated me to poke around some older Mac titles with ResEdit. Particularly games for older kids, as my two oldest ones are bored by something like Millie's Math House (however fun that was 2 years ago). Games like Headline Harry or Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego would seem like a perfect fit for their age, except they are all in English only. My kids don't speak English yet or at least not to the extent neccesary. Checking out both with ResEdit revealed they seem to keep their game data hard-coded in binary. It seems odd why this was done, especially since it would make localization / translation much harder if the game was ever to be distributed in the non-English world. Any ideas on how to localize these games without access to the sources? Any tools that could help me ? |
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Jatoba
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256 MB  Posts: 270 System 9 Newcomer!
Reply #1 on: April 01, 2025, 11:59
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@Bolkonskij I don't know much about this, but I would try checking out romhacking.net for hacking resources. Not sure how Mac-savvy the offered tools will be, but it'd be one place I'd look in if I was serious about this.
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #2 on: April 01, 2025, 16:42
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This is brings up a very common problem...when the replacement text is a different "width" than the original. Some phases may be shorter or longer in other languages. English can be very terse, especially with slang, and grammatical native sounding translations in many languages may use more characters/bytes. If you've binary editing, this can be extremely difficult then to fit things in the exact same locations...but even if you're able to do it with resedit (or separate text based localization files), you'll sometimes find dialog boxes and buttons are too small. This comes up all the time, even with modern websites, where doing things "right" may require reflow and changing layouts subtly. Another thing that comes up with binary editing, is that some games "check themselves" to see if they've been modified, sometimes part of "copy protection", trying to detect if they've been "unprotected". So innocent attempts at translation end up triggering these checks and the games won't run anymore!
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