The Near Impossible 20-Year Journey to Translate 'Fire Emblem: Thracia 776'

And games don't read very well with machine translation, so you'd still have to teach the system to overlay the correct English localization that was hand made.

All that might still have been easier than dealing with spaghetti assembly, but then you are faced with the daunting task of getting someone to actually download your executable. Patching a ROM is pretty well established process. Downloading an extra executable just to run a ROM in your native language is much less so.

The two books I suggest are…

• Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda

• Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound

[To clarify, when I say "Earthbound", I refer to the game that was released in Japan as Mother 2, with the translated release being called "Earthbound" in the US.]

If anyone wants to make the argument that a real-time translation would work, then I have an additional recommendation:

• press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game?

You can find all of the above books at https://www.fangamer.com/collections/books/partner_legends-o...

I have technical concerns and non-technical concerns with the idea.

With Zelda 1 that would indeed work; there was not much text in the first place, and the typeface was blocky and easy to detect.

With Earthbound, things are much more complex. Ignoring text that is "baked in" to the graphics, the dialogue was much more interactive. The text was smaller, with thinner letter shapes, and when one of your characters was dead, the contrast between text and background was alot lower. You also have to deal with changes in coloration and highlighting, for example when you are selecting from a range of options.

Earthbound also had another trick: The dialogue system was not static text. Instead, the game effectively became an interpreter: The game didn't open a dialogue window, the script itself included the code to open a dialogue window, which the game would parse and execute. Check out http://media.earthboundcentral.com/2011/04/a-look-at-the-mot... for an example

So, if you were to make a mapping of "untranslated text" to "translated text", you would have to work out every possible expansion of the interpreted script, translating each one individually.

If your text ends up being longer than the Japanese text, you'd have to work out a way to deal with that. Either making your overlay bigger than the original text, or maybe intercepting a controller button-press to advance the text.

Of course, all of those are technical concerns. But I think there is at least one big non-technical concern: At least for me, it would be too jarring.

It's the difference between a "lean-back" experience and a "lean-in" experience. The lean-back experience is something like watching a movie. Translating a movie via subtitles means expending additional "brain cycles" to line up the subtitles with the speaker, but I'm not doing much else, so that's OK. Translating a movie via dialogue kindof looks weird, because the voices do not line up with the mouth movements.

Playing a video game is a "lean-in" experience. I am doing a lot more work, ingesting and processing dialogue and NPC actions, keeping track of information, making decisions, and taking actions myself. Translating the dialogue is possible, because you can "line up the mouth movements" (update the programming) to work with the translated text. If there is something else—an overlay, say, or a separate translation file—that takes up a lot more cycles, makes it harder for me to keep up with the game, and lessens the experience.

Of course, there are exceptions! A game like Tetris doesn't qualify either way. A game like Doki Doki Literature Club is more like a movie, and so subtitles fit.

But, which emulator?

People play SNES games on Windows PC's, Macs, Android phones, Raspberry Pi's, 3DS's, etc etc. And the emulators in use have shifted: ZSNES was the emulator of choice a decade ago, but using that today would be ill-advised.

Coincidentally, there exist some old translation patches that were only ever tested against ZSNES as opposed to real hardware. Playing them today is a PITA.

There was an Ask HN some time back that asked "How would you write software to last 100 years?" My answer—which I very much stand by—was: "Target the NES".