Pc Engine Translation Roms

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Joslyn Moreci

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Aug 3, 2024, 10:44:27 AM8/3/24

to lelampglimul

The DOOM craze in the mid-90's reached the Eastern hemisphere, in fact, also with the hand of id Software themselves. In 1994, they signed a deal with three publishers to release DOOM in their respective countries; Imagineer in Japan, SsangYong in South Korea, and last but not least, Kingformation Co., Ltd. in Taiwan. As that last country was rife with software piracy, id decided to work with one such pirate publisher at a relatively low fee of $1 per copy. Then, there was the infamous Legend of the Seven Paladins 3D, which started as a deal between Apogee and another Taiwanese company Accend Inc., but later spun off into its own thing. For now, however, that is another story.

For all these years, word-of-mouth spread within the global retro FPS community about these obscure Taiwanese games, and they remained nothing more than exotic curiosities infamous for their rather unfortunate qualities in several aspects, until Community Releases decided to re-issue Mars - The Ultimate Fighter in late 2019, complete with an English translation and a few adjustments to make the quality less notorious. This, in turn, inspired @jval to write the Mars3D recreation (not exactly source port, despite considerably having features of one) based on his DelphiDoom code in late 2021.

Now that's one game translated, what about 3D Hero and Tao? Following that, @WhiteMagicRaven spent some time analyzing the game's format (which is more or less identical to that of Classic Doom) to translate the necessary things in 3D Hero, such as the game interface and the setup executable. The hard work paid off, and on October 21, 2022, the English patch for 3D Hero was finally released (yay!). I've also uploaded it on mega.nz by request (link on the top of the thread), as the original link was set to delete after about 7 days. @WhiteMagicRaven also finished the English patch for Tao on October 30, 2022.

In comparison to Mars - The Ultimate Fighter, 3D Hero is a different beast. It drops away the first-person perspective, in favor of the third-person one and has more to do with a hack-and-slash RPG. Each character has different stats (health/attack/guard/magic/dexterity points) and weapons. Health and magic-replenishing items are stored in inventory, instead of immediately taking effect. It also has CD audio tracks, instead of MIDI ones. You can tell this is a more ambitious affair compared to their previous one.

Enemies are also a mixed bag to an extent. While most of your enemies are human warriors, with garrisons or even warlords serving as a boss at the end of each level, and they're usually manageable, non-human enemies also exist, such as the bees (why does it have to be the bees!? I hate it when this kind of games features them), which are hard to take down, and the aquatic mutants from Mars - The Ultimate Fighter, which might as well have infinite hit points.

Otherwise, I recommend that you play 3D Hero, if not for the rather ambitious curiosity alone. You don't get to see this kind of engine be utilized for a third-person perspective game every day, after all. Also, here's hoping @jval either adds support for both games on Mars3D or makes a new one for those two alone.

Now, I'm not as much of a Chinese literature aficionado as I am a Japanese culture one, but the translation work by @UnknDoomer and @fgsfds has proven useful for everyone to get more insight of the game's background.

I have hopes for @jval too, its rather recreation than source port =) but i like how Mars3D done in just approximately close to original game but don't care to be 100% exact, just visually looks close.

Wow, interesing, the only things I know about Videogame industry in Taiwan was Legend of Seven Paladins (cool sprites and ost eh), PGM Arcade Machine (Pretty influential among the industry because it received a lot of support from Japanese developers) and The Bootleg Dragon Ball Super Butouden 2 for NES by Hummer Team (one of the big names among Taiwanese bootleg developers who also made a game based of the Three Kingdoms too lol)

Talking about Three Kingdoms, I'm suprised that nobody in Taiwan created a game based on Journey to the West (or at least one well know). I mean, is probably the most influential Chinese novel in the history, and being the principal inspiration for creating the first Dragon Ball anime/manga. I'd see more support from Western a Japanese developers than Chinese/Taiwanese developers.

Anyway cool stuff indeed, always thinked that Taiwan should be a strong name on the industry if the piracy and the lack of support from the west wasn't be a problem :/

I guess their competition with the broader Chinese gaming industry doesn't really help as well. AFAIK Chinese studios are benefiting not just from the bigger population number, but also a vast improvement of their products' quality (if we're going by those trailers of new-gen Chinese games like Black Myth Wukong and Lost Soul Aside, among others), whereas Taiwan is less interested in upping their dev game and more fascinated with Japanese games as of currently (ironically, China does also have many fans of Japanese games). Although, I'd be very glad to be proven wrong in this case.

Yup, It doesn't help than Mainland China has a lot of presence in the AAA industry (cof cof Tencent cof cof) and the fact that theres at least one case of a Taiwanese game being pulled of popular stores thanks to Mainland China nationalism.

Oh wow, almost forgot Red Candle Games exists. Yeah, that one case sucks, but I won't comment too much on the political aspect, so as to avoid derailing this thread. Either way, I'm looking forward to their upcoming game Nine Sols.

Tao is just a curiosity: It can once more be played in first person (and then it looks like a first person rendition of Prince of Persia) but at that time (1997-1998), the Mars 3D tech (Or was it TFX, @WhiteMagicRaven?) became rather long in the tooth.

I mean, stuff like Doomguy's grunt being used as the pain sound of male jiangshi enemies, Afrit's idle roaming sound for jiangshi enemies' attack sound (regardless of gender), Mars 3D's pick up sound for a few items, and some more. Nowhere as hilarious as "kizz my azz" or "dammit", but still... interesting nonetheless.

Given the background, it only makes sense that Tao goes with a horror direction, while still retaining the fast-paced gameplay of the previous 3D Hero game. The game itself is largely still the same as the 3D Hero one, except this one features a proper hub system, instead of choosing characters each time you finish a level, as well as the level you want to play at next.

However, much like the previous two games, Tao is rife of bugs, perhaps even moreso. You can get stuck in several walls, which forces you to restart the game, and sometimes the game just randomly crashes upon moving to another level at some points. Magic attacks also lack the punch they had in 3D Hero, which is just ever so underwhelming for a character supposed to be an exorcist. Not to mention that by 1998 standards, the engine has already been outdated by the likes of Half-Life and Unreal, which further contributed to the lack of sales. On a more technical side, the only CD image we have for the game so far may have been damaged to an extent, which results in a few CD audio tracks containing random noises that, fortunately, aren't all too fatal.

The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978.It led to the x86 architecture that still dominatesdesktop and server computing.The 8086 chip uses microcode internally to implement its instruction set.I've been reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos and this blog post discusses how the chip's microcode engine operated.I'm not going to discuss the contents of the microcode1or how the microcode controls the rest of the processor here.Instead, I'll look at how the 8086 decides what microcode to run, steps through the microcode, handles jumps and callsinside the microcode, and physically stores the microcode.It was a challenge to fit the microcode onto the chip with 1978 technology, so Intel used many optimization techniques toreduce the size of the microcode.

In brief,the microcode in the 8086 consists of 512 micro-instructions, each 21 bits wide.The microcode engine has a 13-bit register that steps through the microcode, along with a 13-bit subroutine register to storethe return address for microcode subroutine calls.The microcode engine is assisted by two smaller ROMs: the "Group Decode ROM" to categorize machine instructions, and the "Translation ROM" to branch to microcode subroutines for address calculation and other roles.Physically, the microcode is stored in a 12884 array. It has a special address decoder that optimizes the storage.The microcode circuitry is visible in the die photo below.