Pandora Japanese translation in Pandora emulators ?

[kamui_kun]

Hi everyone

I've been playing with my Viliv N5 x86 Windows XP pocket PC these days, and wanted to talk about a great feature that works for native windows games, and some emulators like the NEC PC98 : Real-time translation of the japanese texts in-game.

The principe is quite simple, use a text hooker that will copy all the detected texts in the API calls for the game, copy that automatically to the clipboard, and use a Japanese morphological analyzer (JMA) + a dictionary to display the furigana (kanji readings), or even the dictionary definition of each word !

This is a great feature for Japanese import games lovers, especially if like me you're still learning Japanese, and have a limited knowledge of kanji (500 or so in my case, should be 2000 for a native speaker).

I was wandering if such thing could be possible on Pandora, in the consoles emulators especially (PS1, SNES, ect.) : The harder part would be to detect the texts and convert it to a manageable string (SJIS or UTF8 ect.), and then the translation could be done using a web translator, or an open source JMA, then the result could be displayed on screen, and displayed / hidden using a keyboard shortcut.

This is just an idea, it sure should be hard to implement, but I'm pretty sure some people could be interested in this, so please consider it ^^

Also, please take the time to answer the topic poll.

Here's a screenshot of how it looks like on my Viliv :

 

[ekianjo]

detection of kanji is pretty hard to implement, especially since most games use different fonts at different resolutions. If that was something easy to do the rom subbers would have implemented it years ago. Besides, there's the issue of the english text being much longer than the japanese text, making it hard to display in the same space. 

The idea is interesting, but it's a lot of work. Its probably faster for you to learn japanese than to hope for anything like that soon.

 

[kamui_kun]

Actually the text is not detected by some sort of OCR, it is detected when the game is about to display the text by triggering the API call. The work is to detect when theses calls are made, and if it is possible to convert the text buffer from a proprietary format to a standard string encoded in SJIS or such. It will depend on the emulator and how it works, for most I think this would be impossible or too hard, but for anex86 on PC, this is possible like you can see on the screenshot. So again, this is not OCR

No need to display the text in the correct place either, just display a OSD (on screen display) like rectangle with the translation. If the box cover a portion of the game, well just hide it with a shortcut or such. The rectangle could be transparent also...