In addition to updating the layout of his blog, Slashing Dragon brings us exciting news today of renewed work on the project to translate the SNES version of Savage Empire — which was only ever released in Japanese — to English:

A cool guy called DDS has sent some info and prompted me to work back on the project, it seems he’s gone so far as to hack the game to use single sprites as letters instead of 4 sprites kanji, which is something extremely important for the translation.

I have updated the Script extractor based on DDS’s findings:

• Marking back newlines, which I had removed
• Subroutines
  • 0x8C (jump to)
  • 0xC0 (set flag)
  • 0x88 ~ 0xDO, unidentified
• Grouping subroutines calls in groups of three bytes

Still figuring out the usage of 00 as a dialog termination sequence. Some times it’s there, some times it’s not. There are also some stranded bytes, probably some subroutines use a single byte or 3 bytes (?)

Also, the byte sequence after the charset is probably data instead of code, may be the dialog options are there (?)

If you click on through, you can see some sample output from the modified script extractor, which seems…pretty darn good, all things considered. The output will still require a lot of manual editing, but this certainly is a much-needed shot in the arm for the project even so.