The sudden emergence of Chinese-language groups has brought countless old games to light again.

Have you played the NDS version of Call of Duty dubbed in Northeastern dialect?

Next, let’s start the hold-up contest, requiring you to hold up after hearing this in-game dubbing!

Congratulations on your successful challenge.

But what you have to face next is a more severe level-the Henan dialect dubbed version of NDS fifa 2020.

The above two Chinese-language + Chinese-dubbed games come from what we call private Chinese-language organizations. These people are completely out of interest and spend their own money to give one old game after another the opportunity to be seen by Chinese players again.

once Upon a time,Various Chinese groupsHe can be called a living Buddha, allowing us young people to appreciate the human civilization under the eternal Eden in Heavy Machinery.

I understand the ambiguous emotions in “Love Follows” and even the mission instructions in “The Lone Gunman”, although there have been many jokes in the process, such as the sea scorpion in “Red Alert” was regarded as a conch by everyone.

Control the hypertrophy and perform decorative punches.

Or maybe they turned the ancient scrolls into old man scrolls, but to say the least, at least they turned a bunch of English letters and katakana into Chinese characters that everyone can pronounce, and may even help everyone learn traditional Chinese.

In short, in that era when everything was very barren, it was quite enough.

Nowadays, Simplified Chinese and Chinese are already standard features in various games.

Even Chinese dubbing is no longer new. It stands to reason that folk Chinese groups should have withdrawn from the stage of history and become memories. However, on the contrary, in recent years, no, within the past year, a large number of independent Chinese groups and groups have suddenly emerged.

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In order to clarify this matter, I also found a few Chinese writers who have been working silently and asked them about their current situation.

Even myself, as a person who knows nothing about programming and doesn’t even understand binary, I started to try to Chineseize it, and it was quite effective.

I believe that many players must have a few difficult-to-play games that have never been translated into Chinese.

For example, I was once unable to play through the two Old Testaments of Persona and Shin Megami Tensei 4 due to language barriers. The one with Sakurai was excellent and could be called Palutena’s Realm that drained the 3DS’s functionality.

I thought that these games would never be translated into Chinese in this life, but in the past two years, the Chinese versions of these games have been launched one after another, and the quality is quite high. I really shed tears when I played them.

To put it bluntly, it feels like Yujo Judai’s childhood wish was fulfilled by Kaiba Company.

重點是，The newly added Chinese versions of old games are far more than that.。

A casual search on video websites will reveal a large number of unpopular Chinese game projects. Among them, PS2, GBA, NDS, and 3DS platforms may account for the largest proportion, as well as PSP and SFC.

Some have already released a complete Chinese version, and some are still in the process of Chinese version. For example, there is a game “Infinite Route” on the NDS that no one has started because of its large size and text size. Now it has a playable Chinese version.

The Four Mad Gods Senki 2 on SFC is the game that Yuzuru Hanyu calls the spiritual origin of his boyhood. It has also released a fully Chinese version in the past two years.

If there is a game that you find difficult to reconcile because it is not Chinese-language, then you can search it yourself now. I think there is a high probability that you will be able to find its Chinese version.

Oh yes, there is even a trend now, that is, many folk Chinese versions, in addition to beautifying fonts and completely Chinese, are beginning to pursue Chinese dubbing.

In addition to the two I mentioned at the beginning, God of War 2, this old game that has been Chineseized for a long time, still has room for operation. Yes, you heard it right, God of War 2 launched a Chinese + Cantonese dubbing version a while ago.

The following is the opening scene. I won’t say much, just show it:

Then I have to emphasize again that the above-mentioned Chinese version of the game ROM is only for learning and exchange. It is voluntary among the people and does not need to be used for any commercial purposes. It is completely free.

So it can be said that these Chinese groups may be the currentThe most Internet-minded people in the broken Internet.

So what is the spirit of the Internet? I think there is an old saying that is quite right.

“Some people are not stingy about sharing the spirit of open source, and some are not stingy about replying to the good poster.”

I’m going off topic. As for what I’m more curious about, it’s actually the Chinese translation work, how it is done, and why so many independent Chinese translation authors have suddenly appeared recently. Even many works that were quite difficult to grasp in the past have now come to fruition.

Has the Chinese language tool made full progress, or has the number of Chinese language enthusiasts increased in the past two years?

In order to clarify these things, I contacted a “certain folk Chineseization group” that has been established for more than ten years and has Chineseized nearly 100 games. I even found the old man who did the Chinese dubbing for NDS COD.

It’s a pity that, without exception, these Chinese heroes don’t want me to reveal their IDs, so let’s try our best to protect their privacy and let them hide their merits and fame.

Let’s briefly talk about how an old game was translated into Chinese.

The old man I interviewed said that generally speaking, a Chinese language project mainly needs to solve two parts-text and pictures.

The text is easy to understand, which is the large number of dialogues, menus, item descriptions, etc. in the game. The pictures are because the text in some games appears in the form of pictures, such as titles.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be too difficult. For example, my previous guess was that for the text, I should first find the parts of the source file that correspond to the lines, and then convert them into Chinese and stuff them back, and it would be ok.

But there is quite a lot of trouble in implementing it, because it involves a font library.

The so-called font library refers to all the words to be used in a game. The developers will sort them out in advance in the form of small stickers. The game’s dialogue text hongq is not a line of words entered in advance, but a line of words.A sentence of dialogue will correspond to a string of codes/formulas instead。

Which words are needed, just index them directly in the font library and map them out.

And in that era when games were only a few MB, many old games had fixed font sizes.

Like English, there are basically 26 letters. Counting uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc., it only lasts for one or two hundred characters.

Japanese is a little better. Hiragana, katakana and some kanji, etc., may reach more than 1,000 characters.

However, the number of common Chinese characters used in an RPG usually reaches at least three to four thousand. If the production team wants to show some literary references, there will be a bunch of rare characters in the plot, and there will be even more.

Now, the dish is spoiled.

Because if you want to switch to Chinese, it means that the entire font library will have to be expanded several times.

This will lead to many problems. For example, some games simply do not support font expansion due to capacity limitations. In some cases, even if you expand the font to fill it with Chinese characters, the original text index formula does not support calling text maps, so it will be useless.

Unless the assembly code for word selection is completely rewritten, all the extra words can be used.

In order to solve these problems, the Chinese team also became weapons masters and tried their best. Since the font library could not be expanded, they tried to find ways to fit more characters into the limited capacity.

For example, reducing the texture of single words, discarding some uncommon words and symbols, or changing the grayscale of text from four colors to single color, and using limited fonts for flexible translation.

Assuming that the original text is translated as “Daigo Enlightenment”, it contains all rare words, but it can be translated as ” So that’s it ”。

Of course, the more common thing is to retain as many Chinese characters in Japanese as possible.

Allow some characters to appear in traditional Chinese, so there is no need to increase the number of fonts.

But there is another situation, that is, no matter how you compress it, there are not enough words.

Then, the only way is to completely reverse the ROM file, that is, to expand the font library, and then modify or completely rewrite the assembly code.

For example, Mega Man on the NDS was completed using this hard-core method of “patching” the game. To roughly compare the difficulty, it is a remote control with only 1-100 number keys. Traditional Chinese translation is to try to add as many buttons as possible on the remote control.

As for this one, Hanhua disassembled the shell, re-expanded and welded a new motherboard and chips, and finally increased the button capacity to 500.

So, when you were on the video game bus and spent half a day downloading a game ROM, there might be several big guys working on it day and night behind the scenes.

To use the original words of the old man I interviewed——Sinicization is actually movable type printing.

I think, at this point, it should be worthy of giving applause to these Chinese groups. Then some time ago, a few videos became very popular and were mentioned by many self-media.

What I’m talking about is that there was a post on Tieba asking if Lance 9 can be read in Traditional Chinese and can’t understand Simplified Chinese. Then someone replied that it can’t be simplified because the Chinese version of the game was spelled out by the Chinese characters in Japanese.

So in many videos, this picture is used to explain, as if the Japanese text is completed into Chinese.

In the end, netizens were shocked and discussed it for thousands of floors, but no matter whether you brushed it or not, you have to refute the rumor now.

First of all, the post was not very popular, and many people who came here even doubted whether it was Shenyang Street. Secondly, there may be this method of filling in characters, but the Chinese version of Lance 9 is useless.

It just retains some traditional Japanese characters as I said before.

However, refutation of rumors is quite rare for such a Chinese-language project with a large amount of text.

Finally, I want to say that although the Chinese translation work sounds a little complicated, in fact, in terms of configuration, it is quite simple.

During the interview, I said that there are only three positions that are needed.One is to crack, responsible for exporting font libraries, reverse engineering and other code work, and then翻譯, as the name suggests, translate, no need to explain more, the remaining one is美工, usually responsible for font beautification, PS, etc.

OK, after talking for a long time, I still haven’t explained why so many Chinese characters have suddenly appeared in the past two years.

One of the reasons is naturally that new Chinese groups have emerged in recent years. They are still persisting in “gold digging” and completing those missing works that were not able to be Chineseized.

Another reason, I think you have already guessed it, is the development of AI. After interviewing several Chinese localization experts,ai, is a word that appears quite frequently.

The rapid development of vibe coding has greatly reduced the workload required for Chinese translation and translation.

Things that might have been handled by a professional team in the past,

Now one person can form an army, and there will be no problem。

Even though, this person is still a complete novice who doesn’t know foreign languages or programming.

As for me, I just hide in the dormitory to study geometry in college programming classes, and I can only speak one sentence in C language. The code of cnm is useless. But during the preparation of this video, I suddenly came up with an idea: That is, can I also rely on AI to completely localize a game?

So I started trying, and finally scored 83 points with ai.

Among them, my efforts and sweat accounted for 50%, and AI accounted for 6 billion%. In the end, it actually achieved obvious results.

And I believe that after listening to what I say, it’s not a bad idea for you in front of the screen to Chineseize it.

The game I chose is Dragon Warrior 4 on steam.

Because the GOG version of this game exclusively has the official Chinese version, but steam doesn’t have it, so I thought about whether I could let AI help me get it done.

As a result, don’t tell me, after I gave the local file permissions of the entire Dragon Warrior 4 to AI, it really started running.

I just say one sentence to Chineseize this game, and it will find the dialogue text by itself, and then translate it sentence by sentence,

Then look at which Chinese characters are missing, then turn the characters into stickers and stuff them into the character library.

The first time I saw the performance of AI, I was quite shocked.

So after waiting for the AI to type the code all day, I entered my own Chinese version of the game for the first time.

No surprises. . .

The dialogues in the plot are all garbled. Although they are all in Chinese characters, I can’t understand them at all.

So I turned around and asked AI, what the hell are you translating, and then I reached a deadlock, because my AI was always writing wrong mapping formulas and couldn’t figure out the offset. After forcibly expanding the font library, there was even a situation where 161 Chinese characters were stuffed into Japanese single section slots.

Of course, the most troublesome problem is that there are too many Chinese fonts and the game does not support expansion.

So no matter how you map it, you can’t get the correct texture despite repeated attempts more than a dozen times.

At this time, ai had already started to give up, and started asking me if there were ready-made patches online. If not, I would just help you download them.

I definitely can’t agree with that. In the end, AI was forced to forcibly expand dat to accommodate 1517 Chinese characters. It is still about 700 short of the complete required text, but it can be solved by optimizing translation.

For those that cannot be expanded, use high-frequency words to replace the translation. If it really doesn’t work, just use zigzag instead.

Finally, the actual test has covered 99% of the text in the plot, and most of the plot can be understood.

When I entered the game again, I saw this screen:

Excited heart, trembling hands, a little unbelievable, this is Chinese-made by myself(ai Chinese version)。

But new problems came one after another. The plot did not delay reading, but after opening the menu, it was still garbled, and it was the same after entering the battle. Even when skills or props were selected, the game would crash, which made it impossible to play normally.

So, I was stuck here for a long, long time. . .

Even if I went to the Chinese guy I interviewed for help, the method given by me still couldn’t solve the problem.

Although the menu was successfully changed to Chinese, it still crashed. The reason given by AI was that the menu, props and description text of Dragon Warrior 4 were different from those in the plot, and needed to be re-translated in a completely different way.

It is very difficult to ensure that there is no crash while the workload is heavy.

Finally, I discussed with AI and came to the conclusion that the current dat expansion can only be made into a compressed font library, which is only a semi-finished product of plot translation. If we want to Chineseize the entire interface and ensure that it does not crash, we must reverse the entire game project.

Moreover, Dragon Warrior 4 has a “shell”, which is encryption protection. If you want to reverse it, you must “unshell it”, and AI told me that it is not that it cannot reverse it, but that it cannot interact in dynamic debugging.

The original words are, it said that I can understand the car drawings, but I can’t open the hood and repair it myself on site unless. . .

Unless I’m going to be its hands and it’s going to be its brains.

I don’t know how you feel when you see this sentence. Anyway, my spine is a little numb, but I am still fine with it.

So I followed ai’s guidance and downloaded the x64dbg reverse tool. I would help it operate whatever ai asked me to do, locating the binary memory address and triggering memory breakpoints over and over again.

I was quite excited about the whole process, feeling like it was about to happen.

Unfortunately, the reverse was not successful in the end.

Because the shell of Dragon Warrior 4, by analogy, has a layer of d encryption, anti-cracking and reverse engineering, if AI and I try to modify the source code, it will trigger the game to crash.

There is absolutely no way!

If we really want to forcefully crack it, to put it more seriously, it may infringe the copyright of the game, so we have no choice but to give up. However, this Chinese translation experience is still very valuable.

Because if it is changed to another game without shell and font limit, ai will be completely handy, and you can pinch it with your hands.

For example, some text slg, I tried it later and there was no problem at all.

Below, show:

Finally, I want to say that in the hands of people like me who know nothing, AI can play a role.

If you have Chinese experience, then the efficiency of AI will not just be doubled several times.

Therefore, even the current Chinese people have begun to try to use AI for Chinese dubbing, and the effect is quite good. It is hard to imagine what will develop in the future.

But on second thought, even though the threshold for Chinese translation and the energy required have been greatly reduced, some non-manufacturers are still unwilling to do a good job in Chinese localization adaptation.

It’s amazing that today, when large language models have become so developed, I can still give you all these machine translations.

It’s really hard to explain, it’s really not as good asThe folk Chineseization group is responsible for, and theyPublish Chinese resources for free, never asked for anything in return.

Like the man who made the Chinese version of nds cod, he made the Chinese version himself and paid for voice actors. But when someone asked if he could upload game resources to other websites,

It also said that it didn’t matter at all, and even said that there was no need to ask for permission, if someone needed it, just download it.

I was also curious about what supported them and persisted in doing one Chinese version after another.

Some people say they want to practice coding skills, improve translation skills, and make a Chinese version, which is quite a sense of accomplishment.

But some people say that what they want is to paste their name ID on the game’s start interface, as a “fake name”, so that more players can see it, so as to satisfy their little pride.

But, after playing the game for so many years, I have seen the names of countless Chinese members.

Who remembers it in the end?

But I want to say, thank you for your efforts, so that we have a “understandable” childhood,

Your names deserve to be remembered.(List has been expedited)

撰文：赤膊朋克

Later in the video:Yuanyuan & Zhupi & Noodles & Gudong & Liu Zheng

美編：素描

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