Eidolon Translation Group

General thoughts - The ETG - ETG projects
 All games - Tools - All translations


 
 

 
Dec 26      Hello everyone! As you know, we were finally successful in finding a translator for Surging Aura (Snake), but we do have another problem now: Lack of time for both me and Snake. Hence, to speed up the work on the translation, we need your help. This is the Email Snake sent me:
     "The translation has been sitting at where I left it. I have been looking for 3 people to help extract text from the game, send it to me, allow me to translate it, then send it back to be reinserted. That is the most time consuming part, extracting, copying, then reinserting. It would go a lot faster with that help, leaving me with time to translate and rewrite. I would handle it where I would start with what I have, send that to everyone helping me, then assign certain vectors to the three. I would translate each assignment sent back to me, one at a time, then update the rom, and send that out to everyone so they have the updated rom to work with. Then I would translate the next assignment, and update the rom again.. So on and so forth."
     So, if you think you have some time for doing the above things, please contact either me or Snake! Let's hope we can release a patch for the first few scenarios of the game soon.
Nov 26      Added a link to Hiryuu Translations, another group who is attempting a translation of Langrisser 2. No news to report on the Surging Aura translation; I'll update the page with some pictures of the actual translation when I get word back from Snake.
Oct 05      Almost nine months after the release of the Surging Aura translation tools, there is good news to report. Two persons (Snake and Bokudono) contacted me recently who are willing to translate the game using those tools. A possible release of a translation patch has become much more likely now; however, some new problems have occured (another bug in the patching program of the developer's kit) which may delay the release of the patch. I'll keep everyone updated, though.
     Besides, I've updated the games lists with the most recent information (release of Monsterworld IV translation for example) and fixed the links to the screenshots on the games pages. Please note that it is NOT possible anymore to download the ROM images of the pictured games! The "download" button is left there because someday I might find the time to re-upload the ROMs too. 
Jan 02      The Surging Aura translation tools have been released. If you're interested in contributing to the translation, jump to the respective page now! I've also added a small "weirdo patch" for Surging Aura, to show what is possible with the translation tools. Finally, I have cleaned up the whole page and deleted lots of outdated information.
  
You are visitor Fastcounter since January 10th 1998  |  last updated: December 26th, 2000

General thoughts
 
The reason why I set up this page (and finally, why the ETG has been founded) is that I am a great fan of japanese games, especially Role Playing Games. But unfortunately, many of those games were released in Japan only, with no American translation in sight (and now that the Genesis is "dead", "official" translations won´t be done any more by the game companies). The only way for European and American players to enjoy those games are "freak" translations as they have been done (and very successfully done!) for Japanese Super Famicom (Super NES) games by groups like RPGe and DeJap. No similar group existed that concentrated their efforts on Mega Drive translation - until the ETG had been founded.
 
The Eidolon Translation Group
 
The ETG has been founded on the 15th of February 1998 as the world´s first Genesis translation group. We are a bunch of people, interested in emulation, and above all: interested in Japanese Genesis games. With our efforts to translate these games to English we want to give everyone the enjoyment to play those Japanese game "jewels" which never made it to European or US stores. 

Current members:

Eidolon (General projects coordination, ROM hacking)
Snake (translator)
Flavio (ROM hacking, translator, programmer)
Cybergoth (Artist)
Nitemare (Editor)
 
Current ETG projects
 
This is our choice of games which we are currently trying to translate. However, this is no final choice. The table is subject to change.
 
Game
 Status
project leader
 Rent A Hero 03/24/1998: about 2%, sleeping
Flavio
 Star Cruiser 04/13/1998: about 1%, cancelled
Eidolon
 Surging Aura 01/02/2000: Translation tools released!
10/04/2000: Translators found - work continues!
12/26/2000: Help needed! Please read news!
Eidolon

Other Projects which have been dropped due to various reasons:
 

Advanced Military Commander (lack of time), Dragon Slayer 1 (lack of time), King Colossus (lack of time), Monsterworld IV (lack of time), YuYu Hakusho Gaiden (we only have a ROM with bad checksum)
Those translations may be resumed sometime later, but no guarantee on that!
 
Some Japanese games which deserve to be translated
 
Follow the links below to see descriptions, a (personal) rating and screenshots of the games which may be translated in the future. Currently you cannot download the ROM images due to a lack of server space. The pages are, including the screenshots, about 600K each, so be patient while they load.

[ Games A-O ]  [ Games P-Z ]
 
Tools
 
These tools and documents might be very helpful if you want to start a translation yourself. Many additional tools and documents can be found in the general Sega section of my site.
 
UNIROM 0.50
This valuable tool (made by Bjorn Astrom) comes in very handy when translating games with many Kanji (which mostly use dual byte encoding).
SearchR 2
Jedi´s valuable tool to locate charsets and text data in Japanese games.
 
Genesis translations in progress
 
This is a list of all Genesis translation projects which are known to me, with links to the respective project homepages. Your translation is missing? Tell me!

[ View the list ]
last updated: November 26th 2000
 
HTML & graphics design (c) 1998-2000 by Eidolon