It's a great movie, isn't it? I've been looking for a ROM of this game (either translated or not, I'd be happy to just guess at the text and look at the pretty pictures) but I've had no luck yet. If I find it, I'll certainly link it and you'd better do the same.

I'm thinking, that if I am able to get the ROM, I'll make it into a translated flash game...

It'll be really hard work, but I am willing to do it!

I have nothing to say but that I approve of this plan to translate the game and will eagerly search for a ROM.



......... I love you guys

I'm on this like Akio on a fourteen year old girl. Except I'm even more aroused.

As to how can I can help, unfortunately I'm helpless to translate since I know no Japanese. I'm also not very experienced with coding, but I'm mindnumbingly stubborn about computer anything and will learn what I need to to accomplish this. (Ask me how much I knew about PHP before this forum got built. GO AHEAD.) I could definitely help with coding, and Yasha and I could look into possibilities for expanding ohtori.nu's host to handle the file sizes. As for the Sega Saturn emulator, it's been a very long time, but I have used it before with limited success. I found the problem was that it ran, but slowly, so RPGs you could tolerate, but forget Radiant Silvergun and Panzer Dragoon. (Hi, my name is Giovanna, and I owned a Sega Saturn three days after they were released. Played Astal? No, I bet you didn't. Your loss.)

It shouldn't be hard to actually make a rom of the game, but translating it would be a huge undertaking. I'll poke around the rom sites and see what the current word is on Sega Saturn emulation, but first things first, where are the translators? Last time I did a translation project, that's how it went bad, and I'd very much like to avoid months of coding only to end up with no one to tell me what's going on.

Coin wrote:

(Side Note: Usually I'm attracted to the female characters but when Akio jumps forward in the beginning -->   I think I'm being drawn to the dark side.)

Akio, Touga, and Saionji singing acapella is either the best or worst thing ever. It's adorable the way Akio and Touga's poses match and Saionji looks all HAY FUCK YOU TWO I'MA FACE THIS WAY .

I know a little Japanese.  There has to be someone on this board who knows more than I do, and perhaps has some experience translating, but if all else fails I will give it a shot.

I know some Japanese... some. I'm sure I can find the resources to translate fully if I search hard enough, but quite honestly this raises the wait period to a matter of a year or more. I'm just not good enough to get it done faster. There has to be someone on this forum who can understand more.

hyacinth_black wrote:

I'm thinking, that if I am able to get the ROM, I'll make it into a translated flash game...

It'll be really hard work, but I am willing to do it!

You would be my hero if you were able to do this.

I think that the Sega Saturn emulator works with ISO. So you must create it with programs like Nero Burning or sorta...

Well, it'd be possible to e-mail (or post on their forums) a few subbing groups that translate ROMs about the project for support and answers. Maybe RPGone.net or Dejap.com---I also heard that RomHacking.net has a forum there just for fans translating games.

The game has two disks. There are video files on both disks which are .cak files. I have converted all of them to avi, however the footage is of the duels in the game (almost all of these clips are in the "Particle Dance" Utena AMV on YouTube) and clips from the TV episodes. None of the fan service scenes are video files. You can see them when you play the game but not sure if they can be ripped from the game disks. The Sega Saturn is hard to emulate and I can't find evidence that anyone has successfully created a ROM from the Utena game. One theory I have is that it might be possible to video capture the game as you are playing it. I need a Japanese Sega Saturn to do that so I bought one but it hasn't arrived yet. I'll try that method and see. If it works, then I can send the footage to someone who can translate it if anyone is willing. The problem with this, even if it works, is that I would have to play every scenario of the game which could take awhile. If anyone has any techie ideas, let me know and I will try it.

Creating a 'ROM' of a Saturn game isn't exactly hard.  So far as I know, they didn't use any really special copy protection (Maybe a few purposely dead sectors.)  To play in an emulator, you wouldn't need to bypass anything special, just use an ISO image.  Nearly any CD-Burning program can make this file, including a few free ones, from the CD itself.  Then the emulator, presuming it's up to the task, can load the ISO (since it's not checking for copy protection) and play the game.  If you're lucky, you might even be able to get a copy to burn and be able to play it on an original Saturn, but that's probably a bit of a gamble.

Dallbun wrote:

Yeah. Apparently most Saturn emulators use bin/cue format, but it's still easily rippable, and it would be easy to send a bin/cue or .iso to folks who need it, asumming there was some way of doing it online or they weren't adverse to getting a DVD in the mail. Unfortunately, I've never been able to get a Saturn emulator to actually run the game.

Ah.  I think the historical reason for this is that several SegaCD/32XCD titles are very particular about the contents of the CD.  Lunar 1 was by far the worst offender, expecting audio tracks to be a specific length down to the milisecond or the game would simply lock on startup.  A sort of poor-man's copy protection that makes emulation of those titles damn near impossible.  Of course, playing them in a 'real' console is also a hair-pulling experience since the slightest scratch renders the whole CD worthless in the 1X drive.  The only way to get a 'good' burn of Lunar was to edit the CUE file to look like what the game was expecting, which, over multiple recopies, causes a weird 'drift' effect where the first few seconds of the next track plays. 

Maybe something similiar is happening here?  Or could it just be that the game is using something that isn't fully emulated yet?

Also, one good way to distribute might be to host a torrent-tracker on the EM server.  Just a thought.