ObiKKa wrote:
In the SNES field at Datacrystal alone I counted 132 RPGs (let's minus one, OK?) = 131 still to work on, sans any omitted examples that we haven't learnt about yet. So divide that by 4/year and that is ~33 years to go. But I think I remember reading an old quote by filler in an obscure place (maybe somewhere hidden within here?) saying that the SNES category (with about 800 maybe all decent games to translate) would still take 80 years to complete. So don't hold your or our hopes up.
From what I checked it's actually much less, thankfully - "only" about 70-80 for SNES + about 40 for NES.
Spinner's list seems to confirm that too. There are very few untranslated adventure games on SNES too, but quite a few on NES - most of them being murder mystery games, as far as I recall. Speaking of other genres, SNES has an insane number of sports titles to translate, that much I remember... so, it is still going to take a long time, but there are quite a few NES/SNES/GB oriented groups at the very least.
ObiKKa wrote:
There is one quality translation/romhacking group that's working on the PC-98 games, lovely computer games with the dithered graphics, that they are. They've got about 30 or less of those examples that they're keen to do with the exception of the heavily hentai/eroge (as these types were called back then?) laden games (They can't as they're unable to work on them in total privacy). So if they do 2 projects a year then half/3-quarters of the PC-98 games list could get wiped out in 15 years' time. After that, who knows, hopefully they could migrate over to the MSX/2, or my strongest preferences which are either the FM Towns or Sharp X68000 stuff. They could adapt their useful and easy to use patcher tool (Re-engineered with the help of an old source code from somebody else).
Fair point, but PC-98 has hundreds of RPGs, actually, many of them not even dumped at all; true, many of them have eroge elements (vide Dragon Knight IV for example), but they can be good games nonetheless. The problem with Japanese PCs is that they're not too well documented in the west, and it's not easy to find games in the wild. The guys from the PC-98 discord are doing their best to archive everything, but it sure isn't easy.
ObiKKa wrote:
There there are two or more other small groups that have been working on the PC Engine cart games and Megadrive stuff. But at least these are fortunately much smaller than the SNES or PS lists (Just about all of the PS console stuff are dreadful to think about, even! But we can understand why most romhackers just want to work on the 8-bit/16-bit stuff coz you'd have to re-skill up just to do those 32-bit or higher end games! And take even longer to translate/hack!)
As I mentioned earlier, there are actually more less as many MD games left to translate that there are just SNES RPGs, so that's a pretty good indication of the difference - you can easily see which console did better in Japan too, with those numbers...
Mega CD had one game I was curious about, a 3x3 Eyes RPG... it apparently is really good, by all accounts. PCE isn't too bad, true, but PCE-CD as you could see has quite a few games left too. As to PS - I'm not holding my breath at all. Maybe in the future more groups willing to tackle these mostly gigantic projects emerge.
Oh, and to stay on topic - great work on the sanctuary, SylarDean.
It is really quite helpful all things considered. I recall some bits of the game being somewhat confusing to figure out, so I'm sure that's going to allay everyone's doubts. Also, Happy New Year to everyone.