MOTHER 1+2 Translation Status

Thanks so much! I’ll definitely play through again if this translation/hack is finished.

Heh, I love the little “Which game?” placeholder text. :p

Once it’s done I’m going to play it. I’d rather wait another year or two than to play the EB zero that’s floating around. Just because I know your polished text will make the game feel more natural.

Until then, it’s continue to work on Saturn Valley Online for me :3

Whoa. :O I was literally just thinking about this project this morning. I was hoping for more progress on this eventually, since EB0’s translation always seemed so bland…

Great to see more of this, though! I look forward to seeing more progress.

Looks like it’s coming along nicely. I like the inclusion of EarthBound inspired text.

😀

Watching this made me remember how bad the sound quality is, though…I’ll still be jumping all over this when you’re finished, Mato.

By the way, since you’re doing this, are you going to switch the “your attack” and “enemy’s attack” sounds back to the way they’re supposed to be? Or would that delve into/result in a nasty coding mess like the ones you ran into while doing MOTHER 3? Just wondering. 🙂

KingDarian: Yep, M2 takes a lot of text directly from M1 word-for-word, so for this translation I’m doing the reverse and taking the word-for-word lines from EB!

Ice Sage: actually, I think part of the bad sound might be due to the emulator I used, it sounded like it wasn’t quite right. I use a special emu when I want to take videos without things getting out of synch, but it’s older so it might not be as accurate. M2’s music is definitely “off”, though.

I really have no idea how to switch the enemy/party attack sounds, it’s something I want to do though. I don’t know if the sounds are sound samples or if they’re generated on the fly by the hardware. It’s easy to find image data or text data in a ROM, but a lot harder to find audio data 🙁

Awesome, Mato! Can’t wait! And I’ll help wherever I can, if you want me to!

I’ve got some translated item names and such if you want me to email them to you. Every since M2 item is translated using the Roman Alphabet (Captial only), and with the ten character limit. Here’s three examples:
Can of Fruit Juice – FRUITJUICE
Skip Sandwich – SKIPBURGER
Skip Sandwich DX – SKPBURGRDX

*Single

Since = Single, apparently.

TheZunar123: Thanks, I appreciate the help, but translation-wise I’ll be okay. It’s the technical stuff that’s really hard.

Um… I noticed a small glitch. When you talk to the healer and go from refresh to soften, the arrow covers the ‘h’ in refresh. Even if you go back ti refresh, that ‘h’ is now completely gone. It doesn’t matter, but I thought you might wanna know.

You’re still working on this!? AWESOME! This is better then riding green trains! I never got around to playing MOTHER, the only one of the series I havn’t touched. I can’t wait to experiance the first game in my favorite saga.

As far as names go I still think you should have a Don’t Care button with multiple names a la MOTHER 2,

I ended up having to use the Mother 1+2 translation when I got a DS flash cart. The only NES emulator that worked on it wouldn’t load the save files, and the SNES emulator is really… Ew.

Being it’s on the DSi though, it was still a good idea getting one that supports GBA emulation. I have to say, all that’s already been done with the translation was a life saver. I played through both games just fine (even Mother 2, despite the Japanese). If it weren’t for the item names though, I don’t know what I would’ve done.

Ugh, does the music really sound that bad on the GBA?

that way Loid and Lloyd could both be used, though I think Lloyd should be first because of Brawl and name recognition by non-MOTHER-savvy people. That would probably be a nightmare to program though.

It really does. It’s a little better with headphones, but not really.

s’always good to see more progress, AAAA.

Cool, looks like it’s coming along. Nice to see more progress.

So, are you gonna use the translated Japanese town names or the names in EB0?

Looks like he’s using the Japanese names, which is okay since the only original name I didn’t like was Holy Loly Mountain, so it’s 90% win for me.

Hey take your time bro, We have EB0 and EB to hold us over and besides people shouldn’t be mad at you, I know you have a life like everyone else

What’s the difference between Earthbound and the Mother 2 in Mother1+2?? Is there any?

Glad to hear that the M1+2 Translation is still in development, Mato. I’ve been following along ever since I heard about it after the release of the M3 translation.

The new video looks excellent. Really looking forward to giving it a try when it is released!

^Linkzcap

its almost next to impos to change the coding apparently

looks great! i love the music, im really hoping m2 will be on, the polar bear looked creepy -.-

@Linkzcap: I’m pretty sure that while the version of MOTHER in MOTHER 1+2 is the updated Earth Bound (EarthBound Zero) ROM translated back into Japanese, the MOTHER 2 ROM is just the original Japanese version with none of the NoA changes present that were in the US EarthBound.

The music is definitely different between the NES and GBA versions of Mother 1. It’s only natural, seeing as the two had completely different hardware. However, it seems that the emulation used in this video did not use any form of sound filtering, making some of the sounds seem very harsh. Even so, the NES version sounds quite a bit better to my ears.

Linkzcap: http://starmen.net/mother12/diff/ lists the differences between Mother 2 SNES and Mother 2 in Mother 1+2.

Mato, will the re-colored enemies be in the final patch?

I dunno yet, for now I’m gonna focus on just getting the main stuff done.

The recolored enemies look really nice

OMG! you are making me so happy, take your time. good stuff takes time. so time has taught me… at least when it’s related to mother 😀

good stuff!

GOOD STUFF!

Did you ever decide on a font or are ya gonna stick with the EB0 one? Just curious.

Oh, and I know 1,000 people have already said it, but this looks amazing Mato. Keep going, we’re all cheering you on!

Oh, for the font I haven’t decided yet, I definitely want to use a different one than the NES one. A few people sent some sample fonts my way but it takes a lot of work to get a new font into the game to try out, so I haven’t looked at them in close detail yet.

I apologize if this has been mentioned before, but I’ve noticed that the “random encounters” and enemy attacks in the Mother 1 part of the game aren’t random. They give the same enemies with the same attack patter every time I load my save on my cart, though it’s only on the GBA version of EBZ. Not that it’s important or relevant, but will that be changed to be properly random? I might make a video of this to show it.

At last! I’ve been watching the artciles of EB Central since I joined, waiting for an update of the MOTHER1+2 translation and I must say, it was quite a long time. Please Mato, I am with you, finish that translation!

Qiezei: random number generators will always give the same results if the initial states/inputs are the same. The problem you have is very common for people who rely on savestates, but I imagine it’s possible for it to happen with regular saves sometimes too, depending on the game.

I don’t remember if it works in the GBA version, but I believe in the NES version the random number generator re-rolls each time you bring up the menu outside. So if you come across that problem, try messing around in menus/doing stuff before walking around, it might help.

It may be a limit of fitting the programming of both games for the GBA. I recall the GBA port of Final Fantasy V using the same random number seed every time a file was loaded (you didn’t even need to turn the game off I think), which made mastering all the classes ridiculously easy once you stumbled upon the conditions that would spawn Movers every second fight.

Yay! I thought it was on hold indefinitely!

Wait, what about town names? I think that EVERYTHING should be as Itoi intended! (Gyiyg, Holiday town names, etc.)

YEEEEEEEEEESSSS
Good to see you still working on this Mato! I’ve always wanted to see Mother 1 and Mother 2 translated perfectly! I’ll even hold off playing Mother 1 until its translated 😀

I like the colored text thing, too! Is that going to stay? Wait, is that like “flavors?” Anyway, thanks for doing M1 and possibly eventually M2! I can’t tell you what it means to me! Mother 1 was just so bland, all cut and dry. A few weeks ago I got stuck after Yucca Desert and the baby with telepathy that can teleport. I just hit a brick wall of pure boredom… The rest was fine and I LOVE the Magicant music, so I lvl up there often! Of course, it was the NES version prototype rom… I play the gba one on my DSiXL using my DSTwo often.

So long as there isn’t an official english name go with the Japanese ones. Gyiyg should be Giygas, but Santa Claus Station should stay as-is. Think the holiday names are silly? This is MOTHER, it’s suppose to be. Also if you go with the holiday names, will it be “Mother’s Day” or “Mothersday”? Mothersday looks more like a town name then Mother’s Day, just saying.

Mato! You are full of win! I have been waiting a long time for a status update and it looks like the waits paying off! Thank you! Itoi would be proud (i hope)

I prefer the English names (Podunk, Merysville, etc.), not the translated Japanese ones, However, Giegue should be changed to Giygas.

I just noticed that the four screenshots in your post have mouse-over texts.

Thanks Hukky, I never would have thought of checking for mouse-over texts on this website >.<

I think the whole Giegue/Gygas/Gyiyg issue is alot like the Pokey/Porky issue, and I, for one, like Itoi’s original idea better and think it should be Porky and Gyiyg!

The names should be whatever Itoi decided, except for puns like Tonchiki/Everdred and Yokuba/Facade. It’s kind of stupid to go changing names; especially ones that are in English like Mother’s Day and Advent Desert.

Exactly!

I would be fine with Gyiyg, but only if Mother 2 gets updated accordingly (along with a Pokey–>Porky fix). I want my younger siblings to play through this trilogy one day without any confusion!

I am SOOOOO glad this isn’t dead. I really look forward to seeing it finished one day. It would be ever awesomer if M2 could get done, but i’m not holding my breath for that part. Thank you so much, Mato-san.

I absolutely can’t wait for this to be finished! I’ve been DYING to introduce the Mother series to my friends, but I’d prefer they play an accurate/consistent translation, and not the one by NoA. Please hurry Mato, the future Mother fans depend on it! XD

Okay, I just ran the entire M1+2 ROM through an audio player to try to see if I could find the “you attack” and “the enemy attacks” sound effects. I had tried to find the sound effects by comparing the data layout with the NES data layout, but there’s no match in the sound/music area.

Anyway, it was easy enough to find all the sound samples used in the M2 part, but I’m thinking the M1 part uses the hardware to produce sound effects on the fly rather than using stored samples (which would make sense for old 8-bit games too). So it looks like fixing that sound bug will be a lot tougher than I had hoped.

Oh well! One small loss! Nothing too big, at least!

I don’t care about the sounds effects as much as I care about the censorship. It’s just silly to remove crosses, blood, and robot “nipples”. Plus, the yellow stripe they added to Ninten makes him look like he’s got a belly shirt on. And I liked having the Peanut characters lol.

Nice! I’m really glad this is still going. I mean the EB0 translation works but this will be a much more polished version.
Question: Will this M1 translation use the EB0 legal changes(no crosses, blood, etc) or no changes i.e M1 just in English?

@Fang+
Actually, in the MOTHER 1+2 version, those censors by NOA were put in to the MOTHER 1 in that version. So to see MOTHER 1 non-censored would mean to replace the censored sprites with the original ones.

Which would involve a lot more work on the part of Mato. Personally I don’t care much about the graphical censorships, I just want the text to be accurate.

Glad to finally see another update on this! I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this. Keep up the good work Mato!! \m/

PLEASE TRANSLATE!
I’d be able to play Earthbound on my Dsi. 😀
I guess you can’t make some changes to Giygas?
Like, make him immune to poison?

@Anouki Agent Yellow
Actually, editing the sprites would be insanely simple. In fact, I could do it myself if he chooses not to do it. Though, I believe Tomato has already mentioned he might choose to undo the censorship/copyright changes.

That’s good to hear! 🙂

Lookin’ sexy. Are you going to recolor the sprites using the EB palette liked in early previews of this (re-)translation, or will it just be a straight Japanese-to-English type deal?

I’m not sure yet, for now I’m going to try to focus on getting the main/more important stuff done. Judging from the poll from a while back, the updated graphics version would be pretty popular though.

Maybe that can be a version 1.2 of the patch. It’s not really necessary or anything. Though, it would be certainly be cool 😀

This is really great news. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to help but I’ll be cheering you on from the sides, Mato!

If there is anything you need help with just say the word!

Good to hear that this isn’t dead, I can’t wait to play this with better text.
keep up the good work Mato!

Hey, if ya need any help I’ve got an exceptional amount of hacking experience.

Sorry about the double post but I just remembered something: If you could get a transcript of one of the games I could help with translatin’.

@OmegaAfroGamer
I’m pretty sure he’s said several times already that he doesn’t need help with the translation, since that’s what he does for a living. The only thing he said he would maybe need help with was the hacking part.

@Anouki Agent Yellow
I thought i remember him saying a long time ago that it would be no problem to change battle sprites to uncensored versions, and the only things he could not change would be overworld sprites, like the crosses and stuff.

When the evil and darkness rises from the strenght of Gyigas… we may pray for Mato and his friends! Bring M1+2 translation to light!

I hope in the when this is released the censored crap will be uncensored.

It might be. Graphics hacking has already been established as not being out of the question.

I’m actually half-hoping you’ll leave in the profanity so I can make another big deal out of it. 😛

PKSTARMAN’s prayer was swallowed… by the darkness

Just so you guys know, someone is considering a Famicom Mother fan-translation. Not sure if it’ll happen, but I thought I’d alert this project of a potential friendly rival. 😉

I’m so excited! I like how you’re being very true to the original. Also, I can’t wait to see the original censored sprites restored. I swear, I feel like it’s Christmas morning all over again! XD *Stops gushing*