Links & Thanks
We managed to do this translation together as a team, but I (as the one who spearheaded the whole thing) would like to pass my personal greetings and thanks to all the people whose direct or indirect involvement allowed me to initiate and (more importantly) realize the project to its fullest potential.
Thanks
Of course, the first people I need to thank are my wife and children! They were so patient with me when I was off in my own headspace calculating hexadecimal offsets. And they barely ever distracted me away from it (aside from my youngest boy :) ). My oldest daughter was especially supportive, too, as she has the same fondness for Japanese culture that I do.
Osamu Tezuka - the original creator of the Mitsume ga Tooru manga and many other very interesting characters and stories. Check the following links if you’re not already familiar with him:
Elena Viktorovna and Olga Vladimirovna - my first senseis from the Japanese center in Sakhalin who taught me everything I know about the Japanese language. And my classmates Nastya and Katya, who helped me with the translation of a couple difficult sentences.
Lyuty Victor Mikhailovich - my first computer science teacher, who instilled in me my love of MSX computers and programming.
Thomas Lipschultz (a.k.a. Wyrdwad) - English co-editor, proofreader, creative and talented translator who became a real friend during the course of this journey. I hope I’ll meet him someday in real life! :) You can find him on Twitter here.
Andrey Obritan (a.k.a. Arrogant) - Russian co-editor, proofreader, creative and talented man who also became a real friend. :) He is also an administrator in the Mitsume ga Tooru VKontakte group.
MP83 and WinniVL - promotion, font creation, and hardcore beta testing.
Armando Perez Abad - for a very useful SAVE/LOAD feature and some more very cool enhancements listed in the patch readme file.
Sergey (a.k.a. TwilightWolf) from gbx.ru - sold me lots of Snatcher and Policenauts antiques along with my beloved MSX Yamaha YIS-503IIIR KUBT2 (which he actually gifted to me!).
Andrey Borisovich Rodionov - talented and creative MSX programmer. Check his website; you’ll find some very interesting MSX games there. You can actually try those games via WebMSX embedded into the site: just click on the pictures. He’s also a creator of the synthpop vinyl album 512KB which was named after the two Yamaha MSXes used for the album’s creation, since the memory volume of 2 Yamaha MSXes is exactly 512KB. His Barocco composition from another vinyl album “Pulse” was quite widely known in the former USSR.
Artemio Urbina - and his project, Junker HQ. Being a hardcore collector of Snatcher and Policenauts memorabilia, I was really inspired by his translation projects. He’s also a creative author of 240p Test Suite, MDFourier, and some other preservation projects.
Kazuhiko Nishi-san, Sander van Nunen, Oasis Team, Max Iwamoto and Project Melancholia, Manuel Pazos, Takamichi Suzukawa, Manuel Bilderbeek, Maarten ter Huurne, BiFi, Daniel Caetano, TheKid, and all the other good people who (directly or not) are involved with the MSX scene and MRC - your work and your creations inspired me to make this project a reality. Your posts on msx.org and other such places were really useful during this long journey, and I know for sure my MSX journey with you all has not ended yet. ;)
I would also like to express my appreciation to Bob and his project RetroRGB, Cory and Try and their My Life In Gaming channel, Sorgelig and SmokeMonster as the MiSTerFPGA project creator and evangelist, Marqs as the OSSC creator, and all the other retro tinkerers and open source community members. The tremendous amount of time and energy they’ve all volunteered allows us, the retro gamers, to play our wonderful old games with the highest possible picture and sound quality.
Pavel Grinev (a.k.a. Kinaman) - he brought the Russian underground retro scene into the mainstream.
Roman Shabanov - for his idea to restore the game manuals from original scans.
And finally, just general thanks to the whole open source community!
Also, it wouldn’t be a proper Special Thanks section without mentioning the tools used to make the patch, along with their specific functions. This couldn’t have been done without them, after all!
- OpenMSX - main tool. Without its emulator and especially debugger, creating this patch would’ve taken SO much more time.
- Z80 Opcodes Table
- SofaRun by Louthrax - really useful and comprehensive MSX tool allowing me to run ROMs, DSKs, and other games from the SunRise IDE with Nextor firmware by Konamiman. SofaRun is also widely used in the MiSTer FPGA project as the main shell for running games.
- BlueMSX and Meisei emulators - BlueMSX allows the user to make changes to the rom while it’s running (which saved me a lot of time during patch development), and Meisei has a very good tile viewer.
- YY-CHR - tile editor.
- Translhextion - hex editor; the relative search and usage of .TBL files was a lifesaver on countless occasions when I was packing and unpacking the text.
- HXD - main hex editor.
- Notepad++ - main assembly and text editor.
- Pokeperevod - character table editor.
- Artmoney - game cheat tool; great for seeking and editing variables in RAM.
- MSX Font Editor
- Free Fonts used for manual
- GIMP - Open source graphic editor.
- IPS Rom Patcher
Youtube links
I’ve always preferred reading over watching videos, personally. However, I would like to give a special mention to all those bloggers and YouTubers who helped make the retro-gaming scene what it is today. Besides, it’s hard to deny that sometimes, videos are aesthetically much more pleasing than text (e.g. MLiG), and the modern-day younglings seem to prefer watching things over reading them anyway, heheh. :) So, I’m going to list some recommended MGT-related videos and links below, noting which language is used in each of them:
- The third eye of the old Dendy by VismutDK in Russian.
- Mitsume ga Tooru review by Gaming After 30 in Russian.
- Mitsume ga Tooru (Famicom) review by Pixel Devil in Russian.
- Mitsume ga Tooru stream by Kinaman in Russian.
- Mitsume ga Tooru - retro review by Game Space in Russian.
- The Three-Eyed One : Mitsume ga Tooru on Famicom by Game Dave in English.
- [MSX] Mitsume ga Tooru - Longplay (with English fan-translation patch) by Wyrdwad in English.
- Mitsume ga Tooru Games by Retro View in English.
- MSX Longplay - Mitsume ga Tooru (三つ目がとおる) by Retro View in English.
- Mitsume ga Tooru [MSX] by IDemonzI1301 in Japanese.
Articles and related links
- Imanok, cax, and Manuel discussing a general desire to see MGT translated here and here (26 July 2005).
- Some more requests for MGT translation from LeandroCorreia (09 November 2010).
- ReyVGM posting mock-ups of the MGT ending screen (11 September 2013).
- Very explanatory and animated (I actually borrowed a couple of GIFs from it for my “about” section) article about MGT for Famicom (19 June 2014).
- Arrogant, Mefistotel and Guyver discussing a Russian MGT translation for MSX. Very useful explanations from Guyver about the RLE method of packing text characters (21 May 2017).
- Arrogant and Guyver discussing the Russian MGT Famicom translation (21 May 2017).
- Wyrdwad asking for technical assistance to be able to translate MGT (10 January 2019).
- Wyrdwad mentioning the importance of game translation quality: "But I'd like to provide players with an alternative -- a more complete translation that ensures English-speakers get the same experience as Japanese-speakers" (21 January 2019).
- Teaser by Wyrdwad (05 February 2021).
- Teaser website mentioned on MRC by moldov31337 and discussed by Wyrdwad, Ivan, max_iwamoto, and Randam. And some curious findings about the game release mentioned by Ivan, Randam and moldov31337 (20 February 2021).
- Long-awaited news for many fans about the release of the MGT translation on msx.org, was posted by ro (thanks a lot from the developers, for the very warm feedback). The news banner was created in two flavors and was kindly provided by Hamlet. An initial version of the banner can be found at msx.pics. This photo hosting, which was launched by another MSX fan, Luppie, turned out to be a very useful resource where you can post photos related to MSX. Russian description was added by Pencioner (22 April 2021).
- The news about the patch was posted on the romhacking.ru resource (22 April 2021).
- While discussing the release of the patch, it was revealed that the original patch used a hacked Korean version of rom with a KONAMI mapper. User gdx adopted the patch for the original 8K ASCII mapper that NATSUME used in the cartridge. The patch can now be applied on different versions of roms (22 April 2021).
- Andrey Obritan posted the patch on romhacking.net (22 April 2021).
- The post about the release of the patch on the Spanish paperblog resource was posted by RoyRamker (22 April 2021).
- How To Beat MSX MGT in Japanese.