Japanese bookstore simulator translated into English after 24 years

https://rhizome.org/editorial/2021/may/18/true-fans-translate-fansubbing-bookstory/

by keiferski • 5 years ago

287 83 5 years ago

Is there a Visual Basic that compiles for all platforms? Man that would be a killer app. As a teen, I hadn't even formally learned BASIC, but somehow I was able to cobble together programs with VB, and it gave me confidence that I could learn more.

xkeysc0re3• 5 years ago

There really is a huge gap left behind by the decline of VB. I've been designing a few games with Godot recently and I've really come to enjoy how intuitive it is for building interfaces and getting prototypes up and running. However the proprietary scripting language (GDScript) itself is rather limited. Having a solid WYSIWYG form builder backed by e.g. Python that generates binaries for a number of target platforms would be incredible.

I may be in the minority but I really enjoy proper desktop software over SaaS web equivalents.

billfruit• 5 years ago

Lazarus might serve the purpose, its based on Pascal, which in most respects a better system than VB.

syockit• 5 years ago

The closest you get to having a RAD IDE for WinForms is probably Lazarus, but it's based on Pascal. For BASIC, there's a project called WinFBE which seems to be in active development.

viraptor2• 5 years ago

Lazarus is a good call. There's also Winforms 2.0 support in mono, which gives you all major platforms via .NET. You can even use VB.NET with it.

2ion2• 5 years ago

I'd argue that QtCreator is a contender here as well. The forms/widget editor is quite powerful.

bdowling4• 5 years ago

Was this done with the permission of Kairosoft? Kairosoft may not approve of an unlicensed translation of a game that they still distribute on their web site, for various reasons including that a poor quality translation may tarnish their business reputation.

(edit: Nothing about permission in article.)

andrewzah2• 5 years ago

I strongly doubt a fan translation of a game from 1997 is going to reflect on or tarnish -anything-. Fan translations are very common, and without them games would be forever unavailable to people who don't speak that language.

bdowling4• 5 years ago

Kairosoft is a company of about 20 people with capitalization of 100 million yen (not sure what that means exactly). [0]. They make games for current game consoles including Nintendo Switch and Sony Playstation 4, and games for iOS and Android. [1]. That's not the kind of company that doesn't care about its reputation or protecting its brand image and trademarks.

Kairosoft also produces English translations of many of its games. [2]. According to this photo from the article, the translation appears to be incomplete and leaves much of the text appearing as strings of question marks. [3] I don't believe that a company that produces dozens of games, including for current systems and many translated into English, would approve of an incomplete fan translation of one of its games.

[0] https://kairosoft.net/company/

[1] https://kairosoft.net/game/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairosoft

[3] https://rhizome.org/static-media/uploads/bookstory5.png

numpad0• 5 years ago

Japanese understanding for copyright is like enforceable shrinkwrap software licensing entitled to authors, literally “authorship rights”.

American version is like rights holder’s right to protect mostly financial interest, almost literally “copy-rights”.

When ones from different sides meet a misunderstanding like this happens; one side says “it’s not going to hurt your sales”, the other side says “how dare you mess with someone else’s binary” and the discussions go nowhere.

As for resolution, an emerging choice is to make the author monetize the pirated translation and let them take down the free version. Don’t work always as sometimes the rights holder consider that a negligible gain or minor loss with high reputation risks to day jobs.

So, “it’s not going to hurt sales” won’t work. “Do you have any idea to make it official” is probably better.

malwarebytess• 5 years ago

I have serious doubts that someone downloading this near 30 year old game's clearly fan translated version is going to be shocked and appalled by the poor quality translation and then reflect this onto Kairosoft's "business reputation."

How about weighing a couple potential morons thinking less of a company against the archival value and reach of a project like this? In my view it isn't even close. The translation is worth it.

Not everything needs to be reduced to "business reputation" and "$". Especially when we're talking about 24 year old japanese software. If anything a translation would improve outcomes for the company in myriad ways. One may be laying groundwork for a modern product that they could actually sell.

bdowling4• 5 years ago

The company here can decide for itself whether it is in its best interest to allow an unlicensed fan translation of one of its programs. If it is, then the company does nothing. If not, then the company will tell them to stop what they're doing.

fenomas• 5 years ago

I don't know why everyone's piling on GP here. This isn't abandonware, the game is still being distributed by a company that still operates. And TFA author isn't distributing a mod or a patch, they're distributing the full actual game, which the owner is also still distributing.

I mean even then it may still be fine. But speculating about what the company might possibly think is beside the point - they're right there active on twitter! It's perfectly reasonable to wonder why TFA author didn't bother to reach out.

2ion2• 5 years ago

Japanese media publishers are notorious for being unforgiving for unauthorized copies. The only reason this has little impact in the West is that most media produced for the Japanese market in whatever form do not even make it to Western markets and are a true niche interest here.

andrewzah2• 5 years ago

This reminds me of the fan translation projects for games like Ace Attorney from Japanese -> Korean. They also found a way to extract the game strings and put them into a google doc. It was super cool.

So I went through all of the hassle of modding my 3ds to change its language to Korean (Nintendo only allows specific languages per 3ds region), and patching a romfile of Ace Attorney. Then Nintendo released Ace Attorney 1-3 on the switch and pc, so that was great timing. It's still annoying on the switch as the game supports Korean, but only if you set your system language to Korean; hardly ideal if anyone else uses it. At least with Steam it can be configured per-game.

dclowd9901• 5 years ago

Yes, totally this. I really wish there was some way I could contribute to the project (they don’t accept donations). Such a nice community of people too.

pkdpic_y9k• 5 years ago

me too, they had me at "japanese bookstore simulator"

firexcy• 5 years ago

There were similar efforts in the Chinese fan-translators community, and Ace Attorney is distinguished by the huge amount of texts, not to mention the peculiar culture references that are borderline untranslatable. The time for grassroot game translations may have peaked with the introduction of official remasters in Chinese and the increasing barriers in dumping and reverse-engineering ROMs, but the contributors deserve to be celebrated for their creativeness and hardwork. They are practicing online collaborations before the era of online collaboration.

softgrow• 5 years ago

I tried to do something similar with Traffic Confusion https://web.archive.org/web/20021203070116/http://hd.st90.ar... I started using a resource editor on the Windows exe to extract resources and substituting in translated ones. Was all by hand (clicky-clicky-clicky) and really needed to be scripted.

Nition• 5 years ago

UI designed purely in WinForms!

xkeysc0re3• 5 years ago

I love it. The enterprise-y look is perfect for a business sim.

raverbashing• 5 years ago

How hard would it be to have a VB VM interpreter in JS I wonder?

kfrzcode• 5 years ago

There are some questions we shouldn't ask...

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

There's this one for qbasic: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=92

patcon• 5 years ago

The vibe and high described here feels really familiar.

I'm involved in civic tech organizing -- communities of engaged citizens (yes tech, but also activists, public servants, lawyers, designs, and any engaged residents) who get together every week (usually in person) to pitch and work on continuing civic initiatives at "civic hacknights". Often these efforts involve some tech, but it's not a rule they must.

On a good night, it's electric: some guy who's a construction foreman might join a group working on supporting emergency shelters, led by an amorphous group of whom its unclear who's leading and who's "volunteering". (There are some white dudes, but not ALL white dudes.) Maybe they've been visiting emergency shelters doing interviews, and some projects even lure some folks with experience in the problem domain (i.e. living on the street) to take on meaningful roles and learn.

I have a hope that someday all civic action will have analogous citizen projects to complement official efforts, both intersecting in unexpected ways. Unexpected like, we've had public servants come out of their government day jobs to "launder" code into the community, meaning another community member takes over the codebase, while the staff goes back into city government to spend down some political capital in "liberating" some data to drive "that new community app that sprung up" (air quotes).

On the good days, it feels a little bit like this article conveys, and I can kinda feel the leading edge of what a future civics might be, once government is truly built openly and is more permeable to the citizenry <3

bigyikes• 5 years ago

There are some white dudes, but not ALL white dudes

Can you clarify what this statement means?

weird-eye-issue• 5 years ago

It's not just white guys

Jorengarenar• 5 years ago

Maybe white- and blue-collar?

barry-cotter• 5 years ago

Some people think that race is the most important thing about a person so they make sure to mention race in every situation.

ikurei• 5 years ago

I understood it as a contrast with the wider tech world, where most people, and specially most people leading, are white males.

layoutIfNeeded• 5 years ago

It’s an American thing. I think it’s best to just let it slide…

ignoramceisblis• 5 years ago

When white dudes do good things, like supporting emergency shelters when their working-class lives are not otherwise consuming them, we get to take them for granted. Talk down about them. It's okay. In fact, it's all the rage.

Don't worry, not ALL of the people doing the things we want done are white dudes. Your experience with our club will not be ruined by the presence of this lower caste. Pay little mind to them. In fact, pay them little, in general.

Join us. You'll feel good about yourself.

867-5309• 5 years ago

reminds me of the dodgily-translated Pokemon Gameboy roms from circa turn of the millennium

xrd• 5 years ago

This game (actually this write-up) makes me reconsider how I've long felt that Visual Basic was a pox on the computer industry.

ngcc_hk3• 5 years ago

VB is definitely easier to learn and run. Cf with powerbuilder, oracle form 4 (so many bugs I recalled), forget what is the third one then. The thick client vs CICS ...

namuol2• 5 years ago

I recently re-installed Kairosoft's "Game Dev Story" on my Android phone because I needed a good distraction from the world.

I had to uninstall it years ago because it was shocking how easily I became hooked!

I had no idea they were making games all the way back in 1997, but it makes perfect sense in hindsight: Game Dev Story is a masterful execution of this type of game and might even be a Magnum Opus of sorts for Kairosoft. Even if this type of game is not your cup of tea, it's interesting to check out if you're familiar with the history of video games.

If it wasn't getting late on a Sunday night, I would be booting into Windows to give Bookstore Story a try, but I know if I do I might be up until 3 am...

bemmu• 5 years ago

Whoa, initially missed that this one is also from Kairosoft. They now have a huge library of sim titles like these, available not just on iOS but PlayStation and I’m sure many other platforms as well.

namuol2• 5 years ago

Their games are so inspiring. The formula they employ is so much simpler than the typical "tycoon" or "sim" game (in a good way) and practically begs to be applied to all kinds of different scenarios like farming, restaurant management, film production, animal breeding, all manner of manufacturing... If I ever get back into game development I will probably wind up trying to apply their formula to something novel.

pvitz• 5 years ago

Thanks for pointing out that both games are from the same company. "Game Dev Story" is highly addictive and I also had to uninstall it some years ago because of this...

Animats3• 5 years ago

If you're looking for something old to restore, here's something I started - restoring one of the very earliest pieces of science fiction. This is "The Sky Pirate", by Garrett P. Serviss, better known for "Edison's Conquest of Mars". That one was intended as an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells's 1987 "War of the Worlds".

"The Sky Pirate" was serialized in newspapers, and never published as a book. I brought back the first 3 chapters from Library of Congress scans of microfilms of newspapers from 2011. The Library of Congress ran those through an OCR program. The result needs much cleanup.

Here's the first chapter, cleaned up.[1] Here's the prologue:

"The sea pirate has long been a fascinating figure of romance, but the march of progress has driven him into well deserved retirement, and he has now been replaced, in fiction at least, by the sky pirate, who is even more mysterious, more daring and more romantic than his predecessor. Read and there will unfold before you the extraordinary story of Captain Alfonso Payton and his airship, the Chameleon; of William Grayman, the richest man in the world; of his beautiful daughter, for whose ransom $10,000,000 was demanded; of Lieutenant Allen of the revenue service, of wonders by wireless and of fierce battles above the clouds."

It gets worse. The writing is terrible. The plot is lame. The characters are one-dimensional. I got through seven chapters before quitting in disgust. There's a reason that nobody, in a century, ever republished this.

So I put it on Github.[2] After 110 years, it's clearly public domain. If someone wants to finish the job, fork the project on Github and go for it. Thanks.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/Sky-Pirate/blob/master/src/cha...

[2] https://github.com/John-Nagle/Sky-Pirate

rightbyte• 5 years ago

Cute story. Maybe you are not the first one to compile it from the issues, but others came to the same conclusion?

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

Could it be a century old piece of fanfiction?

bussiere2• 5 years ago

forked but i saw a barn and noble version : https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-sky-pirate-garrett-p-se...

I'am curious to know if the barn and noble is a legit version.

Animats3• 5 years ago

It looks like someone else transcribed it and brought it out as a cheapie self-published book on B&N's platform.

There's also a version on Lulu.[1]

Both of those went on sale within the past 5 years, and I put the first seven chapters on Github 5 years ago. Hm.

[1] https://www.lulu.com/shop/garrett-p-serviss/the-sky-pirate/e...

Agentlien• 5 years ago

Thank you for sharing this, it was a fun comment to read. The effort itself is commendable and I understand why you would leave the remaining work for others.

For some reason the prose reminds me of Allan Quatermain, which was a book I just couldn't get through.

Animats3• 5 years ago

Correction. "1897 War of the Worlds".

yreg2• 5 years ago

There is something magical about these massively multiplayer Google sheets where a large amount of strangers collaborates on the same goal without outside communication.

I've experienced it when Eliezer Yudkowsky — after several books of content — put the hero of his story in a nearly impossible situation to get out of. He challenged his readers to find a solution within 60 hours otherwise they get the bad ending.

Observing the organic collection, deduplication and rating of ideas in the sheet was an interesting experience.

[0] HPMOR (the story) — http://www.hpmor.com/

[1] Final Exam (the chapter with the assignment) - http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/113

[2] The Spreadsheet – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17-zbmElKXWv9nqcsDzop...

ralfd• 5 years ago

Something with a carbon string cutting heads off was the solution, right? (Why though, I don't recall the setup for this magical solution).

yreg2• 5 years ago

Yes, the canon solution was a (partial) transfiguration attack which was submitted in 36 flavours (deduplicated as "string through air").

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

BookStory is written in Visual Basic 5, a programming language developed by Microsoft in the mid-90s. I econstituted the .exe file’s machine-only instructions into human-readable source code with the help of a decompilation tool

Because these were not machine instructions, that was virtual machine code. VB always was kind of like Java.

I figured I’d need a copy of Visual Studio 97, the original software used to write it. I replied to my tweet seeking a copy and a kind, pseudonymous internet stranger sent one. Surprisingly, it installed and ran successfully on Windows 10.

I wonder if it could actually fit in an Excel file - all versions of MS Excel (I didn't check 2019 and 365) include a seemingly untouched VB5 IDE letting you embed VB code within your spreadsheets.

ngcc_hk3• 5 years ago

Such a lovely story. So great.

shasheene2• 5 years ago

For translation, using a Weblate instance makes a lot more sense over using Google Sheets https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate

hosted.weblate.org is only free for open-source projects, but it shouldn't be hard to find alternative hosting, or launch a Docker container in the cloud??

jka2• 5 years ago

The key is probably to make the community onboarding and experience as easy as possible, to allow for spontaneous community translation projects like the one in the article.

It's nice to see that the Weblate project itself provides some guidance (and checklists) around community-building: https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-4.6.2/devel/community.ht...

(perhaps expanding that could be one meta-method for improving the accessibility and suitability of Weblate for situations like this. agree that hosting -- or having something available online that works already -- can often be an obstacle to adoption too)

shasheene2• 5 years ago

Weblate allows anonymous translation suggestions (to accept a suggestion you have to be logged in though).

I'm not associated, I just use it for a personal project and find it great. Not perfect, but still great.

nottorp• 5 years ago

Doesn't stuff like this infringe on 30 million intellectual property laws and is punishable by death in the US?

butz2• 5 years ago

Considering that some reverse engineering projects have received DMCAs on GitHub, it would be better to publish only a patch file, not full game, even if it is freeware.

joelburget• 5 years ago

For those looking to run this on a Mac, the following seems to have worked for me (M1, Big Sur 11.2.3):

``` brew tap gcenx/wine brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine-crossover brew install winetricks winetricks corefonts vcrun6 vb5run native_oleaut32 vcrun2010 richtx32 comdlg32 comctl32ocx wine BookStory_en.exe ```

xkeysc0re3• 5 years ago

Oh sweet - thanks for this. I will add it to the README

butz2• 5 years ago

And here's what happens when one uses Google Translate to translate a video game: https://legendsoflocalization.com/funky-fantasy-iv/

Japanese bookstore simulator translated into English after 24 years

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