IMPORTANT, BE SURE TO READ THIS!!!
The game has some internal bugs that causes it to crash in certain spots.
One that most of you could encounter will happen if you try to sell Atom Gun or probably any other weapon if you have it equipped, or when you don’t have any other weapon – the game will crash after you exit the store.
We tried to fix this bug, but a few months later during the testing we discovered that it messed up the game even more, so we just left it as is for now.
Other two known bugs happen at random, no definitive pattern to cause them that we know of. One will happen if you use Decoy Flares in kinda the same way it happens in Star Cruiser 2. I guess they just liked this bug too much so they ported it over to the later game?
The other could happen if you visit Gabby Todd’s house, better save before that, just in case.
There could be some other places with such crashes, mind you. So save often, especially since the game allows to do that in any place you want.
We’ll probably fix these bugs sometime later, but for now we decided to release the translation as it was already delayed beyond any sane limits and, honestly, these weren’t “our” bugs to begin with, those were present in the game originally.
If someone else would like to give us a hand to fix them – please contact me (celcion) via the email down below. Thanks.
Foreword
Hello, everyone,
After the completion of Star Cruiser 2, we came up with an idea to also translate one of the PC versions of the game, to see whether there are any differences – and there sure are quite a few.
This port is more similar to Star Cruiser 2 in some regards, whereas in some others it’s a far cry from it. Either way, we hope that you enjoy it!
Game description
The game involves the exploration of four solar systems with over 30 planets and dozens of characters.
It is viewed entirely from a first-person perspective, with 3D polygon graphics used to represent outdoor environments, trees, benches, buildings, and other objects, as well as enemies. The gameplay can vary depending on the environment.
In a city, the player character can move around town and enter various buildings to interact with non-player characters, who are represented with an anime-like appearance, or leave the city and go into outer space.
When the player goes into outer space, they can fly to other planets, moving around in free flight, but occasionally encountering enemies and engaging in space combat. There is an autopilot feature available, setting the spacecraft to automatically go to a set destination, but the player may still encounter enemies along the way.
There is also a warp feature available, allowing the player to warp to different locations, but this requires energy. On various planet surfaces, the player will explore enemy bases and combat enemies on the ground. At enemy bases, the game plays like a first-person shooter, exploring a dungeon while moving, strafing and shooting enemies in a first-person perspective. Enemy bases usually need to be cleared by finding hidden keys, unlocking doors and finding key items and objects.
In this version, there is some grinding for money involved, since you need to buy everything, as opposed to the Mega Drive port. This version also features better/different graphics/character portraits, some different songs, and also – different characters and plot events.
As such, it could be said that this version is pretty much its own thing. It is much more similar to the original PC88 port as well, when it comes to plot/characters.
Another big change are the invisible walls – there are quite a few of them here, and you’ll need a wall sensor to get through some parts.
Some sections are also much longer in this version than in the MD version, especially the VOID Battleship, which is a huge, multi-level dungeon that could take more than 4 hours to finish.
The plot itself was quite inventive for its time, featuring many twists and turns, interesting characters and some funny dialogues in places.
Overall, it was quite an achievement for its time, which is why we set out to translate it in the first place.
Translation notes
This game wasn’t particularly challenging to translate, considering that we had already dealt with the Mega Drive version a few years back. There are some differences, for example Daigo Hidari instead of Daigo Sakai (same for Yuko), some items having somewhat different names and such.
Interestingly, this game also features a somewhat smaller, more concise script compared to the MD port.
This game doesn’t have many of the characters and enemies that were added in the MD version. Namely, Dave, Jack or Talin.
Now, this is a very important point to make – we actually rewrote a lot of dialogues to make them more interesting to read and make much more sense that it originally did.
So if you’re a translation purist who doesn’t accept any changes to the source material, chances are you won’t like this translation.
It’s still pretty close to the original, just more so in the spirit of our Star Cruiser 2 translation.
What we did was basically to try to approximate the dialogues while giving each of the characters a unique personality (as far as it was possible, especially Brian and Daniel).
The whole process was arduous, but also rather fun at the same time! We’d also like to thank Blomman for his helpful suggestions regarding many of the lines.
It’s also important to note that we left the Japanese “Star Cruiser” title screen untranslated because there’s not enough documentation on X68000 graphics and it’s kinda difficult to work blindly with it.
It doesn’t matter too much IMO, but since it’s not translated – the translation version is 0.99, meaning it’s a 99% translation.
Hacking notes
Translation work on this game actually started even before Star Cruiser for MD, our first translation. So, you could say that it’s technically our first project.
Or my (celcion’s) project, whatever. It happened just because it was pretty simple to dump its text that I needed in order to translate what’s going on in the game and dialogues.
But since I had subsequently tried MD version and liked it much more, and also because multi-jointed lines were a pain to piece together and translate, I scrapped it.
A few months later when some of our translations came out and people began to ask us about X68000 version of Star Cruiser, I decided to look at it once again and this time I actually got somewhere since I discovered and parsed events file and found a way to piece together all the multi-jointed lines of the dialogues.
The dialogue file itself had 2-byte pointers which effectively limited it to 65KB and since original file was already 53KB, it didn’t give us a whole lot space to work with.
I added a pretty ugly hack that the MD version also used – a check for a line number that added 0x10000 to line offset, assuming the string was bigger than this number, which in turn gave us 128KB, but there were some other problems – full-width (16×16 pixels) fonts, especially in the menu, all the text outside dialogues was unmanageable, dialogue text scrolling was painfully slow, etc, etc. We made an initial translation of the dialogues and inserted them in the game, it was even playable somewhat, but overall it was barely anything that people would like to play. Since we had some other projects to do at the moment, I decided to postpone it once again.
Fast-forward 1.5 years, late 2018. Out of curiosity I decided to just play the game, because I initially felt kinda bad about it, as it was very grindy and not very well put together overall.
But I was actually wrong – the game wasn’t so bad and it grew up on me big time. I mean, it was still a lackluster experience, but not nearly as crappy as I had previously thought. That pushed me to try hacking it once again, especially since I got some additional experience during the time I’d spent on the other projects. The first thing I really wanted to solve was making it function with half-width fonts.
It didn’t work the same way as in the case of PC-98 (non-standard 0x85xx codes), so I wasn’t sure that x68000 font ROM contains 8×16 ASCII. But it actually did have them, only called differently (0x80xx).
After that I fully (well, “mostly” would be a better term) deciphered events file making it possible to have better control over everything happening in the dialogues, even adding or removing dialogue lines which we subsequently used.
I also used a simple dictionary text compression method I created for Game of Life RPG which allowed to keep the translated text within original 65K boundaries without using ugly hacks.
These developments propelled the work to a very active stage, everything needed to work was finished in just two months, after which we started to gradually play through the game and updated the dialogues.
This was the most time-consuming task, but not because of manual text adjusting that I did with Star Cruiser 2 (event file parsing allowed to create a fully automated text adjustment), but because we had to rewrite most of original game text.
Disclaimer
This translation is a non-commercial and unofficial project which is in no way affiliated with the game creators or distributors. We don’t own anything here and have no copyrights.
You can redistribute this translation freely as long as you don’t ask money for it and include this readme.txt file with it. We don’t condone any form of commercial redistribution. Please, keep that in mind.
Staff and special thanks
- cccmar – translation, proofreading, editing, initial beta-testing
- celcion – hacking, translation editing
- TheMajinZenki – manual translation
- Miralita – game patcher utility, manual editing
- Spolan, Blomman – beta-testing
Special thanks to:
- Great guys from RHDN and Sega-16 forums.
Contact
Celcion
email: celcion@gmail.com
cccmar
email: cccmar111@gmail.com
Downloads
Patch
Game Manual
Additional info
Since this game is VERY dependent on money – which makes it a grindy hell in some places (especially at the start of the game) – we added a small cheat that you can use to add yourself some quick bucks.
When the game starts and you see your starship remains – check them two times and you’ll have your standard 1000 bucks that the game originally gives you for that, but check it some more times – and you’ll get 100K bucks and will give them to you each subsequent time! Spend it wisely! 😉