User blog comment:Velt211/Gakuen Drifting Story 2 Translation/@comment-31720212-20200316090122/@comment-31720212-20200428070707

Thanks to your help working out the character set, I've been able to extract Gakuen Senki's code! It definitely is a System 1 game after all.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file

There are some caveats and notes:

1. The code makes extensive use of "junk code," hoping around EOF characters multiple times per file, and sprinkling NULs everywhere. I haven't cleaned any of that up yet. Because of this issue, I haven't been able to compile the code to see if it's valid.

2. The AG00 file, which defines the verbs and objects, included some of the characters that you couldn't confirm during your experimentation because of crashes. As a result, I've had to guess at them using the MSX table you linked. Many of the results seem to be correct, but without a full understanding of Japanese and the in-game contexts, I can't be certain about them or a lot of other things.

3. The game doesn't include any Alicesoft-formated audio archives, nor does the code have any calls to use any. I assume the music is built-in to the executible. Theoretically, to run the game on a modern system, we'd have to manually implement the music at all levels, including recording the music from an emulator. You've played more than me, so maybe you can answer a quick question: does the same music track play throughout the entire game, or does it change?

4. The game uses several Z commands, which don't match the format of either of the other System 1 games that used Z commands. I'm not sure what they do at this stage. The Y commands are thankfully standard.

5. Another problem, potentially major, is that I haven't yet tested the image files to see if TTSys can view them. They certainly can't be extracted by ALDExplorer, but that's not a surprise awith an image of this vintage. If it turns out they're completely illegible, the best course of action for a theoretical localization would be to recreate the images out of screenshots from an emulator, tedious as that might be.

While I'll probably keep poking around in this, my success here makes me curious about the PC88 games, especially Rance 1 and 2. The character set used by the MSX probably doesn't work on PC88, and with no way to extract from the D88 files, I'll probably have to copy and paste hex code by hand, which runs all sorts of risks for errors. Still, now that the decompiler has code in place for single-byte character sets, a major hurdle has been cleared.

Anyways, that's what's going on.