User blog comment:Velt211/Gakuen Drifting Story 2 Translation/@comment-31720212-20200316090122/@comment-40164738-20200428104803

That's some great work, probably one of the oldest sort of relevant and most unlikely system game to get be worked on. Though this is apparently Base 2's 7th project, chances are that looking for similar UIs to this in other Base 2 team's work could lead to other early system games if there are any. However it's not like they really are related to any of their modern works at this point.

The sound and graphics thing probably isn't surprising, it only saw an MSX release so why bother making the music portable. Looking through the first few page files Championsoft games of the time seemed to prefer SCREEN 7&8. If you play it with BlueMSX you can actually see which one it uses. Here's some info on it https://www.msx.org/wiki/SCREEN.

I assume the images themselves are pretty standard for MSX, so if you could get the files out of their archives you could probably view them with some tool out there like MSX viewer 5 by marMSX (not to be confused by some other tool called MSX VIEWer which I found at some point).

As for actually playing through it, not being able to read it is kind of a hassle as with a 1 byte character set, all it will use is kana. Easier to transcribe, but completely incomprehensible for any translation tool at times. So I didn't get that far.

I'll probably try later today. I'll savestate for any music, if I manage to get through it because looking at the amount of pages, the game seems surprisingly large. Might as well keep an eye on the SCREEN, if that even would be helpful info for the CGs. I should probably just screenshot it, but if I follow a guide I'll only do the proper things and see the CGs I encounter there. It's probably wiser to have the images viewable using some tool and screenshotting them that way.

As for the PC88 games. Extracting them is probably the main problem, as no Japanese tools I've found even managed that. L3diskEX is a nice tool which could probably open them if you set it up right, as I had a few settings which nearly managed to properly display filenames. Chances are if you figure out one game's disk format, you probably got all Alicesoft PC88 games open. Though I do remember older PC88 titles (championsoft) opening just fine when I tried, probably a common format back then.