Happy (late) new year!

Dear Citizens of Monopolis,

it's been a while! Work and the "end" of Corona caused my time to reach negative values last year. But i still managed to accomplish some goals, such as

- Creating a working GitHub Actions workflow/pipeline to automatically create xDelta patches
- Adding pre-xDelta-Patch-creation checks to the pipeline, which automatically checks various Regular Expression patterns on the whole English script
- Cleaning up the whole repository
- Adding some more missing translations

Overall 2023 wasn't a great year for this translation, and i don't know how much time i will be able to invest in 2024. But even a little progress is better than nothing!

One of the great things last year was Ethanol creating a Python tool to dump and rebuild PS2 ISOs, usable through the command line. A version that i am using can be found here:

https://github.com/Risae/Growlanser-6-English-Translation/blob/main/build/03-isotool/isotool.py

This is super useful and might help other people to start reverse engineering PS2 games!

Thanks to the super programmer and creator of the emulator Duckstation, Growlanser 5 and 6 now have a custom made graphics fix

https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/9187

This fix automatically activates once you play any version of Growlanser 5 and 6. Now, As far as i know, the only thing broken in both games is upscaling. Here's hoping that in the future the PCSX2 emulator will also support this. The character models in Growlanser 5 and 6 have a lot of detail that is only visible in higher resolutions.

A lot time and effort has been invested by the PCSX2 community to improve the built-in Debugger, and i have been closely monitoring that (since it makes my life so much easier). The debugger now supports

- Subsequent searches/next scan: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10260
- Save addresses and import/export them: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10518
- And hopefully soon automatically search for .mdebug and .sndata: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10224

Recently 2 fan translations, which i have been following for some time, were finished:

- dotHack Link: https://dothacktranslate.wordpress.com/projects/hacklink-english-fan-translation/
- fate/Extra CCC: https://iwakuraproductions.wordpress.com/2023/12/08/fate-extra-ccc-english-patch-released/

Congratulations to both teams! I hope everybody will be able to enjoy those gems. And i still  hope that the teams will publish their tools - I would love to take a closer look at how fate/Extra CCC managed to handle the xboxhuge script of the game.

The Growlanser 1 translation, done by Poorchief and his team, also seems to be making progress. Here you can find a live-stream of cj iwakura playing the translation:

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZXx38OoNuYc?si=hzRj4CgH0Jz4xBNe

The spirit of fan translations has not died out, and i can't wait to see what the future holds.