Sangokushi Taisen Ten - English translation by pakoito

[regnor]

RPGCodex user pakoito has created an English patch for Chinese Three Kingdoms era strategy game Sangokushi Taisen Ten developed by SEGA for the Nintendo DS.

TaisenFan

Guides, game data, and English translation patches for Sangokushi Taisen Ten (三国志大戦DS).

pakoito.github.io

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/sangokushi-taisen-the-jrtt-phenomenon-that-never-reached-the-west.150174/

The patch seems to work but unfortunately when I play the game on an R4 or 3DS Twilight Menu, it get stuck on a white screen after clearing a battle. Anyone else have any luck with the patched game?

 

[RageBurner]

I tested it, and it is indeed crashing. I wonder if the patch was perhaps made based on a bad dump. Also, the font needs a lot of work; readability is awful.

 

[regnor]

The font looks decent on the 3DS. Also I think the game maybe needs an AP Patch. On MelonDS the game also crashes sadly.

Post automatically merged: May 2, 2026

Update: DeSume also does not work

 

[Otosou]

Hmm, I think it's an AP thing. I would love to play this with my N3DS via Twilight++. Let's see if there's an ap patch somewhere...

 

[regnor]

I'm not sure if it's AP related. The unpatched version of the game actually does not have the white screen problem. I just tested it.

 

[RageBurner]

If the unpatched game works, it's something the patch introduced. Hopefully the author will address this and recruit help to also translate the metric ton of graphical text that exists.

 

[regnor]

Yes...I'm going to try and contact him.

 

[RageBurner]

Yes...I'm going to try and contact him.

One this progresses sufficiently, I'll be glad to add it here.

 

[pakoito]

Hello! I did introduce the crash along the way. I have a very comprehensive tooling, plus it's all on git, so it'll be easy to bisect. I only need time, which I won't have until the end of this month.

This was far from a trivial string replacement project. I've had to patch a ton of assets and rendering paths to make it work with decent text layouts and without crashing. Things like ascii glyphs not working due to ShiftJIS encoding, or the character n not rendering in certain screens because the detection of \n was broken but there was no English text in the original to trigger the bug.

There's a whole-ass Visual Novel scripting engine inside it I've had to reverse-engineer I don't even want to talk about.

If you believe the patched font is bad you should have seen the original, although I'm open to suggestions of open pixel fonts, I have tools to easily replace it. Another problem was that the backgrounds of the textboxes were almost white because the Japanese characters came with drop shadow that doesn't work on the ASCII ones.

As for the assets to be translated, it's all extracted but I don't have the time to redo them. I didn't believe anyone cared enough to help, so I limited myself to actual in-game text. If anyone offers, I'm happy to sling some pngs their way :D

 

[RageBurner]

Hello! I did introduce the crash along the way. I have a very comprehensive tooling, plus it's all on git, so it'll be easy to bisect. I only need time, which I won't have until the end of this month.

This was far from a trivial string replacement project. I've had to patch a ton of assets and rendering paths to make it work with decent text layouts and without crashing. Things like ascii glyphs not working due to ShiftJIS encoding, or the character n not rendering in certain screens because the detection of \n was broken but there was no English text in the original to trigger the bug.

There's a whole-ass Visual Novel scripting engine inside it I've had to reverse-engineer I don't even want to talk about.

If you believe the patched font is bad you should have seen the original, although I'm open to suggestions of open pixel fonts, I have tools to easily replace it. Another problem was that the backgrounds of the textboxes were almost white because the Japanese characters came with drop shadow that doesn't work on the ASCII ones.

As for the assets to be translated, it's all extracted but I don't have the time to redo them. I didn't believe anyone cared enough to help, so I limited myself to actual in-game text. If anyone offers, I'm happy to sling some pngs their way :D

Hope you find the help you need! did you post at RHDN?

 

[pakoito]

Hope you find the help you need! did you post at RHDN?

I wanted to have the project stable and for the website to be polished first. Also publish some articles about all the different steps because trust me, I'm a very very senior engineer and still it's been a trip and a half.

 

[RageBurner]

I wanted to have the project stable and for the website to be polished first. Also publish some articles about all the different steps because trust me, I'm a very very senior engineer and still it's been a trip and a half.

You must be dealing with some serious spaghetti coding, there. I wish you the best of luck untangling this mess; please, keep us posted here, if you can.

 

[Warden22]

Hello is this fully translated?

 

[RageBurner]

Hello is this fully translated?

Not yet.

 

[pakoito]

The fixed patch is up, and I'm cleaning up the guides a bit as I write this.

I have found a few minutes to debug the problem, it was a custom parser I'd replaced with a generic one that wasn't reading floats correctly.

I'm open to suggestions for pixel fonts. The one I'm using, Soft Square Cakes, is the best I could find in my collection that I had a license for. It has to be ~ 6x9 px adv 5 monospaced because kerning code is all effed up to support ASCII.

Hello is this fully translated?

All the game strings are, the assets aren't and that's why I've written supplemental guides on the website, plus the in-game glossary. It's very playable once you do the tutorials.

 

[RageBurner]

The fixed patch is up, and I'm cleaning up the guides a bit as I write this.

I have found a few minutes to debug the problem, it was a custom parser I'd replaced with a generic one that wasn't reading floats correctly.

I'm open to suggestions for pixel fonts. The one I'm using, Soft Square Cakes, is the best I could find in my collection that I had a license for. It has to be ~ 6x9 px adv 5 monospaced because kerning code is all effed up to support ASCII.


All the game strings are, the assets aren't and that's why I've written supplemental guides on the website, plus the in-game glossary. It's very playable once you do the tutorials.

Your dedication is incredible! would it be possible to change the color of dialogue boxes? that could potentially improve readability without the font changing, necessarily.

 

[pakoito]

Your dedication is incredible! would it be possible to change the color of dialogue boxes? that could potentially improve readability without the font changing, necessarily.

Let me show you the original background and font:

And the fix I applied:

The font is thicker and the contrast is better, otherwise the game would be unreadable. And I kept the same palette for the menus with dark font for consistency.

The target color is hardcoded and it tints the rest of the asset calculating the deltas. I ran a bunch of experiments against the other backgrounds to pick a color that worked on dark and light backgrounds and text while maintaining the parchment vibe.

EDIT: Original font, tinted background. The drop shadow is a mess, most characters are 1 pixel wide and curves in `8`, `s` or `a` are barely legible. There's no color combination to fix that.

 

[RageBurner]

It looks much, much better!

 

[regnor]

Thanks for the update! Can confirm I got through the tutorial.

 

[pakoito]

The website now has a savegame editor, and I've done a cleanup pass on the guides.

I'm almost happy with the current state. A couple of tweaks here and there and I can say we're in RC1 :)

I have built a tool for agents to test NDS games, which was the biggest and stupidest timesink for me. So finding bugs and improvements should be much more straightforward now.

https://github.com/pakoito/agent-desmume

 

[regnor]

Fixed!

 

[regnor]

The website now has a savegame editor, and I've done a cleanup pass on the guides.

I'm almost happy with the current state. A couple of tweaks here and there and I can say we're in RC1 :)

I have built a tool for agents to test NDS games, which was the biggest and stupidest timesink for me. So finding bugs and improvements should be much more straightforward now.

https://github.com/pakoito/agent-desmume

I've been succesfully playing Conquest a bit. Tough game! I was wondering to which degree you are planning to translate names and skills in the game (names especially). It can be difficult to search for the details of a unit on the Wiki at the moment.

 

[pakoito]

I've been succesfully playing Conquest a bit. Tough game! I was wondering to which degree you are planning to translate names and skills in the game (names especially). It can be difficult to search for the details of a unit on the Wiki at the moment.

I didn't have translating name assets in my plans because you're limited to few characters, but maybe I could throw an agent at it and use initials. No promises.

Post automatically merged: May 27, 2026

I did a quick pass. Would you consider this better?

EDIT: Shipped, and skills are coming up in a few minutes.

EDIT2: Skills shipped too.

 

[pakoito]

I have translated several buttons from the CAMPAIGN mode to make it more playable. The new patch is live now.

 

[regnor]

Hello, I just saw your update. Looks great! I'll try it out.

Edit: I like it so far. Good job abbreviating the long names. It seems minor, but if the red/blue "Confirm/Cancel" buttons could be translated then that would also help. Ideally, translating anything related to the officer info/overview would make the game easier to play as well. Though given the space limitations I'm not sure how much is possible.