Dragon Quest IV
What this is
A ground-up English translation of the 1997 PlayStation remake of Dragon Quest IV, the version with the added prologue, party chat and Immigrant Town, which has never had an English release on any console.
It runs on the game's own Japanese engine. Nothing is grafted in from another title and no other game's executable is involved. The text is re-encoded in place, in the format the disc already uses, and every claim the tooling relies on is checked against a real disc before a build ships.
Every line is written from the Japanese. Existing localizations are consulted the way a translator consults prior art, never copied.
Status
| Prologue | translated and playable |
| Chapters 1 to 3 | in progress |
| Menus and items | translated |
| Name entry | Latin grid, working |
| Release | no date |
There is no estimate and there will not be one until it is close. The script is large and the work is done in the evenings.
Screenshots
The tooling
github.com/RadMageIRL/DQIV_PSX_TOOLS
The reverse engineering library this translation is built with, public under MIT. Twenty one modules, standard library only, no dependencies.
It opens the disc image and walks its filesystem, scans the archive container and censuses its sub-blocks, parses the text headers, and decodes and re-encodes the per-block Huffman trees. It expands the phrase dictionaries, handles both directions of the LZSS compression, reconstructs both font tables from the executable, and reads the glyph atlas.
It also finds every pointer into a string, which is the part that decides whether a rebuilt block renders or hangs. Some references are stored as a single word. Others are built across two instructions and no word scan can see them. Others again live inside compressed MIPS overlays. There is a module for each.
On the writing side it rebuilds a disc in place, recalculates the sector checksums, and refuses to write at all if the sector table would come out wrong.
Built on documentation published by Markus Schroeder and on Mandy Wilkens's control code work.
Distribution
- No game data is distributed here or anywhere else.
- The release will be a patch applied to a disc image you already own.
- Nothing is for sale and nothing is asked for.