Video games in China

[Quifore]

I believe video games in China today are translated into Chinese, but how was this 10-15 years ago? Was it even possible for a NES or an old gameboy to process the thousands of Chinese characters needed? In many games, you get the option to name your character; how is this done? I know that in Japan, where the Nintendo originated, they simply wrote the games in pure Hiragana/Katakana (and they still do, at least for the Nintendo DS). Here in Norway, almost all video games are in English. I don't think any of those would be an option for China, as Pinyin looks ugly and is ambiguous, and Chinese kids understand very little English.

Looking forward to your replies.

[imron]

They didn't need to process that many. The number of unique characters used for each game would actually have been quite low, and processing them is not really much of an issue (the bigger issue is storage for the font). I think writing the game in pure Hiragana/Katakana is maybe more a feature of the age group that the games are targetted at rather than a system limitation.

[Outofin]

In many games, you get the option to name your character; how is this done?

I had a unfortunate story long long ago that exactly answers your question. Digging it up:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.php?p=140108&postcount=4

"In those years, PC games didn’t allow you to input Chinese. They only gave some Chinese characters for you to select, which sometimes were very limited."

[waixingren]

It's funny you mention about old NES/SNES games. I still see people here in china playing those types of games. Gameboy, and GBA games are also still popular. I was in a shopping center the other day and saw a woman selling what looked like a white sega genesis. the Carts had 52 games on them. the graphics looked 16bit.

I know lots of Japanese and English language games are sold in China even if the people buying them don't understand Japanese or English. I think cause they are cheaper than translated ones. the people playing them can go on the internet and get game manuals for the game in chinese (written by other chinese game players). Much like the english manuals you can get at gamesfaq.com etc.

As for translating the games. it's not so much a font thing as it is an issue with pixel space when the text is displayed. it's no different then drawing the letter in say photoshop.

I saw there is a company that is making NEW games for the Sega Genesis. its a taiwan company that is translating the games into english (the games were actually made for the Chinese market in the early 1990s) The company is putting them on Genesis carts and selling them for around 30US. all are RPGs. So far they have two games made. One of them is Journey to the West

[imron]

Oh it's definitely a font thing. Pixel space can usually be adjusted, but available RAM usually can't. Compare the size requirements of a 40 character bitmapped font (26 letters, plus a bunch of punctuation and symbols) to the size required for a 4,000 character bitmapped font (or even a 2,000 character or 1,000 character font). For game systems which run under pretty strict memory limitations both in terms of RAM and long-term storage, it's a big factor (it's much less of a factor for more modern machines due to large increases in RAM and storage).

For example, let's say you've got a 10x10 bitmapped font, with 1 bit per pixel (0 - for transparent, 1 for visible). That gives you 100 bits, or 12.5 bytes per character. A 40 character font takes up 500 bytes. A 1,000 character font takes up 12,500. Now consider the available memory on the NES:

The NES contains 2 KB of onboard work RAM. A game cartridge may contain expanded RAM to increase this amount. It also has 2 KB of video RAM for the use of the picture processing unit (PPU), 256 bytes of sprite RAM and some palette RAM. The system supports up to 32 KB of program ROM at a time, but this can be expanded by orders of magnitude by the process of bank switching. Additionally, cartridges may contain 8 KB of SRAM and 8,168 bytes (nearly 8 KB) of address space reserved as "Expansion Area." Expanded Video memory (VROM or VRAM) may also be available on the cartridge. (on-cartridge mapping hardware also allowing further Video expansion past 12 KB) [39]

So Chinese font with pretty crappy resolution (only 10x10 per character) and that provides a bare minimum of characters (1,000) poses a huge drain on limited system resources compared to an alphabet based font.

[flywhc]

Font is not a problem. There were plenty of NES clones that even can work with word processor or spreadsheet in Chinese, they are usually called Learning Machine (学习机).

you can search 小霸王 or 步步高 which are famous brands. Also some pocket e-Dictionary also use similar hardware as NES such as 文曲星.

Early 1990s, Chinese font had minimum size of 16x16 pixels, which is 16X16/8 = 32 bytes each character. GB2312 char set defined about 6700 characters, which is below 220KB. The minimum size is 8x8 in the latest windows now.

As you wrote, Each ROM page has 32K, which need 7 pages of ROM. In reality, it needs 14 pages because lower 16K is reserved for display functions. Using compression algorithms will even reduce ROM size more.

When displaying a character on the screen, program just loads the font for that character into display memory, doesn't cost memory.

For a game actually needs much less ROM. A typical RPG game uses less than 500 characters, an action game maybe only need less than 100 characters. Those games will use a mapping table, or a non-standard char set.

Display speed might be slow but combining with scrolling effect it looks not bad at all.

When I was in high school, I wrote a program that produces a small program that display max. 64 characters in clean English DOS system by replace standard system ASCII display font. Size of program is only about 2KB. If we need to show more than 64 character, it shows "press any key to see next page." then it loads another 2KB fonts and refresh the screen. NES screen resolution is 256x224, only can display 16 characters in a row.

In fact, there wasn't many (or any?) Chinese console game at that time. Until recently China wasn't considered as valuable market for Video games. Most young kids like me had to learn some English or Japanese from game magazines and play pirate games at that time. It wasn't hard to understand UP DOWN, KO, VS, Finished, you win, you lost etc. Nobody care about Super Mario's speech anyway.

Japanese RPG game often use a lot of Kanji, which helps a lot.

Some Taiwanese companies translated many English and Japanese PC games to Chinese. PC has at least 640KB memory and massive hard drive space. In order to translate a DOS game, they had to purchase source code, at least development kit from the original manufacture, which is not worthy for NES games. Then they added display module with fonts, using paging technique I mentioned if the memory is limited.

[BrandeX]

Whenever I peek at someones PSP it's a game almost always in Japanese. I have gotten the impression that there isn't many translated, since this is the most famous country for stealing software. My PSP, along with most everyone elses likely, came already modded/hacked from the shop. I could be wrong though, there might be a bunch of chinese language games I am unfamiliar with.

[imron]

There were plenty of NES clones that even can work with word processor or spreadsheet in Chinese, they are usually called Learning Machine (学习机).

I never said it was impossible, just that font size is a consideration and that for Chinese fonts, it takes a significant amount of the memory budget compared to an alphabet.

Take a look for example at cartridge sizes of an early NES game with a later NES game:

Super Mario 1 - 320 kilobit cartridge = 40,960 bytes

Super Mario 3 - 3 megabit cartridge = 393,216 bytes

When your cartridge size has been fixed and you're trying to squeeze in game code, sprites, music and everything else, even a few 10s of KB takes a reasonable chunk of that budget. Increasing the ROM size is not necessarily viable as that adds a cost to production of the cartridge, especially given the timeframe when memory was nowhere near as cheap as it is today.

Those games will use a mapping table, or a non-standard char set.

Which exactly illustrates my point. Fonts are an issue and so the programmers actively take steps to ensure only the minimum amount of characters are used.

[flywhc]

http://www.emu618.com

超级玛利1中文版 and 火炎纹章外传中文版 etc

Try them with NES emulator

[isolde]

we have an agency in china called IQUE(神游).the government only import games like Mario bros or Yoshi island and we have maybe only 5 official ds games in chinese.

of couse that's not enough.

do u know there's some organizition or association hack the rom and translate them

into chinese for free?it's sort of illegal so they always post a reminder like"we do this as a hobby just for study not for any commercial use"or sth,so that chinese players could play games in chinese,thanks to those voluntary organizations.

i'm chinese and i love those nintendo stuff,so i was once part of those volunteers.

[mcgau]

perhaps there ain't such thing as China market for video game? The space of a cartridge was limited, but when we've passed over a lot of generations of game consoles, chinese titles has remain limited in CD- and DVD-era.

I met a manager working for Sony (SCE) in hong kong and he's complaint a lot about the pirated copies. In terms of the ownership per population, hong kong has outplaced american and japanese market for buying playstations, but the legal copy of games owned by each console owner is only 1.x , compared to 3-5 in America and Japan. Don't expect much difference in China, maybe even worse.

The efforts for translating the game doesn't pay because, according to my friends, it's a revenge for japanese and american imperialism and they would never pay a buck for it. Haha.

[isolde]

we translate for free for all gamers,because we r glad to c other people enjoy games we love.just like those who write game guide for free or add subtitle for free.

[Prodigal Son]

Most games now are still not available in Chinese. Some are, but most aren't. It's easier to add Chinese subtitles into PC games but on consoles (like XBox 360 and PS3), not many games have Chinese subtitles. If they do, they're in traditional Chinese and they're translated for Taiwan or Hong Kong. It sucks for a lot of gamers in China, big games like Final Fantasy XIII won't be available in Chinese for years, if ever.

Edited January 18, 2010 at 01:08 AM by roddy

[BrandeX]

Everyone already played them in English or Japanese anyways, pirated. There is little to no money in software in China.

[Prodigal Son]

Chinese people just play games having no idea what's actually going on. My roommate just finished Assassin's Creed 2 on XBox 360 (which took, like 25 hours) and every nuance of the story went over his head. That must really suck.

[BrandeX]

One of my Korean students was playing his PSP last night and I was checking it out. I asked him if he understood Japanese (all his games were JAP region) and he said no. I inquired why he didn't have the English versions instead then since he has decent proficiency in English. He claimed to have gotten all of the games (pirated) from a local shop, and apparently they use Japanese since you can sometimes match up meaning by looking at characters. (Kanji/Hanzhi). I suggested he look to the internet instead for his pirated software (in English) instead of paying a few kuai to a shop that just stole them anyways.

[xiaocai]

Chinese people just play games having no idea what's actually going on. My roommate just finished Assassin's Creed 2 on XBox 360 (which took, like 25 hours) and every nuance of the story went over his head. That must really suck.

Some Chinese gamers do understand English and/or Japanese.

[clevermae]

A few years ago, my brothers were crazy over Dragon Quest (the earlier version), and everything was in Japanese. It always made me wonder how they enjoyed playing the game and how they endured playing it when neither of them can understand Japanese. So I guess when you really are serious about playing a certain game, you can eventually learn how things work by matching characters or something, even if you really don't understand it in its entirety.

[eatfastnoodle]

Dude, you know how average American teenagers are like, if video game involves large amount of reading, it would have been dismissed as "boring" and never would have become so popular. How many English words are really required to play a game? Not that much if my experience serves me right. Also you do know English is mandatory in Chinese schools, do you? Granted, that has nothing to do with how well Chinese kids speak English (IMHO, not very well, not very well at all, even people I met in the states who had been living in the states for years speak and write English so amateurely that they sound almost comical, it's bad, but it's irrelevant to game play.), but you don't need to be a language genius to use a dictionary to figure out the meaning of the few words that you encounter in your game play, elementary school kids can do that. Not to mention as far as I know, people can just play the games and learn whatever words popped up in the process, again, with that much contextual information in a game, it doesn't take much play-around to make a correct guess.

[chrix]

eatfastnoodle, have you actually ever tried playing a RPG in a language you don't understand? How did that guessing technique work out for you?