Dead of the Brain - English translation v1.0 by Retronomicon
Addendum patch by BabaJeanmel

THE STORY SO FAR

Back in 2019, a romhacker called Retronomicon opened a patreon and offered some PC-98 game translations to download for free on it. They worked at a very fast pace, releasing one pre-patched english game per month. However, after a handful of them were released, it turned out these translations were basically edited MTL, with a lot of liberties taken here and there, not to mention a fair share of gross mistranlations. As for the hacking, it's safe to assume it was really quick and mostly untested, as some games were unplayable on real hardware while others had derps of various seriousness (some were unfortunately game-breaking).

Even if the patches were free, the fact that Retronomicon made donations possible raised some controversy and most of all, scam accusations. So Retronomicon first tried defend themselves arguing that the games were shit and didn't deserved an accurate translation in the first place, before closing their patreon page and vanishing from the surface of the web.

"Dead of the Brain" was Retronomicon's first project, and probably the "least worst" of the bunch. However, it had its share of bugs. This addendum patch collects fixes made by others along with some I made myself to make this mess finally playable and editable (see below) in all its infamous glory !

PATCH GOALS AND CONTENTS

I've bothered with this mostly to take a peek at the edited files's structure, for educational purposes (I'd like to work on some games made with the same ADV97 engine in the future). So I don't take any responsability for the un-acurateness of the script. If you don't like the script (and you have all the right in the world to do so) just play the game in Japanese if you can or wait for someone else to retranslate it. Otherwise, it's your only option, so sorry if you're really desperate about playing it. Just to make things clear, I don't plan * at all * to retranslate it.

Here are the proper credits :
- HDI conversion was figured out by cuba200611 on the PC-98 Discord ;
- The broken 000027.MES that was circulating in some premade images (maybe the original, I haven't checked) and contained some game-breaking bugs has been fixed by thepirategamerboy12 ;
- I hex-edited myself the two other corrupted .MES files (000030.MES and 000047.MES) that displayed garbled characters at a couple places, and edited a few goofs in the OOOOOO.MES file using tomyun's awesome "juice" tool. 

HOW TO

Just put the four disk images from the Neo Kobe version ("Dead of the Brain [FD].zip", in the "Fairytale" directory) in the same directory as the patch, then run "patch.bat". You'll end up with a fully bootable HDI file.

NOTE FOR ROMHACKERS

With the fixes made to the .MES files, you can now fully decompress and recompress them using the latest version of juice. Can be interesting in a learning standpoint. You'll notice a few things ; first, half-width characters can only be displayed with the (str) bracket, but most punctuation marks, along with line breaks can only be declared in (text) brackets, so both are used to allow the text to be fully displayed.

Retronomicon changed the text's display speed and removed most of the pause calls. So everything displays instantly in their version while the original one often had multiple pauses in the same sentence.

I've taken a peek at the x68k version for reference ; (exec-mem) brackets have different values so the .MES files can't just be dropped into the x68k hdf. They can be easily ported, though, by removing the (mouse) calls and ajusting the (exec-mem) ones to comply with the x686k structure. Strangely, if you try to insert the english text in its current form inside the x68k files, animations only play after the text, not at the same time like in the PC-98 version (so lips movements are totally out of sync most of the time). I believe there's a difference somewhere in the calls, but I have not investigated yet.