Finding the right resources (translation project)

[Bolkonskij]

Hi everyone,

the other day I was looking for software for my kids to play on our family's LC. Monkey Island came to mind. Unfortunately, it was only ever released in English - which my kids don't speak (yet).

So why not grab ResEdit and translate the game? There's a good translated script out on the internet, so it's just some copy & pasting into the various STR, DLOG etc. resources.

Or so I thought.

I've taken the first download from the Mac Garden MI site. Comes with three files. MONKEY1.000, MONKEY1.001 and Monkey Island. The first two do not seem to have a resource fork, which leaves only the application itself for Resediting.

Upon inspecting the resources I find MENU and DLOG .. but no STR resource. Yet, the game has tons of strings as the characters ingame talk a lot. I wonder where the developers hid them. Same with the images of the scenery, characters etc.

While there is a STRS resource, it only seems to cover error msgs.

- Does that mean the developers did not adhere to Mac programming standards and hard-coded  stuff like dialogs into the source?
- Was there a way to make certain resources "invisible" to resedit?

Anyone who can help out here?

[Protools5LEGuy]

I would try also with a bigger machine and ScummVM https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/

There is a ScummVM Mac OS 9 version, but archaic.

The interesting version is the CD-ROM one with enhaced graphics and audio, IIRC

I had played it with Spanish subtitles decades ago on Windows and now make it on a iMac G3 with Mac OS 9.

Search here if there is a German/French international version here https://archive.org/search.php?query=Monkey%20Island

[Bolkonskij]

Thanks for the reply!

My kids have the LC for playing games and learning "to compute" and I don't want to change that for the forseeable future.

My question is more about the programming aspect behind it. The extensive dialogs in the game should be a considerable number of strings that need to be stored somewhere. IIRC Apple suggested storing such information in a STR resource in the resource fork of the app. Which the makers obviously did not. Thus I'm wondering how the makers made it work.

Does anyone know if there's a useful de-compiler for Mac OS?

[IIO]

you can put it into a STR resource but i am not sure if that is what you would prefer to do in a database kind of thing.

have you tried searching in the data fork already? the text you can see ingame is most likely not encrypted or compressed in any way and you should find matches when you search in either ASCII or binary representation.

[Bolkonskij]

Yeah, searched the CODE, DATA whatever fork. I came to the conclusion that they took a "DOS-like" approach and put the stuff into the accompanying files named MONKEY1.000 and MONKEY1.001. Obviously that content gets imported into the app upon startup and contains the stuff. Both do not have resource forks and a hexedit just brings up garbled-text on both. So there's probably some kind of routine in the main app that interprets that stuff created by whatever internal tool they were using for text/graphics. (correct me if I'm wrong on this one)

I suppose this one is just not possible to translate. Bummer.