Those of you who follow me on Twitter have known about this for a while, but today I´m making it official: Dark Half is now an Aeon Genesis translation. This is actually a semi-continuation of the work done by SirYoink on the game over the last fifteen years or so; while I´ve completely redone the hacking, the script translation is (roughly) the same and was done by the same person, Eien ni Hen. And yes, the script translation is both done and well-written, so no need for a lengthy editing process.

Dark Half is an interesting beast. On a hacking difficulty scale from 1 to 10 I´d probably rate it about a 6 or 7. The graphics compression is kind of weird and nasty, requiring a creative workaround, and the script has a lot of complicated flow-control embedded in it. That said it isn´t anything I haven´t dealt with before, and it´s handled. The remaining issues will hopefully be fairly simple; they have been so far. The game gets more and more stable every day. It´s not going to be ready next week, but I´m cautiously optimistic that it´ll be done before summer.

Okay, i'm so excited about this, the other translation that was released had so much wrong with it but I still enjoyed what I could with it. NOW! you guys have taken on this project we are gonna finally get a version to play that will blow us out of the water, I can't wait.. grtz guys for picking this up.

This now leaves me with one question.. what's happening to all your other 32 games you have in the translation list?

I'm sry to ask that question but i'm SURE i'm not the only one who visits this site everyday to see if there's news updates on the translations being done in your list.. it just seems updates/news for these are very far and few.

Dark Half is a bit of a special case. This was a project I was actively following back when I first started, and one of the ones I most wanted to see done. When Eien ni Hen talked about it on the Romhacking Histories podcast, given the stuff she's done for AGTP in the past and how SirYoink's Dark Half project had sort of stalled, I figured I'd look into it and if it was an easy enough project I'd offer my services. It's by no means a simple game to work with, but compared to a lot of the other stuff on my list it qualifies as low-hanging fruit.

For the rest, the short version is "life intrudes." I'm working an average of 50 hours a week, some of which happen in the middle of my "time off" each weekday evening and effectively prevent me from doing anything that takes more than 30-60 minutes. If I'm going to sit down and work on a project I usually need to block off a couple of hours - if not an entire afternoon and evening - to tackle some of the more complicated problems (like SMT if...'s currently broken shops, or Romancing SaGa 2's font problems.) This means sacrificing sleep (on weeknights) or valuable weekend time. I do this on occasion, but with a dearth of available time, it's easy to get frustrated.

I should note that this is *not* affecting SRW Alpha. There are still a few editors working on the second pass of the script, and for the moment that's largely out of my hands. Nor does it mean that I'm giving up on stuff, it's just going to take longer than it used to when time was plentiful. And again, Dark Half is comparatively low-hanging fruit.

Yeah, I gathered that was the case.. real life issues always gets in the way :( but in any case the work you guys do in your spare time is always appreciated and of top quality work. Well.. I look forward to replaying Dark Half again, good luck in getting this project finished.

The news made me smile! Hooray!

It's one of those few projects I'm waiting for so long.

Thank you for spending your precious time on this one. Kudos to Eien ni Hen too.

This looks cool!

Oh, some Japanese streamers played this game a year or two ago and I remember watching it a lot. If I recall correctly, there was always the howling of monsters when you entered a battle...sounded fun to imitate.

I'm not really waiting for this, but I thank you for your dedication and time.