Japanese ADF/TAW

DID’s Air Dominance Fighter and Total Air War.
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Krishty
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Japanese ADF/TAW

Post by Krishty »

Flight sim heritage has two amazing articles about the Japanese versions of ADF (F-22 Air Dominance Fighter 完全日本語版, “Complete Japanese Version”) and TAW.

Japanese TAW even comes with Kanji radio messages!
cockpit1.jpg
cockpit1.jpg (69.44 KiB) Viewed 2324 times
I don’t think these modifications are possible without source access, for ADF prints text using a hard-coded bitmap font that seems to be limited to 128 characters. This version was distributed by Japanese company Imagineer – which had realized the PlayStation port of TFX in 1996. It does make sense that they had source code.

I couldn’t find any ISO on the Internet Archive or anywhere else on the web. Neither could our Discord buddies.

I’ll use this thread to gather any information I can find.
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Krishty
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

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The Japanese TAW version required patches separate from the known patches for English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Luckily, the Internet Archive has archived the latest patch from 1999-02-19 (version 5.191J), for D3D as well as Glide:

taw0219dx.7z
(961.91 KiB) Downloaded 150 times
taw0219gl.7z
(961.7 KiB) Downloaded 145 times

The timestamp on the executables says they were compiled 1999-02-08 at 05:07 UTC (which would be 14:07 Japanese time).

Aside from executables, the patches contain did1st.dat files.

The 1998-12-03 hotfix is special. It is probably the smallest did1st.dat we have ever seen being shipped!

tawfix981203.7z
(969 Bytes) Downloaded 154 times
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Krishty
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

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ADF完全日本語版 also received exclusive patches. Sadly, they are in the same proprietary format as those for the other languages, so I can’t look inside without actually touching my system.

ADF完全日本語版 came in three versions: One was the “cheap” one with just an online quick reference. These are its patches (for D3D and Glide, respectively):

f22a-ed2.exe
(1.82 MiB) Downloaded 140 times
f22a-eg2.exe
(1.3 MiB) Downloaded 142 times

The other versions were Complete and Premium. They were technically identical, but one included a book. These are its patches:

f22a-jd1.exe
(1.84 MiB) Downloaded 131 times
f22a-jg1.exe
(1.34 MiB) Downloaded 138 times
mikew
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

Post by mikew »

tawfix981203 contains one file, and it's udl\f22demo.udl
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Krishty
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

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mikew wrote: 2023-Mar-16, 22:32tawfix981203 contains one file, and it's udl\f22demo.udl
… and the patch just restores it to be the same as in ADF. It’s the unit list for the first demo mission that plays.

So I guess we’ll have to wait for a Japanese TAW ISO to find out how they screwed that file up. Maybe they wanted to replace a callsign but by accident pasted the complete source code instead? 😆
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

Post by Krishty »

The boxed Japanese TAW comes in version 5.181J, compiled on 1998-10-29.

The executables are a whopping 500 KiB larger than their English counterparts! From a quick look, they actually contain ~500 KiB more executable code, which is a lot. I don’t know (yet) whether this is due to compiler optimizations being disabled, or due to it actually having more dependencies/features.
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

Post by mikew »

Cool! Do you get a nice big Japanese manual as well?
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Krishty
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

Post by Krishty »

mikew wrote: 2023-Mar-24, 12:39Cool! Do you get a nice big Japanese manual as well?
232 pages … and a headache about how to scan it!

The last page lists the staff.

Localization programmer: Prezam

The only programmer, and three “debug” helpers. Could be someone to search for.
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Re: Japanese ADF/TAW

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Some of the additional executable code may come from the copy protection that requires a CD-ROM being inserted:
image.png
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