First post, not 100% that this is the most appropriate place for this thread, help? The Tower II, released as Yoot Tower by SEGA in 1999 to the western world, a sequel to The Tower released as Sim Tower to the west, used a plugin system to add content to the game, most of these were released in packages called "Towerkits" (Equivalent to DLC). The English localization of The Tower II includes very few plugins and additional packages were not released, this makes for a fraction of the net Japanese plugins. Information on the "Towerkits" is incredibly scarce and from my study are very difficult and pricey to obtain. Despite some interest I have seen over the years, albeit very small, no attempts have been made to "rectify" this. No dumps of the game are made, let alone available. Or so I thought: After ~10 hours of searching from the surface of google to the depths of the Japanese Dark-net, about to accept the futility of what I was doing, I found an old emule link on a Chinese Sim-City forum. The emule link was nearly dead and took a week to receive in full. This archive includes a complete set of the Tower Kits and web-released plugin's among other content including some booklet scans. I want to share this find with the few I would imagine to be interested and perhaps start a little preservation project of this game to organize and document the files in the archive so that they are understandable to an English audience and bring this piece of lost media into the light, and if a handful of people are interested: making a fan-made translation (shouldn't be too difficult from a technical standpoint, already found where text is stored). I consider this to be abandonware as the game has been universally unavailable for over a decade and the current owners of the tower series (Vivarium Inc.?) hasn't touched the series in general since an iPad version in 2010. All considered I am comfortable with sharing these files and want this lost media to surface for anyone who is interested. Problem is I don't know where to start, most forums reject any copyright material and I'm not wanting to post this in a "I want free stuff" general piracy forum as that completely misses the point. I also don't feel like starting and maintaining a dedicated website and forum for this as I expect only 5 - 20 people to be interested, if more are then I may. That all being said: I know Assembler is primarily for unreleased and prototype material but can I share this here? would it be appropriate to do this little preservation project here? suggestions? Spoiler: Images A few poor snaps, I'll add more later. Statue of Liberty location showing some exclusive elements such as a thin elevator, statue viewing tower, etc. Station location that was released to coincide with the film Gamera 3. Again, lots of exclusive items not seen anywhere in the standard elements. One of the interesting ones has to be the fire-hydrant, perhaps this has affect when fire's come on. Save included of the Hawaii location which is included in the English localization, however this shows alot of new elements. Spoiler: Extra Background As a child I always enjoyed playing the construction and management game: Sim Tower. As years past I would, out of nostalgia and genuine enjoyment of the game, pull it out from time to time and play through it, I love the pixel art in this game. One day, ~5 yrs ago it came upon me to do some research on the title and gleam anything I could on it. I learned that the game, originally named "The Tower", is the first installment of several ports and versions: few of which got released outside Japan where the series appears to have relative popularity, apparently even gardening a soundtrack release, the heck? I tried to get details on the games different versions, development, anything; but information was basically void. Information, whether it be in video, text, blog post was scarce: the series is greatly undocumented, at least on the English internet. One of the more interesting installments is The Tower II for Windows 95 meant to be the direct successor of The Tower for PC. The Tower II featured the same fundamental gameplay however in a new implementation with additional content and a more robust simulation engine, it's still not that great mind you. At the core of this game was the concept of add-ons. Extension packs called Tower-Kits would install collections of addon's: these included new building elements among other things, but most importantly locations: which were different scenarios where the rules, objectives, available elements, and people/silhouette behaviors would be unique. The Tower II is one of the few in the series to get an English localization, which was done in 1999 and published by SEGA under the name Yoot Tower. This localization however had very few of the add-on's included and no additional extension packs were released. More insultingly the translation itself is poor. I got the game and upon finding I enjoyed it was determined to track down any information about the add-ons and how I might obtain them. I have this kinda weird thing with childhood nostalgia where I will get temporary obsessed over stuff for, often coming back to it every now and then, anyone share this with me? I suppose this is one of the places where I'll find people that do share this Anyway: aside from one photo of a scenario and a couple of guy's posts basically asking if anyone had them all I got was a couple of dead links to the Japanese official website and a Japanese fan page which thankfully both managed to get archived at the wayback machine. I was able to gleam some info from there and got a few images of the add-ons but parts of both sites were broken and that included for the most part add-on downloads. From these sites I was at least able to figure out roughly what was released. Unfortunately some of the add-ons appeared to be exclusively freely downloadable from the official site seemed to be lost for good, but I had hope that the disc based release TowerKits, which contain the main attractions, would be grab able and preserved. I was sort-of right, but it was even worse than I thought: I was only able to find few of the packs on Japanese auction sites: each were ~150 USD, that's a no-go for me in my current circumstances, quite a bit of money for one of several kits, I don't know Japanese so if anything arises I'd need a translator, I'd probably need to ship via proxy, etc. etc. I began scouring the Japanese internet for more info on the game and hoping for a dump of the plugins, and while I was able to gain a little more info, it was still very scarce. After ~10 hours of searching from the surface of google to the depths of the Japanese Dark-net, about to accept the futility of what I was doing, I found an old emule link on a Chinese Sim-City forum, in list form: title, archive size, translated description looked promising; no way to verify for sure what it was; there is no way 20 people who grabbed this back in '08 are still seeding this; there's 1 peer , damn slow, ~168 hours, HOLY ---- backup of every The Tower II related release including some instruction booklet scans. I don't know anything about the original up-loader, where he obtained the files originally (there are some clues though). The post came across as pretty odd as to my knowledge (may be wrong as info is scarce and found in languages I don't speak) The Tower II only saw a bootleg release in China furthermore the post was a download for a SimCity rip, the tower II rip was kinda tacked on and referenced in the post as (from the way it came across to me) "Oh yeah, I also am throwing in a link for this neat little game called Yoot Tower, the Japanese version has more content so I'm throwing it in too." Very perplexing this seemingly random post is the only dump of the content I was able to find on the net.
Hi Lisxx, did you ever find somewhere or someone to share these with? I would be interested to do something. I've loved the Sim Tower game for god knows how long and only just starting to get into the new mechanics of Yoot Tower. I'll pop you a message also incase you dont get the alert for this message. Thanks, Ben
My Apologies This thread went nowhere after my first post and I thought, "oh well," and went onto other things and forgot about it. Upon visiting assemblergames.com after more than a year, it's gained some traction, particularly in my pm's . I currently have other projects in my free time, but now that there is some interest in The Tower II, I may consider looking into this further. For now I'll share my current findings, most of which is old research I haven't touched from last year. I hope it will help out anyone interested. Oh, and the actual archive I should have initially uploaded and that I know everyone is actually here for and grinding their teeth about being soooo close to getting a hold of them... only to have OP die Archive Origins: I obtained a .rar archive containing tower II related material from an emule download. The .e2k file was found on a Chinese simgame forum. The download was near dead, I had one peer. Thread containing the .e2k: http://archive.is/9RczgWho initially compiled the archive and where it was originally hosted I am unable to gather. The archive contains a japanese readme timestamped 2006. I believe the archive originates with a Japanese fan of the tower. Archive Contents: The archive is in japanese: folder names, text files, etc. I don't know how much of the file names and directory structure are official or by organization of the archiver. The archive contains install files for the base game, updates and towerkits: The install files appear to be taken from CD-ROMs and from online downloads. Image files(.iso, etc.) for the actual CDs are not included, just the install files from them. If you're going through the files, make sure to look through all the folders, there are apparently more than one set of install files on some of the CD-ROM folders. I do not know if this is a complete or partial set of content released. Because this game is poorly documented, and I use google translate for what documentation is available, it is difficult for me to establish what content was released and what content is in the archive. Given the extensive amount of content here that is not in the base game, the inclusion of all location towerkits listed as released on the wikipedia, the inclusion of website promo content, and the inclusion of the update CD's I believe this archive was put together with passion and that there is a good chance this is a complete set of released content. The archive also contains some manual scans and save files. I believe the manual scans are unofficial scans, and only a partial set of manuals released. I didn't look at save files too closely, so I haven't come to any conclusion about them. Install: I found myself having difficulty running installs on modern english windows, partly due to windows version compatibility but a lot more to do with character encoding. I ran a Japanese windows 2000 in a virtual machine and installs worked well. The game itself also does not run on modern english windows, so you can't move the game fully installed over to english windows and have it work. I again believe this incompatibility is due to character encoding: when the game boots it throws a library access error with some garbled characters. I believe these characters are meant to be Japanese characters and that the incompatibility lies with this. Note: I can not verify everything works as I did not install all content or spend any length of time playing the game. If you are new to virtual machines, I recommend VirtualBox. You can obtain japanese Windows builds at WinWorld. Preservation: Preserving this lost media is the most important aspect of this discovery. Here is a list of what I feel should be worked on if it interests anyone. Establish what content was released and verify how much of it is in the eMule archive. Reorganize the archive in English. Directories are currently organized in a confusing way. English documentation on the archive. Etc. Translation: Getting the game to be accessible to English fans could be a fun use of this discovery if anyone is interested. The tower II is a text heavy game, unless you can read Japanese script it is unplayable. In consideration of a translation project, I poked around the game files a bit last year. Good news is that text was not hard to locate, but the bad news is I have forgotten most of what I learned. A few notes on what I do remember: The most difficult hurdle is that text is encoded in SHIFT-JIS, which most hex editors and PE editors do not support. Menu text is located in the PE and stored like standard menus. Game text is located in the PE, addon's, etc. Game text is stored in some format I analyzed and made a binary template for below. I made a binary template for editing some text in 010 Editor, unfortunate that I have forgotten where this format is used: Spoiler: Binary Template //------------------------------------------------ //--- 010 Editor v7.0.2 Binary Template // // File: // Authors: // Version: // Purpose: // Category: // File Mask: // ID Bytes: // History: //------------------------------------------------ typedef struct { byte length <format=decimal>; string content; } stringEntry <read=stringEntryRead, write=stringEntryWrite>; string stringEntryRead(stringEntry &a){ return a.content; }; void stringEntryWrite(stringEntry &a, string text){ local int text_len = Strlen(text); sizeof(a.content) > text_len ? DeleteBytes(startof(a.content),sizeof(a.content)-text_len-1): InsertBytes(startof(a.content),text_len-sizeof(a.content)+1,0); OverwriteBytes(startof(a.length),1,text_len); WriteString(startof(a.content),text); OverwriteBytes(startof(a.length) + text_len + 1,1,0); }; byte header <format=hex>; byte num_entries <format=decimal>; short buffer; byte start; struct stringEntry entries[num_entries] <optimize=false>; I don't expect other's to use 010 editor, but hopefully this code can be of reference should anyone go looking to translate the game in the future. Links for research: Archive of a japanese fansite : https://web.archive.org/web/20060504045113/http://thunder.prohosting.com/~towerfan/ Japanese wikipedia for The Tower II: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ザ・タワー_(ゲーム) Mention of the archive I found on some forum: http://archive.is/EvPig Download: https://mega.nz/#!R9AyxZ4Z!2N34KpAghpPeg7iW4YX8lNJGFh8yruraRfTz-adGe2U This is the untouched archive from the Chinese eMule download I obtained. Copyright: The Tower II materials are protected by copyright, however these materials are abandon-ware. These materials have not been available in over a decade. The current right holder's of The Tower II, let alone the tower franchise, are unclear to me. Vivarium Inc. was the previous/current owner of the franchise, however information on the company is scarce and I believe they may have closed business. Another potential owner is OPeNBooK Co., LTD. but it's a similar situation as above.
I've gotten the game running in a Japanese copy of Windows XP (I had some issues running the copy of windows 2000 Lisxx has provided, possibly a local issue) and have installed all the plugins. I have spent a little time playing the game, everything seems to work from what I can tell at a glance....super exciting!!! I haven't tried yet but wondering if it might run if you change your locale in windows through region settings to Japanese - I noticed the English version runs okay on windows 10 Here's the installation instructions ran through google translate below, I have also created a translated chart of the folder structure (attached) ========================================= · Installation order It is best to install the plug-in of TheTower 2 in the following order. 1 TheTower 2 body (assuming it is acquired in advance) 2 Kegon Falls MAP 3 Special addition tower kit 4 KKBEST Series 5 shop front distribution CD-ROM: 2 storey store series 6 shop front distribution CD-ROM: 3 storey store series 7 OpenBook 9003 HP Distribution Plugin Series 8 Statue of Liberty MAP 9 Kyoto Station Building MAP 10 Tokyo Tower MAP 11 Osaka Naniwa MAP 12 Christmas MAP · About the updater I deleted the updater and uploaded Christmas MAP since May 25th. When you install Christmas MAP, the main program will be uploaded automatically. If you want to upload the program of the main unit, please install Christmas MAP though. · About version errors If you install the above lists 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, if you start the program as it is, you may get a version error. If you get a version error please install Christmas MAP. Also, if you get a version error when installing Christmas map, Please install Christmas map again.
I remember that changing locale does not make the installer, or the actual game, compatible. However my memory may be wrong. Locale Emulator works as a solution. There is also MS AppLocale, but it doesn't work on Win10. NTLEA is another option, it works in that the game runs, however there remains text still processed as unicode opposed to the correct SHIFT-JIS, this may be the case with AppLocale too, I've never been able to test it.
I've brought over the fully installed game from Japanese winXP to eng Win10, can confirm it crashed several times when running thru locale emulator but worked after several attempts. I encountered some weird game bugs though
