Originally Stated On April 23rd, 2012 - Allow me to clarify things once again:
I started my
Infinity Translation Guide around June 15th, 2011. Infinity had been out in Japan since February 24th, 2011 and by the time I started working on the guide, it was more than evident that there would be no official English release due to Sega's track record.
During that time, people--mainly those on GameFAQs.com were still clamoring for an English Patch in spite of the fact that I was working on my guide.
Somewhere down the line around October, word of my guide had spread far enough to the point where Coldbird (Creator of the PRO CFW series of firmware, and fan of Phantasy Star) had found out about it and ultimately gave him inspiration for his next project.
After joining up on PSO-World, Coldbird began to spearhead the project for a
Translation Patch (existing separately from my guide). Myself and others volunteered to aid in translating text dumps and scripts that Coldbird had directly lifted from the game's coding.
Everything for the most part was going fine.
Coldbird had (and presumably still has) big aspirations for the patch--one of the biggest being inserting Anti-Cheating Measures installed within the patch in an effort to keep Infinity from turning into USA / EUR Vanilla PSPo2.
But he then hit a snag.
He was designing the patch around the idea of it being used in conjunction with his PRO CFW. After I basically backed off from translating the script dumps so I could finally finish the guide (for you guys, mind you), after little over a month Coldbird eventually backed off from working on the patch in favor of other things having to take priority. Mainly working on his latest PRO CFW for PSP (and ultimately maximizing the effectiveness of the planned patch and all its new features).
Quite some time ago, to ease everyone's minds a bit, I went in Skype and spoke with Coldbird for a bit to confirm the fact that he was busy with other things at the moment. I also asked him if he'd make a brief appearance here on the forums to give everyone an update on the situation--which he did.
The translation patch has been on hiatus since roughly the end of October / Beginning of November of 2011.
I finished my translation GUIDE (Not the same as the patch.) somewhere around the end of March 2012, with the last update having been on April 1st 2012 on the basis that I don't like leaving my own projects unfinished, and I felt that Phantasy Star fans should have the game in English in at least SOME kind of form.
To this day, people still confuse my guide and Coldbird's patch to be the same thing, when they're not.
And
the other thread, detailing the patch has pretty much derailed from its original topic, and is continually bumped by people who haven't been reading the past few pages, or people fresh off of GameFAQs or some-such looking for the patch that was never released--thus causing people to think that the patch is still currently being worked on.
At best, the patch only exists in the form of a Beta dump plugin that only a select few [myself included] have actually tested with only a minimal amount of things translated (like the character creation menu, that's about it). Plus, it's somewhat buggy in that it causes the game to freeze up every now and again.
Will ColdBird come back to finish the patch? There's a chance he will. He's a pretty nice guy.
From a realistic standpoint though, given the nature of patches for RPGs, a decent patch for Infinity that includes the story text and everything is still a long ways off. Months to a year. That's from my personal experience, though.
