Secret Maryo Chronicles in Chinese

To get Secret Maryo Chronicles to display Chinese in Hanzi, you need to replace font files. Here is how.

Secret Maryo Chronicles  (short "SMC") is an Open Source Super Mario clone. Starting with version 1.6 it supports multiple languages, though as of December 2008 not always without problems. We translated this game in an l10n course I am giving into Chinese, and here is a small walkthrough on how to get an existing installation of SMC, that has not yet included Chinese, running in that language.

First, you need the game itself, if you do not have already. The version included in Ubuntu 8.10 is too old, better get a new one .

Next, you need the Chinese language file(s). Either get both PO and MO from here  or grab the PO directly from our Pootle site  and create the MO yourself. Please remember, the file name has to be "Secret Maryo Chronicles", not "smc".

Create the necessary directories. Locate the "translations" directory in SMC, and create a directory "zh" in it, and a directory "LC_MESSAGES" in that. On Linux, you could do this:

cd /path/to/smc

sudo mkdir translations/zh

sudo mkdir translations/zh/LC_MESSAGES

cd translations/zh/LC_MESSAGES

sudo unzip /path/to/SMC-zh_TW.zip

Now we have Chinese, but the characters do not display correctly. That is because the font included in SMC, Dejavu, does not support CJK languages. I suggest you download or install ukai.ttc , an Arphic font. On Ubuntu (and probably Debian too) the command is this:

sudo apt-get install ttf-arphic-ukai

Then, delete the original font files default.ttf and default_bold.ttf:

sudo rm /path/to/smc/gui/fonts/*.ttf

Now you can either copy ukai.ttc there and rename it twice or just create symlinks:

ln -s /path/to/ukai.ttc /path/to/smc's/default.ttf

ln -s /path/to/ukai.ttc /path/to/smc's/default_bold.ttf

On Ubuntu, the file can be found at /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arphic/ukai.ttc.

That's it, now you can play Secret Maryo Chronicles in Chinese. Have fun!