LELauncher: A self-contained distributable launcher for Locale Emulator.

[DTM]

Hi everyone. We all know about the locale issues many folks including patch developers can face when distributing their translation patches for Touhou fangames. Maybe text isn't showing up or the game doesn't run at all without changing to JP locale, even with everything translated. So you resign yourself to just telling users of your translation patch to change locales or use Locale Emulator.

Well with this that no longer is necessary. LELauncher allows you run a target executable in the desired locale through Locale Emulator without needing the user to install Locale Emulator, allowing you to package it in your patches. By simply editing le.config with a text editor with the appropriate values, you can include the files of LELauncher and have the user just run it.

LELauncher can be found here: https://github.com/DTM9025/LELauncher/releases/latest

More detailed information can be found on the README.

== Example Usage ==

Let's say you have a 32-bit game that you are translating. However, for some weird reason it doesn't work unless you are in
a Japanese locale, even after editing all file names, etc. (maybe text doesn't showup or it just refuses to run). You
can include this launcher in your patch and tell users to run `LELauncher.exe` to run the translated patched game, allowing
you to run the game with the Japanese locale.

For starters, let's say the directory structure of the patched game zip will be this:

Code: [Select]

    <Translated Game Folder To Be Zipped>
    ├── resources
    │   ├── blah
    │   └── blah
    |── assets
    |   └── blah
    |        └── blah.png
    └── game.exe
Before you zip this up, you add LELauncher.exe, le.config, LoaderDll.dll, and LocaleEmulator.dll into the root folder
alongside game.exe.

To ensure it runs in the Japanese locale, you edit le.config with a text editor and make the Location value to be ja-JP and
make the Timezone value to be Tokyo Standard Time. To ensure LELauncher.exe launches the game you also make the Parameter
value to be game.exe, as that is the relative path to that executable from LELauncher.exe's directory. You set the other
parameters as appropriate.

If you want, you can also rename LELauncher.exe to whatever is best for you (like game-en.exe or something) to make it
more clear to users that they should run that executable to run the translated game. In addition, you could also change
the icon with external tools like Resource Hacker (instructions can be found here).

Now you can just zip the folder up with those four files as your patch distribution, and tell users to run LELauncher.exe
(or whatever you renamed it to) to run the translated patched game and it will run in the Japanese locale! All without
needing to tell the user to install Locale Emulator or switch locales in Windows!

== Disclaimers ==

This tool is mainly aimed for translation patch developers. If you are a regular user who just wants to be able to run old Japanese games without needing to change locales, it's probably better to just install Locale Emulator directly and use that through the context menu instead of having every game you want have LELauncher in it.

In addition, this release is still in its early stages as there has been limited testing. Help with this would be appreciated! Also this is based on the original Locale Emulator and thus any issues and bugs with that will be present here.