taskforce wrote:
This was almost 20 yeas ago, so my recollection of events will be hazy at best.
I totally understand -- trying to recall the details of work from two decades ago is a weird experience for any of us. I appreciate your willingness to delve into this a bit.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
taskforce wrote:
However, if there is a note in the readme, then that means that we did find the bug during playtesting and it was most likely found in both the original Japanese rom and English versions of the game, making it a bad dump of the original game not the patches fault. (I can be pretty sure of this because anytime I find an issue, I test the original Japanese rom for the same issue as a matter of course, and if I don't find the issue, I try to solve it not let it be. If I do find the issue, I know there is no point in trying to solve it.) Which means it very likely wasn't something we created with our code. Also, keep in mind not all dumps declared good truly are perfect dumps. It could still be a bad dump or just lousy code at that point in the game that was never found originally. It could even be our code that caused it but is pretty unlikely.
When byuu publishes the results of his Japanese Super Famicom dumping project we'll know for sure, but my suspicion is that it's not a bad dump -- though the glitchy pixels at the corners of certain sprites do make me wonder.
Still, given the amount of quirky behavior I'm seeing elsewhere in the game -- treasure chests requiring 4-5 tries to open, etc. -- I'm guessing there's an issue in the original code, especially because it's such an early SFC release. It sounds like it was originally blamed on a specific emulator, but now I think it's clear that's not the issue.
FWIW the owner of the Super Famicom RPGs blog (recently discussed
here) didn't experience the bug when playing through the original Japanese ROM, but the bug doesn't seem 100% consistent. As I mentioned I was able to work around the issue by exiting after I beat Gazus, so perhaps it has something to do with sprite or VRAM allocation, since the second time around the game doesn't need to load Gazus's character sprites.
I should add that I do have a BSNES savestate right before the battle with Gazus. In fact I just resumed from it and managed to get through the battle with Gazus and reach the final battle
without a crash, so it's going to be a frustratingly inconsistent bug to track down.
taskforce wrote:
As for the differences between version 1.00 and 1.01. It has been too long. I know there was a change on the opening graphic to Magic Translations if I remember right. And a few text fixes in the game as well.
Ah, yes -- I remember reading somewhere that the 1.01 redid that graphic. Thanks for that.
taskforce wrote:
As for our patch being the 1.00 version, Red Soul redid our patches a while ago and I assumed he used 1.01, but it is very possible he had the 1.00 patch and mistakenly used it. I'll get it changed to the 1.01 patch soon. Thanks for telling me about it.
Sure thing! At least the 1.01 patch is available from the multiformat downloads page I linked above, even if it hasn't been on the project page. BTW
ROMHacking.net also has the 1.0 patch, not the 1.01; I don't know if anyone here deals with updating the stuff over there, but wanted to mention it.