Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Hi, I registered here because I owe you all an apology.

In the past I had criticized Wildbill's editing of the Dai Kaijuu Monogatari script on Twitter. I should not have done this, and I am very sorry for having done so. The reason I got caught up in this was because back in 2004 I completed the ROM hacking for this title myself, but my translator had other obligations come up and I had to abandon the project. I know that Bongo` re-did most of the work himself, but I still had a personal attachment to the game after all these years. Twitter has really been the worst mistake for me to have signed up for. I've always leaned too hard into trying to fit in with my peers, and that site has a very toxic culture of wanting to shame "wrongthink" and I got carried away with the crowd when it came across my feed there. None of that excuses my behavior, I'm just sharing where I was coming from at the time.

You of course have the right to work on your projects however you like without idiots like me throwing in our two cents. If someone isn't happy with your work, then they should do the job themselves. I don't expect to be forgiven for this by anyone here, but all the same, I wanted to say it to you all directly. I need to do better and treat others the way I would like to be treated, and that starts with respecting others' beliefs and opinions. So once again, I apologize for my actions. I also said all of this on Twitter, if you wanted to confirm this is really me.

Congratulations on recently completing the second game as well, that is quite the achievement!

I'll leave you guys alone now. Best wishes for all your future projects.

I appreciate what you said. I have always respected your contributions, and I hope you can always enjoy what the community does overall as much as I get pleasure from helping put English patches together.

That’s really the only reason I’ve ever seen for doing this - to have fun. I hope you will feel comfortable about visiting here again as often as you wish. We lost Bongo to “retirement”, and we could actually benefit from having someone with the talents you are blessed with come along occasionally and help us through a few rough spots!

For example, I have Oni-II almost 75% first drafted. I am not “localizing” it at all and keeping a lot of Romanized nomenclature. What it needs right now is a bit of assembly work on some menus, sizing and strings with commands or discoveries that possibly didn’t get dumped.

Anyway, I always thought you were a fairly decent guy. If you do any more work in the “community”, I wish you good luck and hope you find fun along the way. Take care.

I appreciate what you said. I have always respected your contributions, and I hope you can always enjoy what the community does overall as much as I get pleasure from helping put English patches together.

That’s really the only reason I’ve ever seen for doing this - to have fun. I hope you will feel comfortable about visiting here again as often as you wish. We lost Bongo to “retirement”, and we could actually benefit from having someone with the talents you are blessed with come along occasionally and help us through a few rough spots!

For example, I have Oni-II almost 75% first drafted. I am not “localizing” it at all and keeping a lot of Romanized nomenclature. What it needs right now is a bit of assembly work on some menus, sizing and strings with commands or discoveries that possibly didn’t get dumped.

Anyway, I always thought you were a fairly decent guy. If you do any more work in the “community”, I wish you good luck and hope you find fun along the way. Take care.

That's a huge relief, thank you for accepting my apology.

Sad to hear Bongo` go, I remember I tried teaching him the ropes of ASM hacking back in the day when it wasn't documented, but he learned so quickly, he surpassed me after only a couple weeks ^-^; He has much to be proud of, so far Chaos Seed is my favorite localization effort I've seen.

I've been trying to retire myself since February. Someone from another forum hurt a lot of my friends to get to me, and I blamed myself for that, and it really messed me up. I'm responsible for my own actions and I probably deserve what I get, but no one else deserved that because of me. I've thought since that event that it would be best if I retired. Then COVID happened. Then I got nostalgic for my very first serious translation effort: I reprogrammed Bahamut Lagoon with all my acquired emudev knowledge. It should be out by Christmas. Then I guess we'll see what happens. It's hard to walk away when this has been my entire life and identity since I was 14 years old; I just need to find my closure first I think.

Ah, Bakumatsu Kourinden Oni II. One of the most gorgeous games on the system, and also one of the most intense ROM hacks. I remember kammedo and I wanting to do that back in 2001, but we weren't up to it yet. I don't want to make you any promises, but if you have a specific area you'd want me to look at, I might have a bit of free time left, assuming that the open beta for Bahamut Lagoon doesn't keep me busy.

I don't feel people should hold themselves accountable for the negative deeds of others. From what you are saying, I don't see that taking your fingers completely out of the pie will either fix anything in the past or bring you joy through letting go.

Politicians these days talk about "resets". Much of it is baloney, but a reset might work for those of us who create intellectual property for entertainment platforms. The process never changes. You start with a Japanese cart, dump the contents into a copier, and create a patch that allows the creators to play the game in English.

If you still enjoy the effort and gain much satisfaction from reaching the goal, I think it would be a shame for you to penalize yourself through self-exile. Maybe cutting off all interactions with selected people in the circle of folks who always involve themself in the process but contribute zero "value added" to the finished product would provide an effective vaccine for a variety of ailments that exist in human nature.

I still check in with Bongo`. Like everyone, his family is impacted by the pandemic. I try to lend support and encouragement. He did a fantastic job setting up Oni-II's basic insertion structure. However, he didn't play deeply into the game, so evolving or unintroduced routines were not necessarily addressed in his menu, text, SRC, or graphic insertion folders.

Oni-II's gameplay and story are top notch, per my tastes. What is broken right now are level-up dialogue boxes following battle. The statements aren't translated, apparently, and if the player learns a new spell or sword technique concurrently, the screen always crashes. To continue making progress, I must leapfrog between the Japanese ROM and working English ROM.

Another major crash much more tedious to bypass occurs during flashbacks in dungeons. In this case, I believe a few strings that control these transitions are missing in the files, and the English build will simply not bypass these points with just a small hiccup. These backflashes provide almost the entire backdrop to the tale. I've polished the dialogue, and I know what happens. I just cannot play through them uninterrupted in English yet.

If these two major glitches were fixed, I believe the insertion system would be 99% effective. We have a software called Mantis where I can upload most of what coders need to investigate glitches. Newly coded files can also be uploaded in those threads for direct downloads into the working insertion system. I will need to get Taskforce's input. In any case, at some point, I will upload my bug reports into Mantis.

Good luck with your Bahamut Lagoon endeavor, Byuu!

It's a long, complicated story as to why I felt responsible but ... yes, I've come to accept that I'm not. While there were things I could have done that would have prevented it, the things I did - however bad - did not warrant doxing and harassing innocent third parties. That behavior is on them. Still there's some sense of, why keep dealing with it when I've already done all the stuff I wanted to do? It wears a person down.



I don't really have the passion for ROM hacking anymore. I moved to Japan a few years back and while I'm not fluent, I have no problems playing games in Japanese anymore. ROM hacking, as you know, is a purely selfless act. By the time we finish a ROM hack, 1000+ hours later, we can't even stand to look at the game anymore, let alone play it. We've ruined every surprise, we know the story like the back of our hands. I have games I love that I'd like to see translated, but not at the cost of ruining the games for me ^-^;

Bahamut Lagoon was a special case: I promised myself at 14 that I would finish this game no matter what happened. It just took way longer than I expected, but it's all but done now.



I'm gonna stay in contact with friends on a personal level this time. I think the vice is Twitter and having an online audience, so that's what I should give up foremost. Strangers don't need to hear and get upset by my opinions.



Same, but on Twitter. He's a great guy, I hope they can get through the pandemic.



So, I doubt you want to send me all of Bongo`s source code, and I very much doubt I even have the tools on my BSD box to build and run them anyway (somehow doubting he's using my bass assember)

But maybe I could approach this like I'm hacking a Japanese game from scratch. You send me a patch file and a save RAM file, tell me how to get to the crash, and I try to analyze why it's crashing and offer a fix, and then you apply that patch on top of Bongo`s work?

I've never really been good at jumping into someone else's project, but I've also never turned down an offer to help when I could. So I'm willing to try, but again, just don't get your hopes up, I can't promise I'll be successful here ^-^;

You can get my e-mail from the account registration here if you like.

I appreciate everything. Let me study on it, consult with Taskforce, and look at options. One never knows if Bongo` or any dormant teammate might temporarily emerge from retirement and jump right back into the swim for a little while. However, the last thing I want to do is get both Bongo` and me in trouble with his wife who cherishes greatly the added family time!

It's Christmastime, too, so I might need a spell to get myself organized here. I'm writing the Oni-II chapter at Ezo Island today (Akujin's #40 of 55 total), and it's a good one! (And I would rather story-write than indulge in holiday treats.) All factions are in-fighting for the power and soul of Japan near the end of the Edo period, and our unlikely heroes are taking on all comers whose greed in their view would destroy the nation.

Thanks again!

Sure, that sounds good to me. If anyone on the team doesn't want me involved, don't worry about it, no hard feelings at all.
Same if they're capable of handling it on their end. I've no desire to step on anyone's toes.
But if you're all in accord, feel free to shoot me that e-mail, and I'll do the best I can. After the holidays are fine. I should be around until at least February.

Good luck either way! Kishin Kourinden Oni and even moreso Bakumatsu Kourinden Oni II are fantastic games, people are gonna have a lot of fun with them for sure!

I won't argue that there probably were kinder ways to give your views, but I do believe you were entitled to your opinion when all is said and done. I appreciate your apology, thank you. If you'd like to help with Oni II, and you guys can work a plan, be my guest by all means. I'll be extremely grateful to get any help you could give. I really want to see the games we have left get released in any form. And that one has barriers that simply make a playable release impossible at this point. Although, I'd even release it broken if I have to when all is said and done. The translator deserves that for that massive amount of work it took to complete that game. BTW: You were asking what Bongo` uses for assembly. He still compiles on the fly with your assembler xkas when you build the rom. So yeah, he still makes good use of it.

I've always struggled with this stuff, going all the way back to '98. It's just too easy to get me riled up on a cause and then I underestimate how many people care about what I have to say compared to your average poster. I don't realize how much I upset people until it's too late, and often I don't even find out how upset people are until years later, kind of like now. And well, I've gotten what I deserve for it (and then some.) Thank you for accepting my apology as well. It won't happen again.

So I mainly use bass now, but xkas I know very well too of course. That one seems to have serious staying power ^-^;
If it's just xkas / binary files to insert with it and no EXE files or shell scripts I'd need to run, then sure I can work with that.

I just finished my own project so I have about six weeks I can put into this. Hopefully I can at least point you in the right direction if nothing else. Feel free to send whatever you like to my e-mail address at your convenience. You've my word I won't share anything with anyone else.