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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 11:48 pm 
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The last bunch is some of my oldest work (Satomi and the RPG Makers), that I had sitting around since I started doing translations but couldn't really figure out what to do.

I'm sad that Famicom Board Game Rail King is another in that. One of my first ASM hacks but still hadn't finished as I hadn't looked into the code deeply enough to add ROM expansion (requiring a mapper hack) to get it working without glitches. The text was translated forever though.
Though someone has since done their own translation patch of the game so it's a lower concern.

Weird is that I have the graphics decompression on RPGM1 all figured out but what's odd is that they pre-flipped some of the tiles seemingly randomly before they compressed it. I could just recompress it as it is with a bit of work. (just another LZ variation otherwise like most SNES compressed graphics seem to be) (the title screen, literally the only graphic in the game that would need replacement. I only used KanjiHack's Naga for figuring out the game's existing VWF tile format so I could make a replacement set of programs to dump/insert to a normal 1bpp font) Menus were a total pain as not only did the game have a custom bytecode format that I had to figure out to do "ASM" mods on but it's menu code was also a pain. I'm not even sure HOW MANY things had to be tracked down FOR EACH of the MANY windows in the game. Hardcoded bytecode for the window size, dimensions, size and position to backup a window before replacing it, size and position to restore the window, size and position of highlighting, size and position of de-highlighting, position and range of movement of cursors, etc.
And then there is the sample game. Had to completely figure out the format of the event data to be able to write tools to dump/insert it. The end result is still quite bad IMO but it's at least understandable and that is WITH hacking DTE into the text input system to cram it back into the hard limit of roughly 17KB (since it's an edit-able game I'm constrained to the amount of SRAM allocated to it, unlike probably any other game you could want to translate).
In terms of how effectively that SRAM can be used to store the sample game (and thus possibly user game),
English still lo
ses a bit of spa
ce since unlik
e Japanese we ca
n't just cut o
ff lines whereve
r we feel like it
.
(losing some space to adding spaces to pad out lines so we get proper formatted text at least, trying to stay as close to spec of the ingame edited text as possible when inserting, to avoid unforseen bugs)
Nintendo Power wasn't lying when they said the sample game was 8-10 hours long. It is a short game that can probably be fully played in a few hours. (less when you don't have to worry about getting the boat and slowly driving through encounters you can rarely escape from, only to end up getting a line of text that crashes the game so then you have to go fix that line and have lost half or an hour of gameplay progress since you saved :P )


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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:17 am 
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I could be mistaken, but I believe I looked at that game before. I have to go back in time and see if it is the same game or not.
If it is, I definitely do not envy you at all on this one. I figured you would have tackled some of these Snes games still lying in
the bottom of the ocean waiting to be brought to land. Oh well, being the lone ASM hacker in the group really makes it hard to
get as much as I want done. As soon as a game is released I feel relieved. One less game to reverse engineer I say. But no sooner
had I popped a bottle of bubbly then mantis goes off and I am back to work on another project. :lol: I guess It's ok to feel wanted
at times. 8-)


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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 4:14 am 
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KingMike wrote:
Well, per filler's suggestion I looked again at the coding for Legend of Kagerou (when speaking to do that or Touch) to redo the text printing from vertical to horizontal.
It's the most convoluted thing I've looked at.
Great to hear! I figure converting vertical text display to horizontal isn't easy, but that sounds particularly annoying. You've probably already checked it, but the FAQ on GameFAQs seems pretty comprehensive in terms of how to play: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/57961 ... faqs/70345


The Devil takes notes from Lina Inverse? That sounds about right.

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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 6:52 am 
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Bongo` wrote:
I could be mistaken, but I believe I looked at that game before. I have to go back in time and see if it is the same game or not.
If it is, I definitely do not envy you at all on this one. I figured you would have tackled some of these Snes games still lying in
the bottom of the ocean waiting to be brought to land. Oh well, being the lone ASM hacker in the group really makes it hard to
get as much as I want done. As soon as a game is released I feel relieved. One less game to reverse engineer I say. But no sooner
had I popped a bottle of bubbly then mantis goes off and I am back to work on another project. :lol: I guess It's ok to feel wanted
at times. 8-)
Heh, you'd better get yourself a half case of bubbly, Bongo`, and have it standing by the rest of the year!

Good luck getting them cracked the way you want , Mike. Glad to see you updating us again in your thread. I get the gist of what you're doing but quickly become lost in the technical details.


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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 7:52 am 
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By the way, are you still working on Ghost Sweeper Mikami, and/or that Gameboy game related to a couple of releases we have planned for the near future?


The Devil takes notes from Lina Inverse? That sounds about right.

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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 7:53 pm 
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Bongo` wrote:
I could be mistaken, but I believe I looked at that game before. I have to go back in time and see if it is the same game or not.
If it is, I definitely do not envy you at all on this one. I figured you would have tackled some of these Snes games still lying in
the bottom of the ocean waiting to be brought to land. Oh well, being the lone ASM hacker in the group really makes it hard to
get as much as I want done. As soon as a game is released I feel relieved. One less game to reverse engineer I say. But no sooner
had I popped a bottle of bubbly then mantis goes off and I am back to work on another project. :lol: I guess It's ok to feel wanted
at times. 8-)


Heh, I tried to learn assembly bongo` back in the day. Sadly, I just didn't get as far as I would have liked. I still poke at it now and then, but I doubt I'll ever get very good at it. I was a bit better with the Z80 than the 6502/65816. The gameboy seemed like a much easier beast to tame.


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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 2:22 am 
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taskforce wrote:
Bongo` wrote:
I could be mistaken, but I believe I looked at that game before. I have to go back in time and see if it is the same game or not.
If it is, I definitely do not envy you at all on this one. I figured you would have tackled some of these Snes games still lying in
the bottom of the ocean waiting to be brought to land. Oh well, being the lone ASM hacker in the group really makes it hard to
get as much as I want done. As soon as a game is released I feel relieved. One less game to reverse engineer I say. But no sooner
had I popped a bottle of bubbly then mantis goes off and I am back to work on another project. :lol: I guess It's ok to feel wanted
at times. 8-)


Heh, I tried to learn assembly bongo` back in the day. Sadly, I just didn't get as far as I would have liked. I still poke at it now and then, but I doubt I'll ever get very good at it. I was a bit better with the Z80 than the 6502/65816. The gameboy seemed like a much easier beast to tame.

z80 is not easier when it comes to coding. I think the z80 has too much going on in way of registers and opcodes. Just toooo much. I hope I thinking of the right CPU here.


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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 4:45 am 
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filler wrote:
By the way, are you still working on Ghost Sweeper Mikami, and/or that Gameboy game related to a couple of releases we have planned for the near future?

Mikami yes I should get to doing that as I don't think it should be too much to start up again.

Aretha GB, that I recall is a fairly complex game from what I recall of the script dump I made.
It's quite some time since I looked at that, but I recall something in it making me kind of doubting, maybe doable after my experience now. I would have to look again to see what that was.
(I do recall the level-up base stats on Aretha GB is a rollercoaster. They go up and down all over, the only thing that consistently increases is HP.)


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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 4:50 am 
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taskforce wrote:
Heh, I tried to learn assembly bongo` back in the day. Sadly, I just didn't get as far as I would have liked. I still poke at it now and then, but I doubt I'll ever get very good at it. I was a bit better with the Z80 than the 6502/65816. The gameboy seemed like a much easier beast to tame.

No index registers on the GBZ80 is a little icky.
But I don't think there's any trace-logging emulators aside from my own hack of GEST which has flaws I can't even seem to be able to fix anymore (compiler issues). (like I messed up something in the bit-test/set/rest sub-instruction set. CB or whatever it was. I think it was the SWAP code.) And the formatting was still bad but it was still able to mostly get the job done for what I've used it on. Castle of Ayakashi and Jungle Wars.)


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Post subject: Re: KingMike's Translations
PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 5:40 am 
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There is an old No$GB fork (or was it the main fork) that had excellent tracing. Honestly it was better than SNES9X's tracing at the time. It helped that I had a really nice book on programming in Z80 assembly. That didn't give me any hardware specific help, but it really made the processor itself very easy to understand. I did have that book backed up on our site. Not sure if it still is. Now the Game Gear, that was something that (last I knew) had jack in the way of a tracer.

EDIT: Doesn't look like it is on the site anymore. I probably removed it to avoid any copyright issues, if you wanted to have a look, I'd be glad to provide a look, but it is all in graphic format, not text. I did it grayscale and it is quite readable.


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