Wildbill wrote:
DoubleDvideogames wrote:
This game looks so cool, sorry you are having such trouble with it!
Odysselya-I contains 14 scenarios of varying length and complexity. I am well into #13. Our main holdup through the years (other than time) has been translation support. Happily, I have learned enough tricks to gain a 99% accurate reading of this game, its sequel, and Shiji. Polishing Shiji was a snap with Hausen’s tutelage. The two Ody’s mostly follow historical events I studied in my career, so fitting characters into those events has been akin to John Jakes creating the “Independence” series of historical fiction.
The bugaboo now is assembly support, plain and simple. Taskforce mentioned he will take a look at the dozen or so places where Ody-I hard crashes (I mean so hard in a few places that the emulator blows off the screen, and when I reload the whole works my SRM save data menu built into the game is corrupted to the point that I lose all of my builds in the patch that I didn’t have backed up prior to the crash. The problem has got to be some tiny little control code that links the crash point to the next scene or text dump block.
If we can solve this, we may be in a position to release both Ody’s simultaneously, as one of our friends has already suggested. So, you’ll be the first person I’ll ask. The Ody games may be played quite well by reversing the order and regarding #1 as a prequel later. Or, would you rather wait for a hopeful fix on #1 and have access to it first?
Second question, if you had a completed English patch for Ody-1 that contained a dozen hard crash points, some of which “ate” dozens of hours of game play, if provided with a list of those points that instructed you when to copy your SRM into a separate directory containing the Japanese ROM to play the game in that language past the crash point and convert the Japanese SRM back into the English folder, would you (A) be fine with doing this if it’s the only way you can enjoy the game, or (B) think it’s such a pain that you would rather not be bothered and prefer to move on to something else?
That reminds me... must get Ody-2 and Oni-2 working folders both to Taskforce. Oni-2 has far-and-away more crash points - perhaps a hundred, but they don’t eat the save data. Otherwise, Oni-II is 100% translated and formatted.
14 scenarios! Wow! That seems like a lengthy game, even if they all vary in length!
It sounds like a complex game to hack. I am always amazed at how much work and time goes into getting these games to function in English!
I think sometimes it can be interesting to play games in reverse, so that playing 1 would, as you said, almost act as a prequel. Interesting concept!!
As you mention in paragraph 4, I have done that before, it is fairly easy to do. Even just having a game partially in English is better than not having it at all. I think you guys and agtp, nightcrawler, dds, etc. put so much work into these games, even just having some of it is still amazing, if that makes sense.
It sounds like these are complex games. I think most sane players would be 100% in support of any patch you want to release! It woulld be cool to have instructions to bypass the hard crashes.
Thanks to DDT for all the amazing work over the years!