Great to hear you're planning to make a "universal" hack.

But I imagine it'd still be a pain for games using tilemapped fonts.
(3x3 Eyes 1 uses one font routine for everything. Dialouge, menus. So, that left me with needed to rig up several control codes to control it (also printed multiple strings in parallel in some cases, meaning I need to include a tilemapped mode to avoid crossing the streams. )

I got away from this for awhile due to the holidays, an injury, and preparing for a wedding, but I've gotten the chance to get back to work lately. Supporting tile mapped fonts has been a bit more challenging than I initially planned for. I've got it working half baked. I need to restructure the main routines to better handle things now that I have it working. I also need some better handling of the vwf buffer when it's not a big RAM window and one 8x16 or 12x12 at a time which is used obviously for many 12x12 fonts and when replacing a tile mapped font.

So, there's still work to be done unfortunately before I can show something comprehensible. There's also a few bugs it seems. Certain areas of Tenshi No Uta's menus outside my test menus are crashing it seems.

Another early issue I'm seeing is speed. The more flexible I make it, the more overhead there is. It's more noticeable on the tile map based menus where sections are fully rendered before they are displayed. With main dialog, you can print letter by letter and it's fine. With menus, you don't really want to see the menu being printed out.

I'll have to see what I can do with this. It just may not be that useful for instances demanding fast performance. In those cases, a custom routine may be a better fit.


I'm not obsessive with fonts. It's the opposite. I don't care about them. I found one that looked OK and don't care enough to find any more. Though I may be forced to on the menus. A thin font may be necessary to fit everything on screen.

Thanks. I will be updating along the way. Eventually I'll post some code to give a better idea of the interface. I've had to make some structural changes and rethink a few things for tile map fonts, so nothing to show until I re-establish the structure.

It works with the four text engines OK so far. It has a few kinks handling tilemap conrol codes though in instances where you want to print the current tile, then one additional tile with spillover knowing the game will the handle the control as normal and  set the tilemap position elsewhere for a fresh start on a new letter/tile. It seems easy enough, but it's been trickier than I thought, especially knowing the variety of different things that could potentially happen during control codes for tile mapped menu engines. Rather than try and handle all possible cases which is impossible, my mentality is it needs to be an independent enough system that it will work regardless of what game might do. Each time through variables are initialized (tilemap location, VRAM location etc.) and it works relative to what the actual values are and can control their update.

So.. my hope is whatever the game does outside of the system should be immaterial because it's initialized with the current instance and all information needed to do it's job each time it's called. It's for this reason the system is called once per character rather than say looping until a tile is finished etc. As you might imaging, the constant information exchange and gathering adds much overhead, but the result is hopefully an independent, reusable rendering system.

It's still very much WIP. Tenshi's 5 or 6 or more (I keep finding additional ones the further I dig into battles and menus, but at least they are similar) text engines are my first goal. If I meet that, I will see about fitting it into other games and see if it can meet it's true potential. That's getting a bit ahead though.

That sounds simply fantastic, and I must say I am impressed with the speed. The number count seems to keep climbing. The implementation process sounds like its running smooth, which is kind of scaring me =p

Anything that goes this well is bound to cause massive spacial distortions, that is simply the way of things.

In all seriousness, in addition to being impressive it also sounds awesome.

This project saw advancements these last few months. Tenshi had more text engines than I thought. We're up to 7 different routines supported (there's more on the battle menu I haven't begun to hack yet). 5 of them were all tilemap based menu printing routines.

I underestimated the vast possibilities of a tilemap menu printing routine. It's been difficult to support them all while retaining the flexibility level of game and routine independence. I'm still facing speed issues, however there were some optimizations I had overlooked before that will help.

Tenshi does much screen redraw. In fact when it's on the item screen for example, it sits in a loop and constantly refreshes the screen. This has made the scrolling item list for example show off how slow things are.

It has been beneficial to the project that Tenshi has so many routines. I've been able to continually improve and enhance the core VWF system. By the time I get to use it on other games, it should be able to do the job.

I think in the end, there are going to be certain situations and games where you still can't use this. There's just so many possibilities on how game engines work, ESPECIALLY when it comes to menus. However, I think the project is coming out successful thus far that you can set up a new VWF very quickly as is in most cases.

It's been an enlightening project so far. I've found interesting problems with the tilemap based fonts and the extra DMAing of data throws off rudimentary frame counters used for courser blinking and other rough timing. Tenshi for example increments what appears to be a frame counting variable every time it DMA the menu tilemap which it refreshes every frame. This is outside of NMI, so if I add any additional vblank waiting anywhere, it slows things down. For each time the game thinks one frame has passed, more have passed.

The easy and logical solution is to throw your DMA in with the games. However, that's game specific. I try to come up with ways to handle this with universal structure. In this case, I would have to adjust the frame counting variable at the defined place in the universal routine to update game specific variables. This is much more difficult because I actually need to figure out what it should be updated to rather than just throw my data in the existing original DMA routine and the game goes on as normal.

These kinds of issues have shined light on the practicality of my universal routine. In some cases, it's actually simpler and faster to do it game specific and would be undesirable to use my routine. The good thing is my routines are modular enough that I could choose to use only some of it and keep the rest game specific. So, some savings is still achieved.

Anyway, a general site update is coming in the next few weeks that will have several screen shots of the action!

Sorry for the delay. I was unable to type for the past month. I'm back in limited capacity for now.

We'll see how it goes and how the system turns out. It'll be in development for quite some time. It's focused on Tenshi for now. Only after that will I start test casing other games.

If I find I've met my design goals and it's practical enough, I am considering cleaning it up with some documentation for public consumption. If nothing else, I would do a limited release to those interested whom ask for it.

Perhaps Terranigma would be a good first test case outside Tenshi No Uta?

Yeah. The VWF system application should be relatively easy. The bigger obstacle here will be appropriately formatting the text to use a VWF. I don't recall off hand whether that game pulls final text from RAM or ROM. If it pulls from RAM, you can easily stick in some an auto formatting code. However, if it's from ROM, the text will likely need to be dumped, formatted, and reinserted which is significantly more work.

I'll have to remember to take a peek at this game again and see what it does. I was hoping I could just slap the VWF in and add some auto formatting code. I would probably have less interest in the project if it were more involved than that.