Things were speeding along way too well to be true there. It was about time for the universe to play another evil trick to try and foil me! Did someone die? Not this time. Historic natural disaster? Well, we did get 24″ of snow in one storm, which I haven’t seen here in about 20 years, but that’s not it either. Evil lung infection sickening you for months? *Ding*, we have a winner! I was healthy nearly all of last year, but it was time to pay my sick debt! At the end of November, I came down with a terrible lung infection. I was sick for about 2 months. Since that time, the infection has resolved itself, but I have been left with chronic lung inflammation ever since. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? *RIGHT*? RIGHT! I am not dead yet, so I must be getting very strong!

The good news is there hasn’t been much work for me to do on my translations projects, so they didn’t suffer much set back. The work is still currently offloaded to others. Here is the latest update:

Hearcles IV

Let’s recap; The game is fully translated, and all technical hacking is complete. The script was found to strongly need some editing. Myself and Kay (the translator) did some of the editing ourselves. However, it really needed someone above our skill level that would be dedicated to the task. So, we decided to call in the proverbial professional! Script editing was handed off to my favorite script editor, Misty. She’s done previous TransCorp script editing for Wozz.

Misty is intending to do two editing passes. The first pass will be the general editing pass. The second pass will be for characterization. The first pass has been progressing well, and she reports being about 90% complete! We have not yet decided if we will coordinate beginning beta testing and the second pass of editing around the same time, or do it in strict serial fashion. We will see how the time table ends up.

So, we have just editing, testing, and release remaining! Hurrah!

Tenshi No Uta

This project has been plagued with bouts of missed text since the very beginning. Other than the main script, many of the menus use isolated, hard coded strings. This means they have absolutely no organizational structure, and aren’t even grouped together. With no organizational structure, you can’t easily find and extract them (let alone all at once, together). I have employed pattern searching based on the code patterns used to call these strings. That caught many, however I have still been nickled and dimed with continued one-offs called in different fashions that I was unaware of. You simply don’t know of their existence until you see them in-game at times.

The main script was translated long ago, but now we have numerous bits of untranslated text from the above described scenarios. This has caused a big slow down for Liana (the translator). With so many years in between, she really needs to spend a good deal of time to come back up to speed with the game as a whole, in order to best translate the missed bits. She is working on doing so, but time is limited in her life as well. These are just some of the issues to deal with when projects span so many years.

On the technical front, I have done most of the major technical work, and inserted all translated text I have thus far! I am anxiously awaiting the next batch! Once all text is English in-game, I will begin a final technical pass. This pass will include working out finalized formatting, lengths, expansions, and any additional hacks necessary when everything is all there.

All in all, Tenshi No Uta is not too far behind Heracles. It is shaping up very nicely!

Dual Orb 2

As a bonus this month, we have another small update for Dual Orb 2! I pride myself in keeping my projects properly maintained and updated whenever I can, even many years later! This update was prompted by work done by mziab of mteam fame. He is the author of the Polish translation of Dual Orb 2. With his help, the last known issues from the readme were resolved, as well as a rearrangement of the naming screen. I can’t believe I never did anything about that ugly mess! A big thanks goes out to miziab for doing the grunt work. All I had to do was integrate it into the English patch, which went well.

With this release, Dual Orb 2 is back to golden status where all known and/or reported issues are resolved!

-Nightcrawler

I’m happy to say things have been continuing to cruise along at full speed. All projects are very active and very far along. What more could you ask for? Releases you say? Soon my friends… soon.

Glory of Heracles IV

I completed all of the technical work on the project and began play-testing on the real hardware. After play testing quite a few hours, I fixed all issues I was able to discover until I could discover no more! Technically, the project is in great standing and ready for group beta testing. However, the script is lagging behind at this point. Although complete, it really is not ready for prime time. After close review, it needs another edit. I logged numerous issues for our translator to review and he has since reviewed them all. He started another round of partial editing, but didn’t have time to do more. So, we decided to get a dedicated script editor to finish the job.

Currently, the script editor is ready to start editing. Upon completion of this round of script edits, we will finally be ready to start group beta testing! The next update you read here will most likely be that announcement! At this point, I have nothing left that I can to do on Heracles, and have been freed up for other projects!

Tenshi No Uta

After running out of technical work on Heracles, I turned my attention to Tenshi No Uta to keep the momentum going. As a result, Tenshi No Uta has seen tons of progress in the past few months! More so than it’s seen in years! This is thanks to all of the new tools I have been developing the past few years, that are now coming into fruition. I was able to use my NuVWF to convert all of the dialog, battle, and menus to VWF. This game will have a complete conversion just like Heracles IV. Few other projects have ever received such treatment.

I was able to use TextAngel to dump all of the remaining missed text, format the script, and insert the script in it’s entirety! The dialog is all ready for in-game review and editing. With the menus, I have English solutions hacked into place for all of them! This includes inserted English place-holder text until the missing parts of the script are translated. That concludes the bulk of the menu work. Only a finalization pass remains when the final translations have been completed! I have re-enlisted Liana (the original translator) to continue on with the remainder of the translation work. I await these translations so I can begin the finalization pass on the menus!

With this, I’d estimate Tenshi No Uta is now 80-85% complete!

nuVWF

NuVWF is a universal VWF engine/library that I’ve been working on for awhile. Now that I’ve gotten far enough, and have some real world application in both Heracles IV and Tenshi No Uta, I have finally updated the forum topics with some details of the implementation. Feel free to take a look if you have any interest in this endeavor. I plan on trying it out in some additional games when time permits.

TextAngel

I’ve posted the latest update on TextAngel in the forum. Basically, it’s in good shape dumping wise, but in design hell due to lack of a coherent insertion solution. Any ideas would be be appreciated. I’m trying to come up with something that works with the node building approach I’ve built for dumping. You can get an idea from the screenshots on the first page of that topic.

-Nightcrawler

Shortly after the last update, I was able to get back to major action! I made sure I was working double time to make up for last quarter’s lack of progress. No! That still wasn’t good enough! I had to make the push of a lifetime to make sure Heracles IV was going to get finished. I had to work triple time! The result was one of the most productive quarters in the past 10 years for TransCorp! Where do I even start? I’ll start with the punchline that all hacking is now complete and all currently known issues have been resolved!

Heracles IV

I had a big breakthrough with the many NMI overrun problems that plagued many menus. Recall that the original game already used 110% (it overran already at times) of vblank time in many instances. This meant I could transfer NOTHING at all, let alone what I needed to to make the menus work. It looked like an impossible feat to gain the necessary time back. I’ve spent the entire project with the mantra of making the impossible possible though. Persistence pays off and nothing is impossible. I forged on and continued to study the NMI routine for some way to cut it down so I would have some time to at least do SOMETHING! The solution finally came to me when I studied the usage of the CGRAM and OAM refresh DMA transfers that occurred each frame. With some very careful new NMI management, I could defer these transfers on certain key frames without visibly upsetting the on-screen graphics. Next, I cracked how the game was triggering refreshes of tiles and tilemaps in VRAM for loading areas, overworld etc. Coupled together, I was ultimately able to better distribute tasks across different frames and buy a little bit of time on some lesser action frames. I seized those frames to transfer a few bytes at time to make the menus work! It barely works, but it works nonetheless!

It was especially difficult for two reasons. First, the code needed to manage NMI cuts into the very cycles you’re trying to save by managing it. So, you have to strike a ratio where the cycles you’re saving outweigh the management code enough. Secondly, it was very difficult to decide how and when was safe to defer CGRAM, OAM, tile data, and tilemap refreshes. The NMI routine is called millions of times. It’s called on every frame of every screen for the entire game! Thankfully I was able to leverage some key memory locations to toggle this management when needed with limited side effects. This did not come without a price however. Some things are slower and some compromises were made. I have minimized the observable impact as best as possible. With the conclusion of the above issue, I was able to then finish all 200+ submenus and convert them to use the new 8×8 VWF engine!

On the translation front, Kay spent much time revising and formatting the letters, monster guide, and Plato’s journal. We came up with some great ideas to better fit English text onto those little book pages without it looking too cramped. We did have to do some cutting here to make it all work, but Kay did a great job at cutting words rather than content or meaning. I was closely involved in this process and have new found respect for how difficult it can be to do that effectively. It’s much easier to take the cheap way out and just cut some content to make it fit. I’m sure you will all appreciate the passion and effort Kay has put into his work to not allow that to happen. We spent a great deal of time going through all of the 8×8 text and finalizing items, monsters, equipment, battle text, places, and more.

Now that everything works and the game is fully playable again, we need to continue on with some polishing, editing, and revision. We are basically having a mini in-house beta test between myself and Kay. I do not expect any further major issues. After this phase of polishing, the project should be ready to assemble a team for full beta testing! These are good times folks! It’s all downhill coasting to the finish line from here! I’m anxious to rush the process, but I know we need to have due diligence and proper procedure to make sure the release does itself justice and properly reflects the passion and effort that has gone into it!

-Nightcrawler

Things were moving along so well up to the end of last year. I was even convinced I was actually going to finish some of these long standing projects in the near future. What followed however, was a string of life events that resulted in no ROM hacking whatsoever for months. Deplorable, I know. So, here is a little recap of how time can go by without getting anything done when life throws more bricks in your face.

Soon after the last update, December became very busy with overtime at work, unexpected home repairs, family obligations, future planning, and holiday events. Almost immediately after the new year, I became ill with a nasty infection (or maybe multiple subsequent infections) lasting several weeks. This was easily in the top 3 for the longest and worst illnesses I’ve ever had in my life. Several days after I got better, the northeastern US got assaulted with one of our worst winters ever (which was depressing since last year was also a worst winter ever candidate). Shoveling became a way of life and nearly found a place in my daily life. Even when it wasn’t snowing, the relentless arctic winds typically drifted my driveway and walkways over at rates comparable with actual snow storms. Along all of this, at my job a major new product was being launched for a big industry show. I was critical to making the launch occur and I had to work more sustained long hours than I have ever had to before.

The only enjoyable thing I’ve done in months is play the Last of Us and Heavy Rain on my new PS3. Even that was somewhat painful due to my longstanding elbow issues, go figure. Life was really starting to get depressing. You’ve got to try to see that light at the end of the tunnel though, right? The Earth was still tilting me closer to the sun every day and the winter assault finally ended. The big product launch happened at work, and I have now scaled back a bit on hours. I am currently healthy (or at least at my ‘normal’ level these days). So, I’m hoping things will be able to get back on track in a forward direction soon.

It sure is frustrating when you are determined to get things done and life keeps defeating you over and over preventing you from doing so. I shall not update again until there is progress to report! Boy, those could infamous last words, huh? Let’s hope not! Don’t worry, I have been back on track this week with Heracles IV and some worthy progress will surely manifest itself soon!

-Nightcrawler

Lots of things have been going on at TransCorp since the last update. And I bet you thought we were sitting around doing nothing, well… :P. I’m still working on clearing out the backlog of old overdue tasks, as well as continuing to move forward with current projects. Life has been especially difficult again in recent weeks, but I’ve still been able to keep a good pace going. Work is progressing much better than the past few years and that carrot of work completion is dangling within my sites! First, we’ll look at what’s new with the old projects.

Dual Orb 2, Wozz, Emerald Dragon, OH MY!

This has been a long time coming, but I have blown the dust off of all of the old projects to give them the tender love and care they deserve. All 3 have received new patch updates to take care of some long standing things that needed taking care of. Every now and then, I like to enhance or improve my old releases. I never truly abandon them and they are never truly done. In addition to the new patch content itself, I took this opportunity to also add xdelta patches to the distributions for superior patching to IPS (IPS is still included for cases where it is needed). The new patches are also now licensed under the Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Deed in an effort to standardize and legitimize the distribution as much as possible for this type of work.

It was brought to my attention some time ago that there were some issues on some flashcarts with the splash screen intros. This caused all kinda of havoc to figure out. Earlier versions of BSNES indicated no problems, and I had previously tested my translations on real hardware via a copier I had. So, it wasn’t until more recently that I was able to decipher the issues. First, there was a crazy issue with my sound driver. The way I was handling the FLG register, echo registers, and ordering/timing of the two caused varying problems on some hardware from distorted to no sound (even locking the game from starting). After running what seemed like billions of tests, I better understood the timing requirements of the DSP’s FLG, echo registers, and their associated functionality. I Just needed to reorder a few register writes, and add some proper delays and it was golden. Secondly, I have always tried to use a minimal initialization of the main system, but it has always gotten me into trouble. What is the minimal initialization? Well, without a real cart with immediate, direct virgin access to the hardware, it’s hard to say. All other devices (such as copiers and flash carts) influence the initialization process by running their BIOS or boot code first. I thought I had figured out the minimal answer for what I was doing, without owning a means for such access. However, it turned out I was still wrong. So, I abandoned the minimal idea and did it the right way, as I should have done years ago. Live and learn, right? Now, the splash intros are pristinly done and have been tested on a virgin cart just to be doubly sure. As an added bonus, I made the intros skippable! Now it can be properly preserved SNES software throughout the ages.

Dual Orb 2 saw an update that finally translated the monster weaknesses for the scan spell. That was something that was missed years ago. I never got to that in the last release either because it was too difficult of a fix to do years after the fact. This time I had a small breakthrough deciphering some of my ancient work that allowed me to more easily do it. I also fixed a small ‘blipping’ issue present while the 8×16 was printing. That one had annoyed me for years. It was a crazy minor tile mapping issue that I’m sure nobody ever noticed but me. I also addressed a few minor reported inconsistencies that I’ve collected since the last release. Every so often detail oriented players come along whom pay very close attention and find some new things no one else before them did. That’s a great feat all these years later after many, many people have looked at it! Congrats! The least I can do is address such issues as a reward. :)

Wozz had previously never gotten a follow-up patch. So, now it has received a new patch update that fixes all of the reported issues to date. Nothing major here, just the usual assortment of minor mistranslations, consistency fixes, etc. There was a pesky missed battle string from Vangas that has alluded me for years that I finally got. I had just a single screenshot of evidence someone sent long ago. I was never able to see this string myself nor find it via searches. At long last, I found it! It had some extra data bytes mixed in the string which hid it from all my previous searches. I never searched for the right combination. Could this be the string that would give new meaning to Vangas, Wozz, or even my life? The excitement from my conquest quickly turned to disappointment. The translation of the missed string was simply that of a generic battle cry… Boo.. Hiss… Oh well, at least the project is now at a status of no known issues. Since it seems I continue to work on my projects years and years after the fact, perhaps one day I’ll revoke the promise to myself of never touching the 8×8 again and do something nice for it. Never say never! Ha!

Emerald Dragon just got the splash intro hardware fix. There was nothing else that needed addressing. :)

http://transcorp.romhacking.net/downloads/

Heracles IV

Most of the past few months for Heracles has been spent continuing on with converting the remaining 100 submenus to 8×8 VWF. I have roughly completed all of them now. I say roughly because a handful of them cannot be finalized due to some serious problems. Basically, the conversion has been impossible on a few of these menus. I have been trying to make the impossible possible by utilizing every trick in the book, but I still need to go back to the drawing board on some of them. The biggest issue in this game is the original NMI routine exceeds all available vblank time in many instances. Actually, I believe the original game only works properly by the skin of its teeth because most of the registers written to (illegally) after vblank is over aren’t immediately visible and/or fixed in subsequent frames (with legal writes). What does this all mean? Well, it means there is absolutely NO time at all for me to load ANY tiles whatsoever, let alone the tiles I need for 8×8 VWF.

In some cases, I could wait for less busy frames. In other cases, I made some hacks to trim the original NMI routine with optimizations and throwing out things that wouldn’t have visible consequences. Even with that, there are parts in battle that run 20 scan lines over allowed vblank time EVERY frame. I have not been able to skin off enough time to get near that. Even for the frames where I have some time, I can’t get enough time to transfer any large amounts, which typically rules out pre-rendering much. These menus have no loading screen between them either, so I can’t load it during black screen or forced blank without visible consequence. These are some difficult situations to work out.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the second major problem is lack of available VRAM for tiles. I’ve even tried the painstaking hacks of rearranging where in VRAM tilemaps and tile data go. However, thanks to the heavy usage of HDMA, the game typically uses TWO tile maps and TWO tile address spaces for EACH background as it changes them mid-frame. There’s just not enough VRAM available when you have to do it like that. Even with some serious new management, the game rarely reloads tile data. It loads a bunch of tiles very early and expects it to be untouched even when not used. So, even if you have gobs of free unused tiles on the current screen, if you use them, when a later screen which needs those tiles comes, they aren’t loaded. What am I supposed to do? I can’t sit there and figure out every tile data load in the game and load it myself when it is needed. That’s just maddening!

Other than these handful of menus from hell which have no solution yet, the game would be once again ready for alpha level testing, which I usually do myself before doing a second round of beta level testing with others. So, if I can get these remaining menus working somehow, we will be ready to move into the testing phase at long last! So, let’s keep hoping I can come up with some kind of solution to these problems…

-Nightcrawler

This has been an exceptional past few months for TransCorp! I’ve accomplished more than I have in a long time. Even though I neglected to make frequent news posts, work has been steadily ongoing the entire time since the last update! The majority of time has been spent on taking Heracles IV to new heights, however I have also spent quite a bit of time cleaning up loose ends that have been hanging around for a few years.

Heracles IV

As you can see from the screenshots, things have been progressing very well on Heracles IV. Let’s refresh: All of the dialog work is done and is ready for the testing/revision phase. We were about to go alpha, however I choose to do a monumental 8×8 VWF hack that broke every single menu in the game. So, I’ve been going through and hacking each and every one of them back to working glory! I’ve gone through about 100 so far. It just so happens this is one of the most menu heavy games I’ve ever seen on the SNES. There are still about 100 more to go!

They really are coming out beautifully though. It’s starting to look like a GBA/PSX level game now. Heracles IV is turning out to be my highest quality hacking work yet. As always though, the higher the quality, the larger the time investment. There is definitely been a huge price to pay time wise, and I was having second thoughts at one time. However, now that I have come so far along and it’s looking so great, I can’t imagine it any other way. I’ve gotten most of the main and battle menus all done, so the core game is becoming fully playable again. The remaining menus encompass the monster guide, shops, letters, diaries, and maps.

There have been constant hurdles along the way with VRAM management. This game uses multiple background layers for the menus, sometimes all simultaneously full of text. Text must remain there even if not visible on screen! This is due to the fancy HDMA effects which scroll in and out leaving other menus partially viewable, temporarily hidden, etc. Since the original was tile based, the game often shared tiles amongst layers too. This makes it even more of a hacking nightmare as there are instances where there is VRAM available, but it is inaccessible. It can’t be made accessible without a painstaking hack and relocation of all of the game’s existing loads and maps that used the old area. Ugh! These are the reasons I choose not to do this on my previous translations. It’s very tedious and time consuming. It’s probably not worth it if it can be otherwise done in an acceptable fashion (It can’t for Heracles IV).

It also deserves mention that FlashPV has been working on a nice looking title screen for Heracles IV, which you can see over at ROMhacking.net. We can now rest assured that the translation will have a nice English title screen to compliment the level of the rest of the project. FlasPV is amongst the best in the business when it comes to translated title screens, so I am happy!

I am setting a goal to try and be ready for beta testing by year’s end with Heracles IV. If there are no major life setbacks, I think I can do it. The end may be in sight after all!

Wozz, Emerald Dragon, Dual Orb 2

There will soon be updated releases for all of our existing translations. They were long overdue for a maintenance release to fix some minor lingering reported issues and address compatibility with some flash carts and SNES9x. I got a flashcart of my own which has been a big help. Also, BSNES/higan was fixed to match rather than give different results like it used to. So, I was able to work out some of the mysterious issues that were occurring with the sound driver, black screen, etc. As an added bonus, the intros can now be skipped. It was a bit annoying to not be able to do so previously.

WIP patches are available on the forum for regression testing before an official release is made.

TextAngel

I hadn’t updated on TextAngel in a long time, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been being developed. You can read about some of the more recent happenings over at the forum. I am trying to take care of the oldest backlogged TransCorp projects first, so a public release will come along after some other things are completed. In the meantime, it will continue to to be developed.

-Nightcrawler

It seems to be the norm these days that every time I build up substantial momentum, life throws bricks at my head to try and stop me! Not all bricks are bad though. One of them landed me a new job this past summer, in July. It was a good brick for my career, family, and wallet. However, it was a bad brick for ROM hacking! I was kept busy for half a year with increased responsibilities and establishing my worth at my new position. The next brick hit me right in the face and really hurt. In December, a family member went terminally ill and recently passed away. As much time as possible was spent getting the family through it all these past few months. Plenty of other little bricks such as relentless snow, and other unexpected tasks came up along the way, but that’s just life unless you’re in the upper 1%!

Despite all of life’s bricks, I am determined to persevere as I always do! There have still been some interesting progress happenings of interest over the past several months. I’m not even sure if that’s grammatically correct, but I like the sound of it anyway!

Heracles IV

Basically, this project was in the alpha stage and close to beta. However, it was deemed necessary go back a few steps and break everything in efforts of getting an 8×8 VWF (proportional font) in for as many menus and screens as possible. The quality of the translation would have really suffered without it. Normally I like to show nearly finished screenshots, but being that this is a large undertaking and things will be broken for awhile, I’ve shown some down and dirty work in progress screens.

As can be seen, much progress has been made. There is still much more to go. The 8×8 VWF conversion is very difficult in this game as the menus can sometimes span all three background layers at once. They utilize numerous HDMA tables, and are extremely cramped for VRAM space thanks to the game utilizing the same regions of VRAM for multiple backgrounds. The only way to make it all work is to go through each and every sub menu and manually address where it is going, and optimized it with the parent menus to fit nicely. The game is set up in such a way that there is simply no easy way to do it.

Work will continue onwards in getting the menus all back up and running with shiny new proportional rendering. There will probably then be a second pass for performance reasons where some things may need to be converted to static rendering. I am trying to set up all screens to use a universal 8×8 rendering engine, which leads me to the next area of progress…

nuVWF

I have been attempting to leverage and salvage my nuVWF project for Heracles IV. I had previously shoved it in the closet for a long while. I have taken this opportunity to redesign the project and make something worthwhile out of it besides a set of reusable routines. You can see an update and some details from the title link above (or simply go to the forums). I don’t know if this project will ever amount to anything worth releasing, but I haven’t given up just yet!

-Nightcrawler

As promised, this update comes equipped with some fresh new screenshots of progress! Plato’s philosophies are finally in English! Wait, on second thought it would appear he is confused and suffering from an identity crisis! Well, rest assured that whatever he has to say will now be entirely in English!

Glory of Heracles IV

After Kay completed the first draft translation in the last update, much time was spent importing the whole thing into TextAngel, and getting the whole script inserted into the game. The full script is indeed inserted and working well! I even got the gobs of misc. blocks inserted that I found post-dump some time ago, as well as most menu text.

So, now we pretty much have the entire game in rough English. It’s now time for the long road of fixing issues and polishing. Although the main dialog is fine, we have a multitude of issues to work out with letters, songs, diaries, menus, saving, shops, battle, missed control codes, and many other special dialogs. I am trying to get the rest of the game in a state where the translator can at least play through (numerous glitches, but no major crashes) with proper in-game context for a second round script revision. That way he can work in parallel while I continue through with many of the aforementioned issues.

You’ll notice there are no menu screenshots. We still have much work to do on the menus. Much expansion and polishing work is needed there. They are barely functional as-is. At least they are in glitchy English though, which is progress nonetheless!

So, Heracles IV is definitely getting there. It’s still a good ways off from ready for beta testing, but we are coming around that mountain. We’ll see if life is kind to me and I can keep the momentum going. Life can be the difference of just a few more months to go, to ‘make sure you remind your grand-kids to keep checking for Heracles updates’! Only time will tell. In the meantime, join in on that Purple Parade, marching to the beat of that ‘other’ drum we all hear, but generally ignore! ;)

Text Angel

Heracles IV was a good first test exercise for TextAngel’s insertion abilities. Some development work and improvements were done on TextAngel along the way with getting the Heracles IV script inserted. It’s finally shaping up into something I am happy with. I won’t have to sit in my fickle, circular redesign hell any longer. The dumping and insertion core is working, and the project interface and supportive building blocks are coming along well enough to work nicely for this project.

There is still much to do here, but I will finally not be going backwards too much in order to go forward. I am still looking to finish implementing the latest draft of the Table File Standard for it. Full implementation is a big task for me, and Heracles IV worked fine with the partial draft implemented. It was more fun to concentrate on other areas of the program with more fruitful results.

It’s also given me a better vision of what I want to see the program do now that I am actually using it on a full scale project. I expect continued slow and steady development along side my project needs. It’s more enjoyable to develop the tool alongside a real world project, rather than remain in the test case world for so long. However, that means only features needed for the project get the real work while other areas don’t see much advancement. Part time development so-to-speak.

Nonetheless, although it is a large undertaking, I am no stranger to such projects and carry forward. I’m sure it will see an end basked in irony. By the time I finish this utility, there will probably be no more games left that need it! It’s probably about 10 years too late. It could have been revolutionary last decade! Hah! It’s an enjoyable personal endeavor nonetheless and I will at least get use from it! There’s still a number of projects that I may pull out of the hat from all these new tools I’ve been developing. We’ll see if anybody else does them before I get to them!

-Nightcrawler

I told you I’d have some news to report when next I updated and I do! I didn’t finish enough to provide some juicy new screenshots yet, but I promise that I will have some for you on the next update. First, the big news:

Glory of Heracles IV

We now have a translated script for Heracles IV! In a turn of events from out of nowhere, Kay from Heracles III translation fame, offered to translate the script. After a mounting number of previously failed translators for the project, my enthusiasm was waning. I had some initial skepticism on Kay, but he knocked it out of the park and got it done with a commanding knowledge of the Heracles universe. I’m definitely glad to have given Kay a whirl.

Now we have a completed script and I’m working on trying to get that inserted. I only had insertion bug free for 15-20% of the game from the previous translator’s efforts. TextAngel has changed quite a bit since then, so I am trying to import the new script back into the latest version in order to move forward with full insertion. This will allow me to use all the new features I have at my disposal in TextAngel. I am currently working on this and expect to continue with good progress.

While things are going great with the main dialog, neither DaMarsMan nor myself have tackled any of the menu HDMA mess. Honestly, I’ve been procrastinating this in favor of less tedious work. I’d rather finish the script insertion and work some more on TextAngel before I get into this. It is currently the elephant in the room that we need to get to sooner or later. If anybody reading this likes to untangle many HDMA tables and do limited VRAM 8×8 VWFs, I’m sure we’ll let you in on the fun if you contact us! :P

TextAngel and Tenshi No Uta

Funny how life goes. I was turning full attention to this task when Kay offered to get into Heracles IV, which I had shelved for awhile. I had to do an about face and shelve Tenshi and brush off Heracles again. My plans for TextAngel then changed as I had to begin working on the importing and insertion side rather than polishing and finishing the dumping and exporting side. So, now I’ve got a crude dumping and inserting side, but nothing is polished or finished! Doh! I will continue on with the momentum on Heracles insertion and when I’ve got it far enough to insert that script, then I’ll finally get to go back and finish the dumping side so we can get moving on the ‘newly’ (by new I mean not in the original dumps) remaining misc. text dumps in Tenshi.

Oh, what a web I’ve weaved working here and there, jumping back and forth, and gaining and losing traction. Throw in the ever nagging health issues and hurricanes, and life is pretty damn difficult sometimes. This year has been plagued with major time wasting setbacks. I will survive. I will carry on. I will deliver screenshots when I next update. I will finish these projects so long as I live! The universe cannot stop me!

-Nightcrawler

Since Koitsu was such an excellent administrator, it’s taken me a little while to get things up to compatible speed running TransCorp on this server. As a result, there’s not much news to report on any of my projects. All of my TransCorp time was devoted to the move, upgrades, and making sure we live on for many more years to come. I think that’s a worthy distraction from the meat and potatoes, right?

Let me know if you experience any issues. There’s sure to be a growing pain or two. Also take note that we have a new contact form on the left navigation bar to get in touch with me, since my parodius e-mail is now defunct.

I’ll be sure to, you know, do some actual work before the next update! March on with the purple parade, TransCorpians!

-Nightcrawler