Greetings once again. Unfortunately, every update can’t be filled with good news and this is one of those times. In fact, I’m probably going to sound like a broken record in this update. At least I got rid of those outdated Christmas lights though! After finishing work on the Emerald Dragon teaser patch, I took a small vacation from romhacking. I got back into game development and have been working on a 2d/3d Direct3D engine and working on a Mario clone as a test game. That’s been pretty fun, but don’t worry, I plan on getting back to work on Tenshi No Uta in the near future. Now, I present you with the bad news which I cleverly buffered with this more upbeat intro paragraph! I guess I did learn something at college afterall! ;)

The status of Wozz remains unchanged. It’s virtually complete minus the script. No one has volunteered to translate the Wozz script yet. Wozz will remain on the backburner until someone steps forward to translate the script. It’s a shame being that Wozz is so close to completion. If anyone is up to the challenge of translating Wozz, please contact me as soon as possible again via the board or e-mail.

With the completion of the teaser patch, all the non dialog work on Emerald Dragon has come to an end. Only polishing remains in this area. This leaves us with the script. I’m waiting on some finished script so I can work on figuring out how I’m going to get it back into the game. I have spoken to the translation and he does intend to finish the script, but has very little time to do so at this time and has recommended I either get someone to help out or possibly even take over the script. So, if anyone out there is interested in taking over the Emerald Dragon script or just helping out, let me know either on the board or via e-mail. Emerald Dragon will probably stay in hibernation until I get some script.

Right before my little vacation, I was working on dumping the script to Tenshi No Uta. It is turning out to be more difficult than I thought. I was unable to successfully separate all the text from the garbage (code/pointers/etc..) it was mixed with. When I return to romhacking work, I will get back to work on trying to get a successful script dump. I also started to do a bit of menu work on the game and will resume that as well. Due to the lack of translators on Emerald Dragon and Wozz, Tenshi No Uta has become my main focus and will get the most attention.

I got the chance to closely examine the script dump I did for Herakles IV. It turns out this is not the full script. I was unable to locate the rest of the script easily and thus it will require some more thorough investigation. The script that was dumped turned out well however, so I don’t foresee any technical problems there at this time.

So there you have it. We are in desperate need of translators for Wozz and Emerald Dragon. These games are very near to completion, but without a translator, they just continue to sit in limbo. So, spread the word! Get some translators so we can finally see an English release of Wozz and Emerald Dragon!! Hopefully, I’ll have some better news next time! Till then… TransCorp lives on!

-Nightcrawler

Happy Holidays everyone! As promised I have released something! I never let my fans down! I decided to release a teaser patch of current progress on Emerald Dragon. You can get it on the downloads page! This patch essentially has all the non dialog stuff done. This patch was released mainly for those people who play incomplete patches and as a gesture of good faith from Transcorp to show that we really are doing things here and will deliver in the end!

There are several minor glitches in this patch. Please check out the readme file for the details. I haven’t had a beta testing staff, so I’m going to rely on some of you! If you find any other glitches or things that untranslated other than those that are mentioned in the readme, please report them on the message board or in an e-mail to me!

Thanks for sticking with us this year and having faith and believing in us even though no full releases were made. Thanks for your support! Happy Holidays!

-Nightcrawler

Winter air is upon us here in the Northern Hemisphere, however along with that cold air comes a good deal of progress here at Transcorp! While there hasn’t been any deliverables to the fans as of yet this year, I plan on cooking up some sort of Christmas surprise for everyone. Unfortunately, I can’t provide you with any full releases because I just don’t have any translated scripts in my hands, but I will bring you all something nonetheless! With that said.. on to the news!

Johnny informed me that his work on Wozz was completed! This concludes all of the graphical hacking and a good deal of menu work. ChrisRPG is also close to finishing his work on Wozz as only an 8×8 VWF and some menu polishing remain! We probably could have had some sort of beta release by the end of the year if we had a script. That concludes the good news on Wozz.

The bad news is I haven’t heard from Akujin since April and I have no choice but to continue under the assumption that he may never return. If he pops up sometime with a script, that’s great, but as of now, I officially declare that Wozz has no translator and am looking for another! So, anyone who has an interesting in translating the Wozz script, pop by the message board or send me an e-mail. The script is the only thing holding this game from release!

Leaps and bounds of progress has been made on Emerald Dragon. I have hacked this game to pieces. It has turned out to be on of the most challenging and tedious games I’ve worked on to date. I have been unable to make a single change without having to hack something up to make it work. Hacks have ranged from 16 to 24-bit pointer hacks, window hacks, DMA hacks, decompression routine hacks, VRAM hacks, and almost anything else you can think of! Many hours have been put into translating all the menus and hacking in items, weapons, and armor. As you can see from the screenshots, I took a two line item approach to Emerald Dragon which is very similar to what I did with Dual Orb 2.

I finished rough hacking for the shop menus and all the main menus. A good deal of polishing still remains as well as a few missed sections as you can see. But the hard work is over for the all menus aside from the battle menus, which I haven’t done yet. The script is also coming along well. 50 blocks have been completed totaling about 16% or so. The progress page for Emerald Dragon was updated to reflect up to date progress. I’m going to attempt to finish up the menu work in the coming weeks so the only thing holding back this game will be the script.

Tenshi No Uta has also seen a good deal of progress lately. I wrote a decompressor, found and decompressed the entire script, and have been working on a dumper. This game needs a custom dumper to handle text extraction from its complex scripting blocks handling much more than just text. With a little more investigation and fixing up, I will dump the rest of the script and send it off to a potential translator and begin work on the menus. The dialog work was already mostly complete from several months ago and a pretty large chunk of progress has been completed.

I’ll see you all again for a Christmas update next month. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be providing, but I’ll be providing something! I predict that hacking work will be completed soon after the new year on Wozz, Emerald Dragon, and with a little luck Tenshi No Uta also. Translated Scripts are holding things back. In any event, at long last we’ll be seeing some more releases come out of Transcorp, which have been a long time in the making!

-Nightcrawler

Once again, it’s been ages since I’ve updated. That’s basicaly due to the fact that everytime I want to update, I keep thinking I want to get one more thing done first and that one thing ends up leading to another thing and another etc.. That and increased time spent with a special certain someone ;) So, I finally drew the line in the sand and here’s the update!

To start things off, I’ve updated the links page with several new links. I’ve been wanting to do that for a very long time now. I’ve added people I should have had on there a long time ago as well as a few SNES development sites!

Focus has shifted to Emerald Dragon recently and much work has been accomplished. As you can see from the screenshots, I’ve been hacking away at the menus! They have been a nightmare plauged with various technical problems. Some of them still remain as you can see from the screenshots. I attempted to expand every menu and put in full text, but I ran into some limitations in VRAM(which would be a nightmare to get around and I won’t touch it) as well as actual screen space limitations. I may need to make the move to a smaller font to finish the menus. This will save on VRAM space AND screen space. Unfortunately, that means redoing all the menus with the new font table(The menus now share the dialog routines and tables.) I’d rather no have to do that, but it looks like it may be necessary. In any event, the menus are coming along nicely.

In other ED news I have at long last dumped the entire script! After battling with one of the worst text storage systems ever, I have finally gotten it all out! At this point I actually have a potential translator to do the script. We’ll have to see how that works out. I don’t even want to think about the inserter at this point.

Due to ChrisRPG’s hardships over the past couple of months, Johnny’s focus shift to his other projects, and my lack of drive to fix that nasty inserter bug and work on ED instead has left Wozz progress on vacation for the past few months! All three of us are ready to get back to business though. Estimates from ChrisRPG and Johnny call for them to finish up their work on the project by fall(which translates into hopefully this year in reality =) ) and other than fixing that nasty inserter bug and polishing things up, I can’t do a thing because Akujin is missing again. Never fear, he’s been missing for months at a time before, so I expect him to turn up eventually. I think he took a haitus last summer without telling anyone. Wozz is so close, yet so far from completion.

Next up on the horizon, aside from more ED menus, is to dump the script to Tenshi No Uta and Herakles IV. These projects sure do take a long time, but things are still moving forward as always! So, with that in mind I bid you all farewell until the next update!

-Nightcrawler

Well, as you can see, the sight has gotten a major facelift for the first time in nearly a decade! Well.. about 8 years to be exact. I designed the base of this page in late 1996! The entire site was upgraded and VALIDATED to the latest CSS and XHTML Strict standards! That was quite the task being that the pages were coded in broken HTML transitional to begin with! I think it’s a major improvement and to celebrate we have a patch release! We also have some great progress to report on Wozz. So, read on!

Although Transcorp is looking new, we’re going retro too with a new Dual Orb 2 patch release! That’s right.. almost a year and half after the initial release, here are new patches(for both A and B version)! At long last, the Hilandian Church bug has been fixed along with many script bugs. I would list what was fixed, but I lost my list long ago. The reason this patch took so long was I always meant to fix more bugs, but never did. So, I compiled what fixes I did implement and decided to release a final patch. These patches are for a ROM *WITH* a header since I play on a copier.

It should also be noted that NSRT and GoodSNES now show that the ROM my patch was based on was an overdump! this new set of patches works on BOTH the original overdump and the correctly dumped ROM! Thanks goes out to Nach for the initial information and for finally getting my butt in gear! This will be the official final release of Dual Orb 2. Remaining bugs/issues will not be fixed, most notably the Scan spell text. I have no more desire to work on Dual Orb 2. So, go get the new patches from the download page!

First, I’d like to apologize for glorifying ChrisRPG’s contributions to the Wozz project last week and not give any credit to another individual involved in the project who has done even MORE work! That man.. is Johnny! Johnny needs no words said.. this list of things accomplished speaks for itself! Wozz is destined to have one hell of a quality release showing the passion and talent of all of us involved in the project. So, here’s what magic Johnny has been able to add to the magical land of wozz!

Hot on the heels of his already astounding progress he plans on implementing a few two line hacks for items and descriptions etc. as well as be involved with ChrisRPG on a possible 8×8 VWF font. It looks like the 8×8 stuff is all in good hands with these guys!

Nothing major to report as far as my other projects go. I came down with a case of pneumonia for about 2 months and then I spent too much time on the website redesign, but it was a nice break from hacking! That’s about it for this time! Goodbye! *Poof*

-Nightcrawler

I didn’t realize how much time had gone by without an update. There have been plenty of things going on early on here in the new year! So, I thought it be about time I let people know! Now that I’ve got several projects going and lots of progress, I had to section out the update by game. One day when I feel motivated, I’m going to revamp the site a bit to make updates cleaner and page up to date! Anyway, on to the updates!

The biggest news this update comes from Tenshi No Uta! I have been hard at work and decompressed all fonts in the game. This game even had compressed Kanji banks. It was definitely irksome to deal with a game where every single letter in the game was compressed to some degree.

As you can see I slapped in a test English font and went to work hacking the font routine to be VWF. And by the screenshot, you can clearly see it was a complete success! So, bar any discovered bugs, font routine hacking is complete.

The next thing scheduled for Tenshi will be coding a decompresser for the dialog script. This game uses a scripting block type(no pointers) like Wozz, but at first glance seems less complex. Nonetheless, it’s going to take some time to do. After that it’s script dumping time!

Progress moves right along fairly well here. ChrisRPG has been doing a great job with all the 8×8 stuff and menu expansions. He’s completed a great deal and is more than half way through in my estimate.

Akujin has recently contacted me with a script update. He’s currently 75% done with first round draft of the script. After he’s completed that, the script will under go a second revision and be looked over by various individuals. It’ll still take some time, but work on Wozz is beginning to head toward the end.

Speaking of the script, there are still a few bugs to work out in the inserter before it’s ready for the script. These bugs are due to complications of the scripting system used in Wozz. I’m working on it, but not with very much motivation! :) I hope to have it completed in timely fashion to be ready to insert the translated script when I get it. That’s next on my list for things to do with Wozz.

I have been working in collaboration with Bongo on this one to get the font decompressed and script decompressed. The font came out great, but I have yet to verify the script. At first glance, everything appears to be in good shape, but needs some further scrutiny.

After I’m convinced I’ve decompressed the script, I’ll procceed to dump it! This is a little lower priority at this point, so give it some time.

Emerald Dragon has been in hibernation of sorts due to being plagued with several technical issues and other problems which I’m not going to get into. The point is, after getting some new found motivation from one of the guys currently working on the PCE-CD version(I didn’t ask for permission to give a name yet.) I am going to be pulling this one off the backburner!

We have found that the PCE-CD and SFC versions of this game are very technically similar despite being on different platforms. We have been sharing knowledge about this game to the greater good of getting Emerald Dragon done. It’s just so beautiful when hackers work together.. I think I might shed a tear.. ;)

I plan on coming up with a solution to dump the entire script to this game finally instead of manually ripping each bank which is very sloppy hacking practice I admit. ;) It’s just been tough to do. After that, I’m going to attempt to rip all the menus out of the game and relocate them to somewhere with some space. Yes, that’s going to be a hell of a lot harder than I just made it sound! :) I just can’t work with the menus where they are. They are plagued with space limitations and control codes out the rear and I’m fed up with it. I need to a develop a new more efficient system for those as well.

As you can see, lots of things have been going on and things are zipping on along. As always, anyone wishing to help out on any of these games just let me know on the message board or via e-mail. The more people we have working, the faster things get done. ;) It also allows me to focus on the more difficult issues where my talents are really needed rather than wasting time on the more trivial matters.

That’s it for this update. I’m off to crawl in the night once again…

-Nightcrawler

Happy Holidays Everyone! It’s been awhile since the last update and a lot of things have happened and theres a lot to cover. The biggest news of course you already saw! There has been lots of progress on Wozz! Transcorp has teamed up with RPGOne to bust this game out faster in top notch quality as exemplified by the screenshots above! I have worked hard to dump the script, get it out to Akujin who returned from the dead, code and inserter and stick text back in the game! The dialog portion of the hacking is nearing completion and I am anxiously awaiting a translated script from Akujin.

ChrisRPG from RPGOne has been handling the expansion of menus and all 8×8 related material. He’s already expanded and translated several menus and will soon be inserting the 8×8 text. Future plans from Chris involve a 2-line item hack and a possible 8×8 VWF! Things are already looking very good and he’s done great work so far!

TWO new projects have been started and added to Transcorp. The English screenshot above is from Herakles no Eikou 4 and significant progress is already underway! The second screenshot is from Tenshi No Uta! Tenshi No Uta is by the same developers who eventually turned into the famed ‘Wolf Team’. It also has the same musical composer as Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean. Both of these games are definitely deserving of an English translation and that’s what I’m going to give to you! You can get the details on both of these new projects and take a look at some screenshots on their respective Project Pages! I urge you all to check out the screenshots of these two games! Very nice looking!

Great things are once again happening here at Transcorp the future looks very bright. Happy Holidays everyone!

-Nightcrawler

Greetings to all! Lately, it seems as if the entire translation scene has gone dormant. Just like everywhere else, not much has been happening here either, but we do have some orders of business to attend to. I have no choice but to break the silence of the translation scene! :)

It seems something has happened to Akujin. He has been MIA for many months now and I have been unable to contact him. No one else has been able to contact him either as far as I know. It’s to the point now where I sadly must look to find another translator. As of right now, the entire 8×8 stuff is dumped and awaiting translation. It’s a big obstacle to getting menu’s done. Akujin was very enthusiastic to do the script, but the show must go on. In the event he returns, I’m sure there will be plenty for him to do. So, any takers on the 8×8 stuff?

The main script is not ready yet, and several small, but largely annoying issues must be worked out still. It’s a nagging never ending problem. The script can be dumped in it’s entirety, however I have no means to re-insert it at this time because I have been unable to figure out exactly how the game finds the text it needs. Such a small problem is posing to be a giant obstacle. If anyone wants to lend some technical assistance, let me know.

Thus far, it has been a rather uneventful year, but such is life I guess. We may yet still see some good action before the year is out though. For the dozens and dozens of Transcorp fans.. you may want to give the message board a try before it dries up and blows away. Make some noise. Let it be the first in a movement to breath some life into this desolate translation scene. It ain’t dead yet! I know you people are out there! I see the hit counter increase here and at the whirlpool, so I know you exist! Enjoy your day! Ladies and Gentleman..

Nightcrawler, the Dark Angel of Romhacking has left the building..

-Nightcrawler

It’s been way to long since an update and way too long since anything significant has happened. The fact is, after I graduated college and now have 6 months of full time work under my belt, work sucks and takes up way too much of my time. I don’t even get a fraction of the amount of time I’d like to devote to hacking. In any event, My fire still burns.. and progress continues.

I’ve got some surprise help working on Wozz with me which will be revealed in the future when we have something good to show from our newfound partnership. Things are moving along slowly. One big obstacle that must be overcome is text storage. Even though all the compression has been worked out, it is still a mystery as to how the game locates it’s string pointers. That’s the last hurdle left preventing dumping of the entire script.

Emerald Dragon has seen some progress as well. The VWF bug which was hanging things up was fixed and progress continued on menu work. The menu’s use a very strange storage method also making things difficult to expand and slow everything down. No new screen shots on the menus yet because a good amount of work is still left on them.

One a side note, I am also in the process of moving and if any of you have ever moved before, it takes up a good deal of time to pack and move all your stuff. Between working and moving, ROM hacking doesn’t get much of the time pie :) Help is still welcome if there are any takers.

Things may be rough and slow, but my fire still burns and my desire is still there. So, for my dozens and dozens of fans, do not worry for I shall not let you down!

-Nightcrawler

I had a very texual experience with Wozz. With built in support for automatic line wrapping, VWF, indenting, dictionary support, and a host of other little features found in the text routine, I was filled with pleasure. Wozz seems to be every hackers dream. So I went to work right away.

Because Wozz used a one-two punch compression scheme mainly LZxx first, then dictionary on the uncompressed data from that, I needed some utilities to handle it. I coded a dictionary ripper, to rip the dictionary to my table, I then coded a new more flexible dumper to work in conjunction with my de-compressor and proceeded to dump some sample Wozz text. After a few small formatting issues are worked out, I will dump the entire thing. I have contacted Akujin and he has agreed to translate Wozz! So, the script will continue to be dumped and shipped out to Akujin.

I have also begun work on the menus. The menu’s are very straightforward. I’m looking for some helping hands who would like to help take care of the menu’s for me. Time is just so limited now a days for this veteran hacker. If I only had as much time to devote to this hobby as I did back in ‘96! Ah, those were the days. Anyway, despite time issues, I still have a lot of ambition left, so progress continues!

Things are pretty stagnant on the Emerald Dragon front. With the recent departure of D-boy from the scene and my texual experience with Wozz, and lack of help, Emerald Dragon is temporarily on hold. I need to work out some bugs in my VWF code that are holding back menu insertion, and finish dumping more script which is considerably more tedious than my other projects. So, again anyone wanting to help out, let me know.

That’s about all the news I’ve got to report. Nothing too noteworthy, but I feel as though I have an obligation to the dozens… and dozens of Transcorp fans! =) That and I know people like to the old ‘I’m not dead’ update. Enjoy the day!

-Nightcrawler