Worth releasing?

[KingMike]

Today I figured something I should've done a long time ago. Edit Magna Braban's dialouge outside of the ROM, so I don't have to worry about pointers and stuff screwing up the game.

Well, I made a prog to quickly whip up empty files of a specific size. Is there already some sort of a command to do this? If there was, well, I guess I wasted 2 minutes of my life. But if not, then, um, YEAH.

[Nightcrawler]

I don't quite understand what you've done.

Why do you need empty files of different sizes?

Usually.. the script files you get back from the translator are the ones that are inserted in the game.. so you can edit those files all you want.. and insert them when you're done.

Or insert what you have.. then make more changes to the original files and insert the next draft of the script etc..

It sounds to me as perhaps you don't have an inserter for the game?

[KingMike]

Actually, the translation files are in MS Word, and that includes both the Japanese and translation.
Why the manual insertion: It also uses DTE, which I don't know an effective way to build an inserter for.
So what I did this program for:
I made a program so I can re-construct a bank of data, fiddle with the text in that, make sure it fits, and re-insert.
Although, I suppose to finalize the DTE table, I should dump the unoptimed text to a plain text file (to get a single-tile script from the DTE insertion, and use DTESeek(?) to get an optimal table made, then retype the whole thing (unless I figure out an effective way to build a DTE insertor before that).

[Nightcrawler]

It's not that difficult to add DTE to your inserter.  As soon as you make your inserter able to do more than one byte lookups, you're already there.  You're going to have a table like this..
A4=Y
A5=Z
FE00=King
FE01=Mike

You're going to want the multibyte enteries(DTE) to have search priorities, so you're going to scan for those first.  If no complete match is found, you go to the single byte ones and insert like normal.  If you have already coded an inserter, you should be well on your way and be able to add support for DTE with not all that much difficulty.  The hardest part will be spending a little time to debug the code and make sure it works consistently all round.  That's the basic idea.  If you want, I can give you some code example if I have time.

[KingMike]

Ok, I've now had some experience in the multi-tile text encoding department.

Namely, Banana Prince for NES. This game uses substring encoding. I tried manually inserting text, but when it took me about 10 minutes to optimize about 5 lines of text, I decided to try and work out a solution program. I also figured out the whacko pointering stuff in it.
Yeah!!

[Nightcrawler]

Thanks for sharing! You get a cookie!  

Screenshots?

[KingMike]

Still just an encoder, not yet inserter, I think the problem I had before was when I would write to a file (back to Dream Maze font reinserter, the old data's erased.

The translator gave me a text file translation, which was not dumped from the ROM, so I'll need to still rewrite the text file to put text in the order that the ROM stores it in.

I believe I want to use "r+" as the file-access mode for the ROM, correct?

[Gideon Zhi]

Hey KingMike, find me on ICQ or IRC (#aeongen on irc.darkmyst.org) later today, like, after 6 or 7 PM or so EST. I've got some stuff that might be useful for you :)

[KingMike]

Nightcrawler:
Here's a few shots of text auto-inserted:

I thought of using the shadowed English characters from the Japanese ROM, but I must have placed this text into a backup of the German ROM, with the original font.





Yeah, that casino one makes no sense, but that's because I guess I still got issues to figure out with how the strings are accessed. It's pointers to blocks of sequential strings. I thought it just counted end-of-string characters. Maybe it also counts end-of-lines?

Gideon: Well, I didn't get the message until this morning. I'll try again tonight. Thanks.

[Nightcrawler]

Looks good.  I don't think shadowed fonts really work for 8x8 NES text very well.  Just makes it harder to read. You're just too limited in color on NES.

When are ya gonna resume work on Magna Braban? I think that's my favorite project of yours

[p3arl-jam]

Magna Braban? i need help here

[KingMike]

I should work on Magna Braban more this summer, as that is what I've got the most translated files for (all non-dialouge, 2/3 dialouge).

SD Gundam comes second, as I have translations of much of the non-dialouge stuff.

Shell Monsters Story last. But most menu-related hacking is done. The only real ASM hacking left is attempting to increase the size of the "field" for dialouge to appear in (the game autoformats to 16 characters per line, 4 lines on the dialouge window. I'd like to make it at least 20 or 22 characters per line).

p3arl-jam, Magna Braban is an SNES RPG. Instead of command-menu-style battle, the game's charaters fight automatically, but it is the player's job to set which actions they could possibly take in battle (I guess you could say you're in control of their AI), giving the game a more strategic element than most RPG games.

[p3arl-jam]

like ogre battle i gues ?

[TechMaster]

Similar, but there's some differences.

In Ogre battle, player is stationary.  In Magnum Barren, you'll actually see them moving around freely.  Also, Ogre Battle is a SLG while MB is RPG with random encounters.

[KingMike]

Looks good.  I don't think shadowed fonts really work for 8x8 NES text very well.  Just makes it harder to read. You're just too limited in color on NES.

When are ya gonna resume work on Magna Braban? I think that's my favorite project of yours

A bit of a future letdown here. Tomato said on his  board that he doesn't have time to translate the last section of script. Though I still need to complete the parts I have.
Anybody around here able and willing to finish it? It's about 31KB ROM/60KB SJS of kana love.