KingMike updates

[KingMike]

Sorry Nightcrawler, I almost forgot about this place after I updated my PC some time ago and had manually updated my bookmarks.

I spent way too much time watching TwitchPlaysPokemon this year. That was like crack and reintroduced another Poke-addiction so that's what delayed progress.

Still stuff I have to work on:
Light of Indra (as I mentioned, I did finish a beta-test playthrough, I did a walkthrough on youtube but I can't recall if I finished annotating it. Part of the reason to hope people would watch and give suggestions on the enemies and spells, kind of the last part I needed)
Tower Dream: Been doing more work on this lately. It looks like most of the text can be made VWF with one routine. This game oddly uses ShiftJIS (odd for an SFC game) but seems like I need to hack nearly every window to make it supports its publisher's namesake ASCII , as well as proper function of the VWF.
Maka-maka
3x3 Eyes
Ginga no sannin
Little Magic (FC SRPG, not the same as the SFC/GBC puzzle game of the same name): missing story mode cutscene translations

The smaller projects I've procrastinated:
GS Mikami
Paris-Dakar Rally Special
Space Hunter
Puzzl'n! (Puzzlen Desu)
Battle Zeuqe Den
Super Monkey Adventure
Gangan-Ganchan
Coron Land
Hammerin' Harry (SNES). I should be able to do this. The only trouble I forsee is the title but I suppose if I get the text inserted/tested (had a translation for forever) and all it probably wouldn't be too hard to find someone wanting to design a title as its somewhat of a cult franchise.

What I'd like to get started:
Momotarou Densetsu Gaiden: after I released a patch for the FC original, the logical step does seem to be the FC version of the spinoff.
As well as the sequel MDII. Though I'd probably like to do the PS version of that, me hacking PS games is probably a dream at this point. Though I eventually managed to at least find some text, the immediate problem I'd have is finding the font.
I can do Shin Momotarou for the SFC. Needs menu work, needs a translator but at least the text is dumped.

Some I plan to work on at some point:
Day of the Idea (might as well do the spiritual sequel to Maka-maka if the first gets one. Though it's probably a danger to say this as I know one guy was demanding this quite awhile ago)
Chachamaru Boukenki 3: Tower of the Abyss (kind of neat puzzle-heavy action-RPG for the Game Boy). Currently doing an initial playthrough in Japanese (as best I can, though its thankfully going well so far as it seems fairly linear) and mapping it out.
Trinia (action game by the makers of the Aretha series. Seems kind of fun though perhaps could use a bit of touch-up like the camera)

Less likely:
LaSalle Ishi no Child's Quest. I'd be kind of surprised if Pennywise or aishsha (sp? ) weren't working on this or planning to, they seem to be making good work tackling the obscure FC RPG library.
Mito Koumon. 2 obscure Goemon-like games by Sunsoft for Famicom. I dumped at least the first game.

SD Gundam Gaiden SFC. Perpetually in the effectively-fully-hacked but lack-of-translation stage.

Too complicated:
I have mostly dumped scripts between Elnard and 7th Saga, trying to aim for some sort of patcher that would insert the latter into the former, but the script/pointers are not stored nicely at all.
Dragon Slayer 1 SFC. I'd like to play this but the script is pretty messy.
Kabuki Rocks. I really want to make a translation patch of this game but it also suffers from nasty scripting. I recall getting as far as dumping/identifying script codes for the entire intro sequence. Could be doable eventually but of course don't expect progress for years probably. Goemon 3 SFC in similar state.

[Nightcrawler]

Great to see you're still active KingMike! I thought you may have been slowing down like me.

S-JIS encompasses much of the ASCII single byte range. Every S-JIS SNES game I've seen already has support for a single byte characters. What problem are you running into with the menus?

Day of the Idea is one crazy looking game. I've had my eye on that for awhile. It would be cool to see that done.

What is Shin Momotarou about story-wise? I remember playing that for awhile before.

With Elnard and even some of the other ones that you have script difficulty with, I almost always use string relocation so I don't need to decipher all of the scripting commands and the original remains in tact. You need only need to know how to locate the text, which is usually only accessed a handful of different ways or commands. When you insert back in, you'd add a relocation control code in the original string's location relocating the string to anywhere you choose. No need to deal with any non-text commands, relative pointers, jumps, or any of that stuff. The game chugs along like normal on the original block jumping out for the text and back in and continues as normal. It's really saved me much time over the years. Some of those scripting engines have 256 different commands. I don't have time to decipher all that!

Even hardcoded strings embedded within assembly code can usually be identified via a pattern saving you much time and work.

[Garrett]

aishsha and I aren't working on that Child's Quest game. It's true we've worked on a bunch of obscure Japanese Famicom RPGs, but that game is one that hasn't been on our radar.

[KingMike]

Great to see you're still active KingMike! I thought you may have been slowing down like me.

S-JIS encompasses much of the ASCII single byte range. Every S-JIS SNES game I've seen already has support for a single byte characters. What problem are you running into with the menus?

Can't remember pretty sure it crashes with ASCII. So I have to make a routine to check if it's ASCII, and if it is convert it to the J-ASCII (2-byte Shift-JIS) value (which the game does accept). And of course update the code that increments the pointer by 2 to increment by the appropriate amount.

The stupid thing Elnard/7th Saga does is it stores the text pointers as part of the sprite definition data. If a sprite has an ID for a NPC, it will have a text pointer with it (including hidden items, which are invisible sprites).
I had to use text relocation for Nadia for Genesis. (though that game not only stored the text pointers within the event data but the window size as well. So I had to put in a hack to override the original window size data if it detected a typical-sized dialogue window so I didn't have to change that for every single text box in the game. Considering that game is essentially a top-down point-and-click adventure, that's a lot of text windows. )

Haven't played too much of Momotarou but the good thing is that it practically supports VWF out of the box (just needs a minor hack).
The bad is that the menus are formatted to assume the font is a constant 12 pixels. (or we get jagged borders and probably misaligned cursors)
And it crashes if the items are longer than 8 characters, even if the original pixel width isn't exceeded.
If I understood HDMA one thing I'd like to do if it can be done is to add shading to the battle windows. The game uses outlines to make the text readable but I don't know how well that would work with VWF. I suppose the best that could be done to mess with the outlines to see if it can be turned into a shadow.

The other thing I had been looking at was manual preservation. byuu wanted to scan all his but quickly realized the time investment was more than he could afford, especially with his high standards (though he said he'd probably only share them with an actual archival institution, for fear of the, probably low, chance someone would sue him for copyright infringement over 20 year old documentation. But his decision. ) Hope he at least scanned the ultra-rare stupidly-expensive books though.
I also have a mountain of SNES and SFC manual scans (over 350 IIRC, including a small number of moderately expensive/rare SFC games, and a handful of choice JP games on other consoles) I planned to submit to an appropriate site. But the work editing the scans is scary when I look at it.
(and I need to at some point get a new scanner for maybe a dozen or so more I've gotten this year)
I had only scanned as far as what could be considered "retro" JP (my few GBA games and one GC game). Undecided if it's now time to consider NDS acceptable.
(I know at least first-party 3DS manuals don't even qualify as manuals anymore. )
I got a ton of English GBA and NDS games I've bought CIB, but I think those are much lesser scanning priority as there's more info on the Internet about those games.

[Nightcrawler]

I didn't know byuu had quit his manual preservation project. That's unfortunate. It's a worthwhile effort to get these manuals preserved. Too bad I only have the bandwidth to preserve ROM hacks!

What sites are you thinking about submitting your manuals too? I'm not sure what the most appropriate place would be. VGMuseum comes to mind,  but as I check there, I see you already contributed there! haha

I wonder if Evan over at SNESCentral is interested in such a thing?

[MariusB]

Hey KingMike, that's an absolutely mind-blowing list of projects! Some interesting stuff there, like Little Magic... IIRC, you were also working on Akuma-kun (FC), right? That's the one I'd like to see translated the most I think, as I enjoyed the anime/manga a lot. Light of Indra also sounds pretty interesting, if I dare say so myself. Have you made any progress with them? Good luck to you!