Lupin III - Hunt for the Legendary Treasure! (SNES)

I think an update on this is overdue. It isn't a very substantial one, but I know at least jojuinc would be curious about what's been happening.

• I've got decent progress on writing a 65816 assembler. It shouldn't be very long before it's good enough to assemble my code for Lupin, whereupon work on Lupin itself should resume almost immediately.
• I've bought an SNES PowerPak as a part of a promise to myself to have Lupin finished or almost finished by the time it arrives (which will likely be the end of January). This way I can witness/test my work on the actual hardware.
• I cannot guarantee anything about when the hack will be finished. Again, I hope to be done by the end of January, but no guarantees. (Especially not if I keep getting distracted by Sam & Max! ) I will, however, state that I will not publicly release the hack until it is 100% to my satisfaction, or at least as close to 100% as it's going to get. The reason is people would probably rush to download whatever version came out first and probably not bother to get an updated version when one is released -- I'd much rather people experience the hack as it was meant to be. Still, I'm hoping it won't be an unreasonably long time before it's ready.
• Not news per se, but I don't think I've ever mentioned it: this will be a fully "open source" hack with all materials used to make it freely available. If you think you could make a better translation than mine, it would be reasonably easy to do so. Though, again, this will only be after the hack is finished.

So hang in there guys, it'll come out eventually.

Gee, I missed this the first time around.  I heard the game was supposed to be vaguely like Super Metroid.

It makes me wonder why no one has apparently released a patch before now.  Was the game text compressed at all?

Gee, I missed this the first time around.  I heard the game was supposed to be vaguely like Super Metroid.

Vaguely, yes. It's structured into levels rather than being a single large world, so perhaps closer to Castlevania. The gameplay gets rather repetitive for my taste at times, but I'm sure some people will like it.

It makes me wonder why no one has apparently released a patch before now.

Dunno. I figure part of it is the game was forgotten once the Lupin craze ended. Overall, the game hasn't proven overly difficult to hack for an experienced hacker like me. I'm only taking my sweet time because WLA is broken and I'm too stubborn to use xkas...

Was the game text compressed at all?

No, but the text was tricky to find because the charset is 16-bit (little-endian) and non-contiguous, like this:

0000-0F00: 　あいうえおかきくけこさしすせそ
2000-2F00: たちつてとなにぬねのはひふへほま

Notice how it skips over 1000-1F00. That's because trying to print them will print gibberish characters (the lower halves of the characters in the first row combined with the top halves of the characters in the second). I didn't find the text until I reverse-engineered the code enough to find where it was pulling the text data from. Once I found a block of text in the ROM, though, it was just a matter of changing bytes and seeing what they printed.

The font, on the other hand, was compressed. But instead of bothering with decoding the compression, I took a suggestion from Lakmir (a.k.a. Gideon Zhi) and simply stored an uncompressed font in one of the game's many blocks of free space and just had the game load that at the appropriate time.