Translations: Jesus 3 Days Later Edition Released

[RHDNBot]

Update By: Pennywise

Some five years after Niahak released his patch for Jesus, we present a brand new patch and experience. For those who played the original release, we recommend that you give this patch a spin as it is an entirely different experience from the first patch. Nothing short of excellence. Thanks to sin_batsu for the sweet title screen and rveach for the invaluable compression assistance.

Some housekeeping items:

We have scanned the Japanese manual and was hoping someone could photoshop in a translation so we could release an English manual sometime in the future.

Also, it would be nice if someone proficient in Java or some other high-level language that's cross-platform could port ROM Expander Pro so that users outside of Windows don't have difficulty in applying our patch. Program source is publicly available to those interested in helping.

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link: (http://yojimbo.eludevisibility.org/)

[hugues]

Thanks for creating this patch - I've been itching for another Snatcher style game.

I've written a couple of ROM and save state editors in C# and Java. Porting the backend of ROM Expander Pro to Java wouldn't be too painful but for cross-platform UIs you're stuck with Swing which is both ugly and painful. Whenever Oracle ports JavaFX to Mac & Ubuntu it would be a much better option. It might be fun to try this anyway so PM sometime and we can talk about it, I'd need help testing because I'm not familiar with the tool.

[pelham123]

Graphic designer here with a bit of spare time, what exactly would you need me to do with the manual?

[Dragomorph]

Hey, I started playing the patch.  Good translation, except I went into the first room on Floor 1 of the Nebula and all the dialogue reverted to the dialogue when talking to Commander Ali.  Is this just a problem with my ROM, or did some pointers go screwy?

[Pennywise]

Yeah, I see that, but it's only a problem for folks who are playing on Nestopia or a Powerpak. Works fine on FCEUX, but I still want to fix this issue.

Although it is the preeminent NES emulator for debugging features, FCEUX and other emulators aside from Nestopia don't emulate the littlest of intricacies that would render a hack unplayable on hardware. So of course this is news to me and unfortunately I can't debug the problem as Nestopia features no debugger. For some reason my hack to split the text between banks in the expanded area is not working. I'm sure the code is executing properly, but just no banks are being swapped.

Seems to happen in Nintendulator as well. Looks like I figured out the problem. I need to add some extra code to select which 256K chunk I want with the hijacked CHR bit.

[Niahak]

Graphic designer here with a bit of spare time, what exactly would you need me to do with the manual?

I'm not familiar with the details of what's involved... but we have scans of the original manual in Japanese, and we'd like to release an equivalent PDF/imageset in English (whether by editing the images in situ somehow, or using the artwork and layout of the instruction manual to create a new one).  I can handle all the translation stuff no problem, but I'm not good with how to go about making something like that look decent.

[meunierd]

http://hastebin.com/gulutekaqu -- python implementation of ROM Expander Pro

NOTE: MD5 is optional, but if you supply one and it's wrong, you'll get an error. In this case, remove the '0' from the SIZE line or replace it with the proper MD5.

You should just be able to stick it in the same folder as the appropriately named rom, and run it from your file manager on linux or the cli on OS X.

Also I haven't tested this on any of your patches that use REPLACE, (can't remember any off the top of my head) but it definitely works for all the COPY/FILL ones.

For windows, you can just save it as expansion.pyw and you should be able to run it from Explorer by double clicking. I'd appreciate it if people tried.

[Kiyoshi Aman]

Use py2exe to generate Windows binaries.

[Gideon Zhi]

... or you could just use xdelta? Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't xd support data relocation like this would need?

[Pennywise]

I'm all about keeping old and outdated traditions around and will continue to use IPS for patching formats.

Incidentally, I've never used xdelta, so I have no idea how it works, but it seems like overkill and blasphemous to use for an NES game.

[Gideon Zhi]

I actually intend to start releasing in _both_ formats (included in the same zip), I just release so infrequently these days that I keep forgetting.

[Pennywise]

Yes, got this issue under control. I'll release an updated patch in the near future and will also be complaining to the FCEUX devs for letting me think my assumptions were correct, when in fact they were wrong.

[Dwedit]

The text speed is a little slow.  When you switch from Hiragana to English, you usually need to double the text speed to compensate.

Also a bug in the password screen:


It's using an uninitialized tile for the spaces.  It often shows up as a 2.

[Pennywise]

The text speed is a little slow.  When you switch from Hiragana to English, you usually need to double the text speed to compensate.

I looked into this briefly, but since I don't really know how text speed works on the NES and consequently have no idea what to look for, I dropped it.

[KingMike]

One likely place to start is the NMI routine. See if there's some sort of counter that gets decremented each time.
It's likely there's some sort of delay that says to wait for so many NMIs between characters.

Aside from IRQs (which most mappers don't have), that's really the only way the CPU can judge real-time. (that or Sprite 0 Hit, but I don't see that as much aside from games that use it to scroll the screen independent of the HUD. Superman (Kemco) is one example, that method is detectable because it places a dummy sprite at the far edge of the screen at the scanline where the HUD ends and the main game screen begins.)

[heratio]

Playing this on VirtuaNES also creates some of the problems mentioned before, using dialog from the crew members when they are first introduced much later in the story.

[Nightcrawler]

Aside from IRQs (which most mappers don't have), that's really the only way the CPU can judge real-time.

It's also entirely possible to have precisely timed delays entirely in the normal program flow via loops by simply accounting for cycle timing of each instruction. I've both seen and done this inside and outside of ROM hacking. Your hardware timers and interrupts are the preferred timing source, but this is another possible avenue that can be used for various reasons.

[Pennywise]

I figured out the text speed. I'm considering leaving the normal text speed alone unless people don't mind the rapid-firing beeping sounds. I'm thinking the best solution is just to increase the fast forward speed and be done with it. Also new patch soon, but needs to be tested and probably include the manual in the archive as well.

[KingMike]

Optional extra patch, maybe?

In my Deep Dungeon 3 hack, I made fast printing an option. (actually, an option to auto-apply the effect of holding B in the normal game: fast printing and no sound)

[Pennywise]

Ok folks, before I release an updated patch, I'd like to make sure everything is working properly. To that end I'd appreciate if some of you could play the current release candidate and tell me if it works properly or not. So if you want the latest version, please pm or something and I'll send it to you.