Messages

1

Personal Projects / Re: Survival Kids 2: Escape the Twin Islands

« on: April 22, 2013, 11:35:08 am »

@Zynk Oxhyde: I do, but so far haven't found it necessary; there are globs of unused space in the ROM to point to. For instance, the menu screen stats now look like this...



(Incidentally, the first game's English translation used a single letter for each stat instead, like 'L' for Life, so I think we're doing pretty good).

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Newcomer's Board / Re: "Half" compressed GBC titlescreen?

« on: April 16, 2013, 12:57:49 pm »

Thank you both for the explanations! I vaguely recall hearing about RLE (Runtime-Length Encoding or something like that, I think?) - I'll read up on it and see if that's the case here.

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Newcomer's Board / "Half" compressed GBC titlescreen?

« on: April 15, 2013, 07:33:23 pm »

Hello all,

Just trying to improve my understanding of compression. I've been toying around with a GBC game and have finally figured out where some of the graphics are. As an example, here's a picture of the tile of a box's upper right corner.


What's interesting to me is that the first 5 'lines' of the tile correspond to the graphic, but the last 3 are a jumbled mess. Furthermore, changing the colors anywhere in the first five lines makes the expected visual change in the game...



But editing anywhere in the last 3 lines screws up that tile and every other one that follows it...



It seems odd to me that only 'half' of a tile would be compressed if the purpose was to save space. I'm sure that's not actually the case, but if anyone could explain it better (or at least send me looking in the right direction) I'd be much obliged. Thanks!

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Removing \'repeated\' tiles from translation (WonderSwan)

« on: March 17, 2012, 09:22:34 am »

Wow, thanks everyone for all your help! I didn't expect this much.

@Spikeman: That's really helpful! The WonderSwan emulator I'm using has a way to turn off layers and the font disappears when you turn off the 'foreground' one, so you're probably right about that. Hopefully I have some time today to really dig into this.

@Romsstar: Actually, the big letters used for the name entry screen are only used there (as far as I know). The 'RYU' in the upper-left corner of my screenshot is the font used in the in-game dialogue boxes, and that all seems to work fine. But I'll definitely need to learn more about Vfws anyway if I want to get better at hacking.
March 20, 2012, 10:12:32 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)Hey all. Just an update on my progress.

Thanks to what you've all taught me, I managed to find what hex values the tiles were being represented by (seems there was a four-bit pointer in the pattern '49 08 4A 08 4B 08 4C 08 4D 08', part of the first line of letters). Changing the sequence in a save state fixes the repeated-tile problem on the screen.

However...I can't find this sequence in the actual rom.
Well, I can find *that* string multiple times because it's sequential, but they never contain, say, "08 50 08 51 08 FC 08 48 08 53", which is one of the repeated tile areas.

I've tried reversing the bits and using relative search for the 'constant' 08, but to no avail. Is it possible there's some kind of compression being used that I'd have to reverse-engineer?

On the bright side, what I've learned here has helped me clean up a few other hacks I've been working on.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Removing 'repeated' tiles from translation (WonderSwan)

« on: March 16, 2012, 11:24:01 am »

Thanks for all the information!

@King Mike: Yeah, I've gotten spoiled with all the tools available for NES and GameBoy roms; this is a challenge of a different sort.

@Romsstar: Haha, I had a bit of nostalgia, started looking up Digimon and found out a whole series of side story had never been translated, so I wanted to give it a shot. The one I'm currently working on is Tag Tamers, but they all seem to have been built off their predecessor, so figuring out one will help solve the others.
Judging from TLP and the game itself, each 'letter' on the name entry screen is made up of 2x2 tiles, each one an 8 by 8.

I'll need to learn more about tracing and breakpoints I guess (I understand how to set one to stop when the game tries to access a certain address, but I'm not fully understanding how to make it stop when it draws tiles of a certain size). Also, if you don't mind me me asking, what's a Vfw?

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Newcomer's Board / Removing 'repeated' tiles from translation (WonderSwan)

« on: March 14, 2012, 04:25:03 pm »

Hello,

I'm trying to translate an old Digimon WonderSwan game I saw in the abandoned section. Thanks to the previous hacker and the original WonderSwan's similarity to the GameBoy as far as text and tiles go, I've been able to make some good progress.

I've already fixed the functionality of the name entry screen, so when you click a letter it adds that instead of katakana to the player name. However, the appearance leaves something to be desired...


As you can see, the left-half of the 'a' is appearing next to the 'f'. Ideally I would like to remove this. My question is, is it likely this can be done with just a hex editor (IE: Figure out what the tiles hex addresses are, keep trying combinations like '30 31 01 32' until I find that area, and then change the '01' to remove the duplicated tile), or will actual assembly programming be necessary? I've been trying the hex way without luck, and I'd like to know if I'm going about it wrong or just need to keep struggling.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.