101

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Star Ocean Blue Sphere Project Work & Analysis

« on: June 05, 2018, 03:36:51 pm »

Helloooo, I'm back. I got college out of the way, so I'm restarting this lost cause.

Sent you a privmsg. Want to collaborate? My script should be accurate enough inasmuch as it conveys the meaning of the words, but it does badly needs an edit.

102

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Star Ocean Blue Sphere Project Work & Analysis

« on: June 05, 2018, 01:31:45 pm »

I'll take anything you can offer at this point! Though again there's no immediate rush; I have a few other things on my plate that will fully occupy my time over the next several months, though I do expect to be back on Blue Sphere by fall.

103

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Star Ocean Blue Sphere Project Work & Analysis

« on: June 04, 2018, 04:05:05 pm »

Main dialog (and some of the incidental stuff) is translated and inserted. Needs to be edited. Font assembly work for main dialog *should* be done, but that hasn't touched events, battles, or menus.

Unfortunately either the emulator I was using to test was bad (very possible) or some of the scripting got broken during reinsertion. After the intro cutscene plays you end up with a ghost Precis flickering in and out of existence in the corner, and the remainder of the intro event doesn't play as it's supposed to; you can just talk to Dias, pick your party, and leave the ship. I recall this working in an earlier version though, so I'm not sure what happened. I experienced a blackscreen crash in Mile Tower as well.

Haven't touched anything beyond the dialog, though iirc I started documenting the combat text routine. I haven't looked at it much since fall. Masoukishin's text work popped while I was tinkering with this, and that took priority.

104

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Star Ocean Blue Sphere Project Work & Analysis

« on: June 04, 2018, 03:40:24 pm »

So, Gideon Zhi posted an update today here: https://agtp.romhack.net/pantheon/index.php?topic=757

It looks like he ended up using the tiny French font like I did.

Yeah, this has been on my to-post queue for the last month or two, but it's kind of languished behind the Masoukishin releases. I've been trying to make a post at least once a week, usually on a Monday or Tuesday, and this happened to be this week's. (There are only three left; one's an announcement, one's progress that I want new screenshots for, and one's, well, you'll see.)

None of my work is actually based on the French version; the 4x8 font in my screenshots is actually done programmatically (though it might be the same graphics as the french one, idk). I held out for a vwf from other people for *years* and at this point I'd rather just have the 4x8 and something releasable than nothing at all, and I'm not confident enough in my z80 skill to write an actual vwf.


It's still a good ways off though, and I'm probably a few months away from being able to devote any meaningful time to it.

105

Programming / Re: How to reverse the order of the numbers of a file?

« on: June 04, 2018, 03:04:56 pm »

Assuming you've read your file into a variable called byte_array, here's a python snippet:

Code: [Select]

new_list = []
for i in range(0, len(byte_array), 2):
    new_list.extend([byte_array[i+1], byte_array[i]])


106

Help Wanted Ads / Re: [Text Editing/Extraction] Gokinjo Boukentai

« on: June 04, 2018, 02:05:16 pm »

Sure, I'll have a look.

107

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Help With Super Robot Taisen Gaiden: Masou Kishin - The Lord of Elemental

« on: May 30, 2018, 02:28:03 pm »

But my statement still stands about play testing, 1.41 are so irrelevant at this point. If your releasing something in 2018 you test with 2018 emulators.

Generally, the sorts of changes made to a game during the process of producing a translation patch are not the kind that would be affected by emulator accuracy. If a hacker is writing timing-critical code or using poorly-documented architecture features, they're doing it wrong. Accuracy at the emulator level generally only really plays a significant role if the emulator is *so* inaccurate that it's ignoring basic hardware restrictions (see: ZSNES allowing writes to video memory outside of vblank) or if the hacker is completely overhauling the game with new visual features (see: Breath of Fire 2.) The former is easily testable via bsnes (which, again, I stress I use) and I never approach the latter.

I've been doing this for an incredibly long time, and to the best of my memory the last time I released a patch that flat-out didn't work on actual hardware was back in 2000. Please don't tell me how to do my job. Besides, if I *had* told people to use the latest 9X and they experienced the prologue crashes you're experiencing, we'd have gotten significantly less testing done.

108

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Help With Super Robot Taisen Gaiden: Masou Kishin - The Lord of Elemental

« on: May 30, 2018, 01:36:43 pm »

Why would you playtest using v1.41-1.43, do you know how old those are? If it was play tested with anything recent ie v1.55 which is almost a year old now or 1.56 which is comming out soon, you'd notice you can't even get past the intro. but sure playtest with 5+ year old builds...

Because that's what my dev tools are built on top of, and savestate incompatibilities with future versions make testing difficult. Yes, there have been improvements. No, they're generally not super significant in the grand scheme of Making Sure It Just Works. Yes, I also test with bsnes's accuracy core.

But sure, immediately jump to conclusions and blame me for your use of a broken emulator.

109

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Help With Super Robot Taisen Gaiden: Masou Kishin - The Lord of Elemental

« on: May 30, 2018, 12:50:31 pm »

Anyway the game is incredibly buggy, I doubt it's been play tested at all. I've hard patched a ROM using both 1.0, mziab custom patch, and now 1.01 (both versions) to a No-Intro ROM, and using SNES9x as my emulator, and I still get constant emulator hardlocks and graphical glitches on menus/dialog at seemingly randomly points, so either it's the patch, SNES9x, or the game, but I just don't care enough to troubleshoot which it is since the games not all that fun in the first place.

Not sure which version of 9X you're using, but my testers ran through the game on 1.41-1/1.43 with minimal problems. They did experience intermittent soft-locks during one animation sequence but I was unable to replicate the issue on bsnes or on snes9x 1.54, and am assuming that they're due to timing issues with the emulator.

We've been testing and fixing issues for a solid four months, and went through five different increasingly-stable iterations of the patch before v1.00; I take extreme offense at the assertion that it hasn't been playtested. Maybe try a little harder to actually pinpoint the issue before blindly flinging assertions around?

110

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 30, 2018, 12:36:22 pm »

Great to hear. Thanks for following up!

111

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 29, 2018, 07:22:46 pm »

Okay, issue was with a quirk of SA-1 mapping. I've got a fix, will upload shortly.

Edit: Fix is live. If someone could grab the patch from AGTP and verify that the translation when patched to the no-intro rom produces a rom with a good checksum, I'd appreciate it; I've been kind of rushing to get the fix out and while I don't *think* I missed anything it's certainly within the realm of possibility.

112

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 29, 2018, 06:53:45 pm »

I'll continue to look into it, but yeah, not sure what's up with v088.

How are you running this on SD2SNES? It's an SA-1 game. I didn't think SD2SNES supported SA-1 at the moment?

113

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 29, 2018, 06:03:18 pm »

I tested this! Ugh. Just a sec.

Edit: I just reapplied the patch and it seems to be working fine for me?

Further edit: I've downloaded the patch from my website and applied it to a ROM whose CRC32 and MD5 I've compared against the No-Intro DAT-o-MATIC and it still works for me. What are you using to patch? The patch expands the ROM and it's possible that your patcher does not support expansion via IPS.

I used LunarIPS (as always) to create and patch, for what it's worth.

Tested with snes9x 1.53 and bsnes-plus accuracy v073+3a

Working with a few people on my discord server and they're claiming it doesn't work on bsnes v087 and v088, but that it does work on higan.

114

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 29, 2018, 03:41:36 pm »

Update's live on AGTP. I've submitted the patch to RHDN and it's currently in queue, but if you can't wait the link is in the first post

115

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 25, 2018, 06:14:42 pm »

But the only upside of IPS patches is that they're common and easily soft-patched. Releases in multiple formats are nice, but only a handful of people do that.

Multiple formats are a thing I've actually been meaning to do, but I keep forgetting One of these days!

116

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 25, 2018, 12:04:38 pm »

Hey folks, just getting over a really nasty virus + allergy one-two punch (finally back in the office, sheesh) and should have an updated patch with that fix (and a few other, small, wording and text-flow related things) this weekend.

117

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords Translated

« on: May 22, 2018, 05:11:05 pm »

Congratulations on the release, Gideon! I remember when this was first announced. Have been waiting for it ever since, so I'm really hyped to play this. The usual Aeon Genesis splash screen seems to be missing, though. Is this intentional? Everything seems to run fine otherwise.

It also seems the patch requires an overdumped rom, which is pretty scarce nowadays due to the spread of NoIntro. From what I see, it's just the last meg of data that seems to be repeated. At first glance the normal-sized rom also works, but I'm not sure it doesn't crash later into the game. Not a big issue, just thought I'd put it out there in case someone else is confused with the whole overdump thing.

Neither of those things is intentional, and to be perfectly honest, I had no idea that the rom I was working from was an overdump; if I'd known, I'd certainly have been less stressed about finding space in the game for text! Whew.

118

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Treasure of the Rudras font bug

« on: May 12, 2018, 07:20:36 pm »

This is not an issue with the patch. The game renders its text using the SNES's hires mode. Your emulator just isn't handling it properly.

119

Personal Projects / Re: abcde: Atlas + Cartographer + A Whole Lot More

« on: April 09, 2018, 04:30:34 pm »

Atlas can absolutely do this, though it becomes harder to do if you're using an AUTOWRITE directive. If you're just using standard WRITEs, W16s, or W24s, you can just do something like:

#W16(addr1)
#W16(addr2)
#W16(addr3)
string here<end>

120

News Submissions / Re: Translations: Dynamic-Designs Releases G.O.D. in English!

« on: April 02, 2018, 09:25:36 am »