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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Problem: Lufia II Hacking - Monster World Map Sprites

« on: March 09, 2016, 06:14:41 pm »

It's been a while since I've done this, so I'm probably skipping over a few things, and *ahem* some assembly required, but what you need is a debugger and savestate viewer.  vsnes & Geiger's snes9x would work well for this. 

Get a savestate with one of the overworld sprites in it, and open it with vsnes's savestate viewer.  You can mouseover the sprite and get its location in vram.  Next, open Geiger's and set a breakpoint against that address.  When you're on the overworld map, that breakpoint will stop the routine at the moment the sprite is loaded into vram. 

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Problem: Lufia II Hacking - Monster World Map Sprites

« on: February 22, 2016, 11:05:27 pm »

There's a large amount of overworld sprites stored immediately after the fight sprites and town sprites, do you mean they're not all in that bank of graphics?  Not familiar enough with the game to say if all the monsters are there, but some of them certainly are.

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Gaming Discussion / Re: Anyone feel the PS1 graphics had it's charm?

« on: February 04, 2016, 09:48:44 am »

The PS1 has not aged well.  Blocky / washed out 3D polys & textures seem to render some of those old games unplayable to me, even on my old crt.  3D, in general, does not age well like a sprite-based game, but there's an early 3D era around 95-98 where most games just look bad now.

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Gaming Discussion / Re: Broken gameboy cartridge: can it be fixed?

« on: February 04, 2016, 09:43:52 am »

Green residue is definitely corrosion caused by oxidization.  It's especially visibile near the resistor closest to the battery.  Use rubbing alcohol & a q-tip to remove, and replace the battery / solder in a new connector.  It's possible the battery is required to boot, and has went bad.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Dark Half (SNES) Released by AGTP

« on: June 01, 2015, 08:10:29 pm »

Finally, someone with the skills & motivation to finish this came along!   

From what I played of it last week, it looks good so far. 

@GideonZhi: Guacamelee goat?

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Gaming Discussion / Re: RPGs with good game design?

« on: August 30, 2013, 09:23:29 pm »

Good RPG with simple, linear game design?  I'll take Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars for 200, Trebek.  /thread

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Gaming Discussion / Re: DBZ Legend Of The Saiyans New Patch

« on: June 03, 2013, 09:55:00 pm »

Confirmed as a bug, and a rather embarassing one at that.

The biggest problem I've had with this game is trying to find people to test it.  You can imagine that by now, I've played more of this game than I ever cared to.  I handed out copies to a dozen people and never heard about this, released it since they "didn't find any bugs", and one year later this post is the first I've heard of it.   
June 03, 2013, 10:49:19 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)Found the problem and have a fix for it.  Insertion routine used to put the script back in for the last patch was wrong.  Damn... full year and no one reported all the problems it caused.  Emailing a fix to OP, will post it public after I get some feedback.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Blast from the past, Trans-Flux

« on: December 21, 2011, 10:43:08 pm »

For anyone that has been around long enough to remember.  And still cares.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000520015136/http://trans-flux.emuviews.com/

Oh, the internet back then.  Oh, the immaturity back then.

edit: and oh yeah, wwwboards.  Yeah...

Aha!  The secret identity of Zatos is finally revealed! :p

Not only do I remember it, apparently I've been around long enough to be on it.  And yeah, it was a good site at the time, it just wasn't around for very long.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Dark Half translation still going.

« on: June 25, 2011, 10:36:01 pm »

For anyone interested in playing it, I posted another partial update to this several weeks ago.  Looks like someone already put it in the rhdn database.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Bloody Warriors Teaser

« on: June 25, 2011, 10:34:04 pm »

Good job on the game so far... as for the ads, I think you'll find the minor revenue you collect isn't worth the intrusion.  Unles you're pulling 1k+ hits/day you'll likely never even see a check.  People will avoid the site if they have to use a specific browser just to get past the ads.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Dragon Ball Z: Legend of the Saiyans Complete Translation Released

« on: June 15, 2011, 07:38:24 pm »

From what I heard, those "90%" patches from like a decade ago were based on a partially-BSed French translation. This one was a redone-from-scratch Japanese-to-English translation.

From what I understood from the readme, it says that the only Japanese translations that were done were "spot translations". The guy doing all of the French to English translations was still credited.

Does that mean this is still highly based on the French translation?

~DS

Well... since I did the French->English, and all the hacking, hopefully I still got into the credits somewhere.   

The only known bit of "BS" intentionally left in is the names of some of the trash enemies.  They were generic to begin with, and over the years, the internet/wiki community seems to have spread them to the point it would almost be futile to change them.

About half is still based on the completed french translation.  The problem with the french->english translation was, it wasn't finished until 2003!  Yet several parties put out patches, claimed them to be complete, and then decided to "blame the French" when they weren't.  One of the patches up on this site is from a group that wholesale ripped off everything I did on this game, then after a few nasty conversations, decided to start over and rip off Vincent's work instead.  I would even say my own previous patch - supposedly 90+% was overestimated, in all caps and full of bad engrish edited to fit in alloted space.  I would say no one working on it back then really knew what they were doing, but at least I never tried to pass it off as finished.  I never was happy with it, but quit work on it at the time due to a lot of negative feedback from the "online dragonball z community" who said I should "leave it to that group doing all the dbz games".  What happened to the "reflections" pages?  I could rant for a few paragraphs on the garbage those guys put out.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Pathcing Program Question

« on: June 08, 2011, 12:45:27 am »

The difference is in the formats they support.  Upset only supports the .UPS format.  NINJA supports multiple formats, but does not support .UPS .  The usefulness of each would depend on what you were trying to use it for?

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Found an old and lame hack of mine...

« on: June 07, 2011, 10:59:04 pm »

So I was looking thru some old romhacking stuff I had and remembered and old (and kinda lame) NES hack I did some 10-odd years ago.  I'd posted it on my then-geocities page, and thought it was long gone.  Google says otherwise.

lol I might make a patch and submit this piece of junk to the archive just for its historical value.  Somehow the patched rom has managed to circulate quite a bit!

Edit: Hell, this thing's got a page in the data crystal. 

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Interviews (interest check)

« on: June 06, 2011, 07:30:39 pm »

This sounds like a really good idea.  Could be really informative, or could end in Gid' getting punk'd on skype.  Sounds interesting, either way.   

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: The Adventures of Hourai High Translation Released

« on: April 19, 2011, 08:05:29 pm »

Congrats, Gideon!  I know you've been working on this one for a long time!

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Cartographer and Lorom?

« on: April 15, 2011, 07:33:22 pm »

I figured out what I was doing wrong.  The base pointer needed to be adjusted by an extra $8000 to the base pointer address to accommodate.  Pretty basic stuff.  /facepalm

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Cartographer and Lorom?

« on: April 14, 2011, 10:51:12 pm »

I'm working with Cartographer and trying to get a good script dump of a lorom snes game.  I can dump the raw text with no problems, but does anyone know if Cartographer supports LoRom, and if so, what syntax the commands file needs to get it to dump the pointers are?

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Linda Cube Again (PSX - J) Hacking Help Needed [GOT IT]

« on: March 26, 2011, 12:03:20 am »

I think zeroing out the checksums may be the best you can hope for in this case.  I'm fairly certain almost all hacked games come up with a bad checksum on them.

I ran across this one a while ago and it really looks like an interesting game.  Take 2 parts Monster Rancher, add 1 part Silent Hill, and set blender to "Dragon Quest".  Good work so far!   

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Linda Cube Again (PSX - J) Hacking Help Needed

« on: March 22, 2011, 08:05:11 pm »

0x020388D2 is where the first text for a new game of Scenario A (Merry Christmas) is stored. The entry is 77 bytes long and is also sandwiched by zeros like the menu string. Unlike the menu text this one also includes non SJIS bytes that are used for text formatting.
After the first 6 bytes is the first word: 83 50 83 50. ケン in-game, "Ken" the main character's name. Changing this string will cause the game to hang when loading Scenario A. The menu and other scenarios will work perfectly fine.

Not sure what else is going on here, but it's almost impossible for 83 50 83 50 to show up as ケン in-game.  Do you have a table file built for this, and what program are you using to make the changes?

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: *GAME UPLOADED LINK INSIDE* The Legend of Zelda Crystal Past (Beta)

« on: March 20, 2011, 10:58:23 pm »

I still can't figure out... was this a massive troll, or could they really just not figure out how to zip and upload a single file?

Where's the Emulation Police when you need them?!?