[John Enigma]

Can a project like this one be "ported" to its remakes, like the Japan-exclusive Super Famicom/SNES port, or the Game Boy Color port?

[Chicken Knife]

Can a project like this one be "ported" to its remakes, like the Japan-exclusive Super Famicom/SNES port, or the Game Boy Color port?

Not outside the realm of possibility in the future. I love the originals the most so that's what lead me to start here, but there's really no saying where we stop. Keep in mind the remakes have significant additions to the text and will pose various hacking challenges based on being different games on different systems. I think the plan is to move through the NES games, then into doing some addendums to the existing fan translations of 5 and 6. At that point we may look at applying the same conventions to various remakes--as well as the Dragon Quest Monsters series. One big dream I have is doing an English version of the Japanese only PS1 remake of DQ4 but I'd have to come a long way in my abilities before I take that on.

But tbh that all sounds like a bit of a pipe dream. Getting through the massive NES 3 and 4 alone is the goal.

[Chicken Knife]

Wanted to give everyone a quick update. Nejimakipiyo finished their work on on the script's rough draft for DQ3. At this stage, we are going through everything together to make it as natural sounding as possible. Things are moving. I anticipate that within the next 3-4 weeks I will begin work on the insertion. 

[AdamDravian]

Appreciate the update. This project is the main reason I check up on these forums.

[Lord Igniz]

Good work guys, but I'm really waiting for the Dragon Quest IV release. I already played through DQ 1-3 on the SFC, too bad they didn't remake IV on that one as 5 out of the first 6 games are available on that console.

[abw]

Good work guys, but I'm really waiting for the Dragon Quest IV release.

I'd advise some continued patience here . Dragon Warrior IV has a pretty large script for a NES game: it's about double the size of Dragon Warrior III, which was approximately 2.5 times larger than Dragon Warrior II, which itself was about twice as large as the original Dragon Warrior.

Wanted to give everyone a quick update. Nejimakipiyo finished their work on on the script's rough draft for DQ3. At this stage, we are going through everything together to make it as natural sounding as possible. Things are moving. I anticipate that within the next 3-4 weeks I will begin work on the insertion. 

Nice. Did you notice how despite the abundance of control codes for gender-specific pronouns, a lot of the script has conflicting hard-coded references to the hero's gender?

As for my own update, I've been going through joe73ffdq's Dragon Warrior II notes and merging them into my disassembly and am happy to report some serious synergy. Knowing what the data is for makes figuring out unknown code much easier, and knowing what the code is for makes figuring out unknown data much easier. Many parts of the ROM are stil completely opaque to me, but it's going to be a while before I run out of things that can be easily documented, and with every documented area making all the other areas that reference it easier to understand, by the time I'm done with the easy stuff, the stuff that's currently hard should be a whole lot easier.

Along the way, I've come across a few items that you might be interested in knowing about:

• Lunch bag letdown: despite displaying a message saying that you found a treasure chest after battle, monsters will not drop their item if you have a full inventory (there is no option to throw away an old item in order to get the new item) or already have one copy of it (you can't get 2 Mysterious Hat drops), except for selected items such as Lottery Tickets and basic consumables.
• Silent loquaciousness: the guard in the NW corner of Hamlin has extra code to display 2 additional strings after his normal string, but in the English version, both of those strings are empty (does somebody want to check the Japanese version?).
• Zahan's magically teleporting Golden Key: the Golden Key is available in 2 places on the Zahan map, but which place you can find it at depends on the X-position of the town's lone dog.
• ... I can't believe I paid money for that: in the Japanese version, the woman in the SW corner of Lianport will offer you a puff-puff for 100 G if you talk to her while Moonbrooke is dead; the dialogue was changed in the English version to ‘Dost thou think I am pretty enough to be a queen?’, but the code for charging you 100 G if you answer YES still runs.
• It's over 9000: despite the highest achievable maximum HP for your party members being a mere 240, the game dedicates 16-bit storage to HP values and often (maybe always?) performs 16-bit calculations on them; as one example, the Healall spell is hardcoded to restore 61,680 ($F0F0) HP.
• Greatest thing since sliced bread: in addition to protecting you from damaging floor tiles such as swamps and lava, the Armour of Erdrick also magically disarms trapped treasure chests for you. No more getting poisoned or losing half your current HP! (I guess the HP regen effect from DW1/3 was too powerful?)

[Chicken Knife]

Appreciate the update. This project is the main reason I check up on these forums.

Thank you for your continued interest! Always makes me happy to hear when people find value in these projects. 

Good work guys, but I'm really waiting for the Dragon Quest IV release. I already played through DQ 1-3 on the SFC, too bad they didn't remake IV on that one as 5 out of the first 6 games are available on that console.

Yes, like abw said IV will take some serious time. Not only does the game have separate night and day text like DQ3 but it's also the first game in the series to update vast amounts of town NPC text based on events in the story that have transpired. Quite shocking that feature existed at all in an NES RPG.

Nice. Did you notice how despite the abundance of control codes for gender-specific pronouns, a lot of the script has conflicting hard-coded references to the hero's gender?

Accurate observation. We've found that in both the English localization and  the Japanese original, there is a very high frequency of misgendering of the female hero. She gets referred to with male pronouns, she gets called "son", she is named "king" at one point. At first we thought this would be a consistent thing until we discovered there are plenty of times where the game does have separate text for both male and female and handles it correctly. One of the strangest lines of text we've wrestled with has the hero actually denying that she is female when confronted by a child in Reive / Reeve who is angry over the death of his parents. Our handling of the misgendering will be one of the ever so conservative improvements that we've done on a few occasions. We want a female hero who is consistently referred to as female.

Lunch bag letdown: despite displaying a message saying that you found a treasure chest after battle, monsters will not drop their item if you have a full inventory (there is no option to throw away an old item in order to get the new item) or already have one copy of it (you can't get 2 Mysterious Hat drops), except for selected items such as Lottery Tickets and basic consumables.
Silent loquaciousness: the guard in the NW corner of Hamlin has extra code to display 2 additional strings after his normal string, but in the English version, both of those strings are empty (does somebody want to check the Japanese version?).
Zahan's magically teleporting Golden Key: the Golden Key is available in 2 places on the Zahan map, but which place you can find it at depends on the X-position of the town's lone dog.
... I can't believe I paid money for that: in the Japanese version, the woman in the SW corner of Lianport will offer you a puff-puff for 100 G if you talk to her while Moonbrooke is dead; the dialogue was changed in the English version to ‘Dost thou think I am pretty enough to be a queen?’, but the code for charging you 100 G if you answer YES still runs.
It's over 9000: despite the highest achievable maximum HP for your party members being a mere 240, the game dedicates 16-bit storage to HP values and often (maybe always?) performs 16-bit calculations on them; as one example, the Healall spell is hardcoded to restore 61,680 ($F0F0) HP.
Greatest thing since sliced bread: in addition to protecting you from damaging floor tiles such as swamps and lava, the Armour of Erdrick also magically disarms trapped treasure chests for you. No more getting poisoned or losing half your current HP! (I guess the HP regen effect from DW1/3 was too powerful?)

Some fascinating trivia here! I've discovered a bit of that myself. Nejimakipiyo and I will have to check out the Hamlin/Moonpeta guard's text in the Japanese version. I don't remember offhand how we handled it.

Great to hear you are making progress and joe73ffdq's work has been complementary! I'm looking forward to seeing the result--and I wish I could read it! I have a high-brow friend of mine who is fluent in Latin and I keep prodding him to give your hacks a try. The issue is he hasn't played an rpg since AD&D in the 70's and 80's. A bit of catching up to do.

[abw]

Some fascinating trivia here! I've discovered a bit of that myself. Nejimakipiyo and I will have to check out the Hamlin/Moonpeta guard's text in the Japanese version. I don't remember offhand how we handled it.

Great to hear you are making progress and joe73ffdq's work has been complementary! I'm looking forward to seeing the result--and I wish I could read it! I have a high-brow friend of mine who is fluent in Latin and I keep prodding him to give your hacks a try. The issue is he hasn't played an rpg since AD&D in the 70's and 80's. A bit of catching up to do.

Here's another bit of trivia I came across today: the game reads controller 2 data after you win a battle. If you win a battle on one very specific but otherwise unremarkable map tile in the entire game (World Map X=$EB, Y=$14, a.k.a. the centre of the tiny "+" formation at the tip of the peninsula near the shrine NE of Midenhall) and controller 2 has the "A" button pressed while controller 1 dismisses the final battle message, the game adds 1 to the battle message delay variable, making all future battles take just a wee bit longer... unless your message speed was set to SLOW ($FF), in which case it overflows to $00 and battle messages become extremely fast. That same variable gets copied and used in a few different places, and various parts of the code only check for the pre-defined FAST/NORMAL/SLOW values, so it is entirely possible that there might be other less-obvious side effects.

I should probably approach this more methodically, but at the moment I'm basically just jumping around to whatever looks interesting and/or easy at the moment. Thanks to joe73ffdq's notes to start with and all the expansion I've done from there, I've got pretty good coverage of banks 4 (battles) and 6 (main COMMAND menu selection handling, which includes the dialogue and searching logic), and I already had the menu data in bank 1 and the script data + text engine in banks 2 and 5; bank 0 is mostly graphics, the rest of bank 2 looks like map data (including warp point data, shared with bank 3), bank 3 is where the audio data lives, and bank 7 has, among other things, the opening Moonbrooke sequence and some text engine support functions. I haven't done much with banks 8 through B yet, banks C-E are empty, and the fixed bank F is a smorgasbord of everything.