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Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy IV Namingway Edition (updated to Version 1.86)

« on: October 20, 2018, 09:05:38 am »

Honestly if you can get ANY name that is closer to Flan Princess than it is to Pink Puff I would support the change 100%. Flan Lady, Lady Flan, Flan Girl, Flan Prin., Flan Hime, those are all fine.

And just to add another one, Dame Flan, that would fit, Dame is a general title used for female British aristocracy and royalty, but since it is a title it comes before the name.

As far as Flan Prin. I don’t see what is wrong with abbreviations, we use abbreviations for the King and Queen of Eblana when they are encountered as boss enemies.

Keeping it as Pink Puff just doesn’t fit in with the way this hack changes other names to be similar to the GBA, PSP, and Nintendo DS official ports of Final Fantasy IV. Pink Puff is not an accurate translation and it is not what the newer official translations by Squaresoft/Square Enix use, and for everything else in the game, Namingway Edition uses names of things that are basically standard names from newer official ports.

It is a little inconsistent to see just this one thing keep using language from the SNES official translation when pretty much nothing else in Namingway Edition does that. Project II, sure, Project II mostly sticks to names from the original official SNES translation, but I thought Namingway Edition was aimed at changing those to the newer standard names.

Anyway I would be happy with almost anything other than Pink Puff, something that is more accurate to the Japanese. Flan is more similar to Pudding than a Puff pastry is. And while the enemy certainly is Pink, that is not mentioned in the Japanese name, instead the English word Princess is used. If the goal is an at least semi-accurate translation, I don’t see how leaving it as Pink Puff makes any sense. If you compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flan to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puff_pastry I would note that puff pastry is mostly made of dough, in fact having many layers of pastry dough, while flan is mostly made of soft filling, making flan much more similar to pudding. So at the very least the pastry is a Pink Flan rather than a Pink Puff. But again Pink doesn’t belong in the name, instead some mention of female royalty or aristocracy belongs there ideally.

I don’t care if it is Flan Lady, Lady Flan, Flan Girl, Flan Prin., Flan Hime, Dame Flan, or something else like that, any of those would be much more accurate than Pink Puff and I would approve of any of them as being a better translation from the original Japanese. I would fully support changing it to any of those. If other people can agree on ANY of those names that is more accurate than Pink Puff, I agree to it too, I just want it changed from Pink Puff since Pink Puff is so inaccurate.

Generally I think going by names that are standard in the Nintendo DS, PSP, and GBA versions is best, you can find the names for everything in the entire game in the translation comparison here: https://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_IV/Translations. In this case all 3 of them agree on Flan Princess so some abbreviated variant of that that can fit in the space should be used here ideally. Just like for most other things in the game, Namingway Edition pretty much already uses the standard names used by Nintendo DS, PSP, and GBA versions, making it quite close to one of the newer official translations at least regarding the naming. The only other translation that uses Pink Puff is the PlayStation one which uses the same names for almost everything as the SNES one, and the PlayStation port copies all the other mistaken translations for names of things in the SNES version. Names did not get fixed until the GBA, Nintendo DS, and PSP ports.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Datacrystal doesn't accept my RH.net login

« on: October 20, 2018, 02:03:22 am »

I sent you a password reset. Check your email this time.

Thanks, now I can login! It works now.

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Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy IV Namingway Edition (updated to Version 1.86)

« on: October 17, 2018, 07:28:05 am »

I can think of absolutely zero major English Releases by Square where words like "Hime" have survived the localization process. There's a reason for that is because it hasn't been adopted beyond the anime and gaming crowd.

OK fine, Hime is a Japanese word, not entirely localized to English, I got it.

Maybe "Flan Prin." would be a good option.

OK fine, you both made your point regarding Flan Hime, plus Rodimus Primal already kinda rejected Flan Girl when he said “Flan Girl just didn't seem right not being an official name” and also said that Flan Princess doesn’t fit since it’s too long.

So now that I considered that, I guess Flan Prin. is my first choice and Flan Hime is my 2nd choice. But I am 100% fine with either of those 2, they are both accurate. Whatever Rodimus Primal decides I am sure it will be something I am fine with, unless it is left as Pink Puff, I really would like it changed but I guess first everyone has to agree on what to change it too.

Is there anyone who objects to Flan Prin.? I certainly don’t.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Datacrystal doesn't accept my RH.net login

« on: October 15, 2018, 10:56:26 pm »

Oops, I sent a PM about a DataCrystal login over a week ago and got an email about it on October 2nd and I failed to login in time I guess, I think it was a temporary password, and now it doesn’t work. Sorry, my bad, I need to respond faster next time I get an email. Just noticed the email a few minutes ago and tried out the login and password and they don’t work but I guess it is understandable since I got sent the temporary password for a DataCrystal account 13 days ago and those probably expire within 24 or 48 hours or something.

Sorry, danke! Looks like I didn’t check my email in time.

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Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy IV Namingway Edition (updated to Version 1.86)

« on: October 15, 2018, 02:37:58 am »

“Flan Hime” is fine with me. Reminds me of Orihime in Bleach or the anime Lunar Legend Tsukihime... I know what Hime means, probably a bunch of people do who don’t speak Japanese since it even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hime (most Japanese words do not have Wikipedia pages but a few like Sushi, Karate, Kawaii, Eroge, Anime, Sensei, etc. do).

Since the original Japanese used “Purinsesu” as a loanword from English, reversing that and using a loanword from Japanese, “Hime”, with the same exact meaning, makes perfect sense. I never thought of “Flan Hime”, that is a pretty smart way to solve this in a way that fits into the space. Great work! I agree about using “Flan Hime”. Hime might not technically be English but Princess is not technically Japanese either.

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Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy IV Namingway Edition (updated to Version 1.85)

« on: October 12, 2018, 07:36:07 am »

It is impossible to properly fit Flan Princess properly in 8 tiles even with all the squished tiles I have. Flan will fit in 3 tiles, leaving 5 for the word Princess. It would fit IF I had more space available for the font to add more tiles. None of the current letters fit. However, if the abbreviation is fine with everyone, I CAN make it FlanPrinss or FlanPrincs but that look terrible IMO. There's FlanRoyal, Flan Lady, Flan Girl, or maybe Flanpress?

Okay, so after carefully thinking about it, and since other monsters are abbreviated this way, I can also make it Flan P., Flan Pr. or even Flan HRH (Her Royal Highness). We have K. Eblan, Q Eblan, and Lamia Q so it might work if everyone knows what they are. All in all, a Pink Puff still works as it's name. Just calling it Flan P. takes away the charm of the original name with the spacing available.

Version 1.86 is now ready for download.

Nice to see the new download! Thanks! As far as those options, Flan Girl is good, it is a pun. In the original Japanese the name for that enemy is also a pun, “Purin Purinsesu”, or “Pudding Princess”, with the first “Purin” meaning “Pudding” and the second “Purin” being part of “Purinsesu” which is just “Princess” from English. In the spirit of the original Japanese name being a pun, Flan Girl is a good pun, and you said that you are able to fit that with the available tiles. I suggest this although it is not technically the canonical name. It is definitely in the spirit of how the Japanese name for that enemy is written. Japanese people love their puns, at least, judging by comparing the Japanese and English versions of many anime and video games, where the Japanese versions are full of puns and wordplay and the English versions kinda... aren’t.

My vote is definitely for “Flan Girl”, it is the only option that is a pun in English, plus it is also technically an accurate translation too, it does leave out the part of her being royalty but I think having it be a pun makes up for that. The only reason the royalty thing has any importance is because, this is a rare enemy and the most powerful of the pudding-type enemies. But, I think people can kinda figure that part out themselves, and also it does sorta make sense why a “Flan Girl” would be strong. If you imagine her saying “I’m your #1 flan!” then she is probably the #1 most powerful flan in battle, which is true. I really do like the name “Flan Girl” and think it is the best option if we can’t fit in the official canonical name “Flan Princess”. And I think a name like “Flan Girl” is something the official translations from Squaresoft might have done if they thought of this pun, they just didn’t think of this pun.

The other good thing about Flan Girl is it is not that different from Flan Princess as used in newer official translations. So aside from being a pun, it is also probably identifiable as the same enemy. As well as being an accurate translation.

Anyway good job with everything else and with getting the latest version of the patch out. I just wanted to answer that thing about Pink Puffs/Flan Princesses/Flan Girls. Do other people like having that be a pun? I wonder what other people think about this, if they like the name Flan Girl as much as I do. I know I did squeeze in the graphics for Flan Princess and post an image online in an earlier post but yeah, I get it, you need ROM space to fit all those tiles, you are low on space, gotcha, that’s why I’m suggesting Flan Girl instead. Which ought to be very very easy to fit, if there are any other enemies with “irl” in their names, “irl” easily fits into 2 tiles since lowercase i and lowercase l are both very thin letters. Then every other letter can be normal fixed-width alphabet tiles, very very easy to fit. You probably already have “irl” tiles hopefully.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Secret of Mana's intro?

« on: October 08, 2018, 11:05:10 pm »

No, I never retranslated the game in english. The best I did in english was just to make an uncensored version (restored the boss with the chainsaw and some other stuffs) with the original english translation, that I never published because it required some polishing (basically, to redo the line-break as the actual hack use a VWF (not FuSoYa one, Magno's) and as you said, someone else was planning to retranslate it so it seemed useless to publish it.

Ah, yeah, that makes more sense. It appears I misinterpreted your comments in that thread Hiei-, you were saying that you had translated a patch that you had done for a French version of the game into English, NOT that you had translated the entire Japanese script of the game into English like I thought. Makes more sense in retrospect because according to your profile you know French and English but not Japanese, and also, that would have been very fast to translate an entire JRPG from Japanese into English. Although admittedly Ted Woolsey translated it very fast originally so it is definitely possible to do.

Sorry about my confusion and reading comprehension problems. It is a shame RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero’s awesome retranslation project never got finished. I guess it was a very ambitious project that required a lot of work, and, probably much more work would need to be done to get it into a finished state. The last comment in that thread is from 2016, only 2 years ago, it might still exist on their hard drives, but probably needs more work or else obviously they would have put it out if it was done. OK not necessarily, I mean I have made hacks that are not on this site, but that is for different reasons, because of submission guidelines and not having screenshots and stuff ready yet and only recently creating an account here, my hacks are on another site but unfortunately it is offline now so I will try and get that fixed.

Anyway so, FuSoYa has his game protected with some kind of CRC check huh? Well then the proper-caser patch by vivify93 and the other patches that are compatible with FuSoYa’s patch must have gotten around this somehow. Also its description for the proper-caser patch at https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1105/ says that FuSoYa “vehemently advocates combining the two patches”. So I interpret this to mean FuSoYa is totally fine with basing other patches on his work.

I would assume the purpose of the CRC check, then, is to make sure that the IPS patching process went successfully. Since with the whole headered vs. unheadered ROM thing and other differences between ROMs, the CRC check FuSoYa built in is almost certainly just a mechanism to make sure you used the correct ROM and patched it correctly, to keep players from encountering bugs in the game later. FuSoYa is the author of Lunar IPS after all, so it would make sense that FuSoYa’s concern here would be whether the patch was applied correctly or not. IPSWin after all has bugs in it. This type of thing is probably the reason for FuSoYa putting that check in there, namely, protecting ordinary gamers who just want to apply patches and play the game from having bugs from accidentally patching things the wrong way. NOT wanting to stop other ROM hackers from doing ROM hacks.

So I would encourage the original poster of this thread (Timbo) and others such as RedScorpion, Hiei-, etc. to continue doing ROM hacks. Sorry for misinterpreting a comment on that other thread! It was an honest mistake. But, I think people like KingMike are probably misinterpreting FuSoYa’s intentions for including a CRC check, it is not aimed at stopping ROM hackers in my opinion, it is aimed at making it obvious to ordinary users if they have a corrupted ROM, at least that is what I think. Then again I have been wrong about other things so I guess you should think for yourselves instead of just accepting my interpretation of why FuSoYa put in the CRC check. Also as far as the encryption I think, back then in the early days of ROM hacking, someone could easily claim credit for someone else’s work and FuSoYa didn’t want anyone else lying and saying they were responsible for his work and not giving him credit, very understandable, I think in the early days of fan translations in the late 90s translation groups probably stole each others’ work without credit sometimes and there was not really any way to document it back then. But I really doubt that would be a problem nowadays because nowadays everyone respects FuSoYa and gives him credit for all of his work.

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Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy IV Namingway Edition (updated to Version 1.85)

« on: October 08, 2018, 09:52:44 pm »

After really thinking it through, it makes the most sense to just ditch the extra spacing for the key items Whisperweed and Sand Pearl. The only time it will look strange is when selecting the item in the Fat Chocobo menu since the pointing hand is on the second character instead of the first. Every other place it's fine. It will render as Whisprweed and SandPearl respectively.

With this extra space I could also change Gysahl to GysahlGrn if everyone is fine with it. Again, it only looks weird in the Fat Chocobo menu.

The Package is going to become the C.Signet item and will be called a Carnelian Signet in dialogue, similar to the PSP and 3D translations.

I am also changing the Clerics to Epopts, and Edge's Pin and Image to S.Bind and Mirage respectively. G.Needle will also be GoldNeedle.

Sounds perfect to me too, I agree with Orochi Kusanagi. Good job! Yeah, you should use all the names that you said in that particular post, I agree with all of the things quoted above 100%. No objections from me! Great work! I don’t really care if the Fat Chocobo has a cursor on the 2nd character instead of the 1st for some items, I don’t think anyone would even notice that, not even me and I am kind of a perfectionist but I don’t have any problem with that. Great decisions there, all of those in that post!

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Personal Projects / Re: FF6 Improvement

« on: October 04, 2018, 04:48:33 am »

Yeah actually I was the one who made the unofficial FF6 Improvement Patch FIX version 1.07a. Both General Public and yetisyny are common names I use online on many websites, I use yetisyny on romhacking.net and General Public on Slick Productions. Although I haven’t been able to use Slick Productions for several years since every time I tried it was offline unfortunately. I only recently joined romhacking.net, a site that has the advantage of staying online.

So anyway I just uploaded the latest official FF6 Improvement patch by DarkMage to this site, which is still apparently at version 1.07 after all this time. I forgot that version had bugs in it but it still ought to be on here because there are other patches made since then that are addendum patches to it. Like, well, the one I made that I numbered at 1.07a. I kinda forgot I made that but just remembered it after seeing it here. I DID remember DarkMage’s patch and how great I thought it was, which is why I just uploaded it.

Yeah, from what I am remembering now, I put a letter after the version number because I did not want to conflict with the version numbering scheme used by the official DarkMage patches, like if I released it as 1.08 and DarkMage also released a 1.08 that would have been a version number conflict. I used a because it was the first letter. If any problem was found I would then go to b, and then c, and so on. At least until an official version 1.08 came out, then my work would be done. But apparently after I released the unofficial version 1.07a neither I nor DarkMage released any subsequent versions, I kinda forgot about it until now, not sure what happened with DarkMage, I kinda just assumed DarkMage would keep working on it and incorporate all my fixes.

Anyway seeing as I just submitted the FF6 Improvement Patch version 1.07 here to RHDN to add to their database, it seems I ought to revive this thread. And also perhaps I should submit my own unofficial FF6 Improvement Patch FIX version 1.07a to their database next, after the official one is approved, as an addendum patch. Since this site is good at remaining online and Slick Productions has some trouble with that, we should probably try to transfer over everything from that site that is not on here yet, which meets the inclusion requirements of this site.

But I am yetisyny and General Public, both are names I use, the unofficial FF6 Improvement Patch FIX v1.07a is something I managed to put together. I was kinda hoping DarkMage would continue their work on the FF6 Improvement Patch with a 1.08, 1.09, etc. after that and incorporate those fixes. I was hoping my unofficial version would only be temporary because it seemed like DarkMage was for the most part doing a very good job other than allowing a few bugs to slip in that I managed to catch and figure out how to fix. But, I mean, once I documented how to fix them and what the problem was, I think, DarkMage and/or other people ought to have been able to continue working on their projects unimpeded once they knew what was wrong and got it all fixed. If I in any way contributed to that project coming to a premature end by documenting bugs in it I am very sorry and that was not at all my intention, I was just trying to help improve it.

Not like that was the end of things for mega-bugfix patches, there are a ton of bugfixes in Rodimus Primal’s Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition patch at https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1386/, and there are even more bugfixes in C.V. Reynolds’s C.V. Bug-Fix Compilation and Script Fix patch at https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3253.html. But, at the time, DarkMage had what I think was the biggest and best compilation of bugfix patches which helped pave the way for those later projects and personally I thought it was very impressive work, I was just frustrated by a few bugs but I managed to get things working again. I really ought to get ALL of these different patches onto romhacking.net.

From the README for my unofficial patch of this, version 1.07a, I kinda remember that I didn’t really consider this patch to be fully tested and wanted other people to test it out and I see the different suggestions I put there on things people could test out. As I recall, I thought that once this was tested it would become incorporated into the next official version of DarkMage’s patch.

Since I did not have the complete setup DarkMage did for making the different versions of the patch, and kinda had to reverse-engineer the patch, and only managed to get 2 of the 3 versions of it to work correctly instead of all 3 because the version with the fan translation was too much for me to figure out. Since the fan translation moved around text in the game, being a translation.

And some of the bugs involved text in the game, and so the bugfix patches were at different offsets or whatever compared to the official Ted Woolsey translation, and I didn’t know where or how to fix it, because I am an amateur who, then and now, is kinda clueless and just trying to do my best with my limited skills. Which do not include anything about understanding offsets or ASM hacking or pointers in ROMs, all I know is basic stuff involving checksums, internal ROM names, adding or removing headers, combining patches, and using a tile editor. Plus my skill at finding bugs and debugging them. But really my skill level is quite low, that is why I wanted someone more expert than me to help out. And I definitely thought of DarkMage as WAY more expert than me. A shame this patch did not continue to be updated, it is really quite good once you include my bugfix to undo the few bugfixes that broke things instead of fixing them.

So anyway, Rodimus Primal’s Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition is already on this site, and I just uploaded the official FF6 Improvement version 1.07 by DarkMage and it is in the Queue awaiting approval. So the 2 that are left to upload are the FF6 Improvement FIX version 1.07a by me (General Public a.k.a. yetisyny), which I originally uploaded to the forums on Slick Productions which are currently offline but thankfully someone posted a link in this thread, and the C.V. Bug-Fix Compilation and Script Fix patch version 1.14 by C.V. Reynolds which is also mainly on Slick Productions but there is also a link in a thread on ff6hacking.com, a site I am not a member of. Regardless, the point is, I just uploaded the official patch that is the subject of this thread, while the unofficial patch also mentioned here, which would be classified as an addendum patch to the official one, I cannot really upload until the first one is approved so that I can link to it in the description of my patch to say which patch it is an addendum to.

EDIT: Gah, my submission was rejected since I didn’t include 4 screenshots of the hack. OK I guess I have to make 4 screenshots and do them properly and have them be 256x224. I will re-submit it once it is ready.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Submission of 2 games to database, Zero Tolerance & Wall Jump Ninja

« on: October 03, 2018, 11:50:18 pm »

UPDATE: Zero Tolerance is still in the Queue but Wall Jump Ninja has been rejected because the RHDN staff did not see evidence that walaber had given permission for RHDN to redistribute this homebrew game, and said that ideally the creator of the homebrew game ought to submit it themselves. Just wanted people to know what the current status of things is, if you have been looking at this post at all.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Secret of Mana's intro?

« on: October 03, 2018, 11:24:37 pm »

I'm using ... FuSoYa's VWF and Vifify93's Proper-caser patches as a base.

Since that is how I play the game, with those 2 patches, that is a very good base to start out with, I agree 100% with that decision. Very smart, you start out with a variable-width font and everything in the correct case, but without any hacks that change things from the way the game originally was designed.

Your idea sounds pretty good. I would refer you to this unfinished project attempting a retranslation: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=19920.0 Some of the people who worked on that project might the text of their unfinished retranslation or some tools to recommend that they used, and they might be able to help you out. Apparently RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero worked on this. Also Hiei- worked on it too but it seems his/her work was separate and not really coordinated with RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero, from that thread. It seems RedScorpion and Thanatos-Zero never finished their project but Hiei- DID pretty much finish an English translation but never put it out because Hiei-’s work got dismissed by Thanatos-Zero because Thanatos-Zero and RedScorpion were doing their own translation, look at http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=19920.msg285004#msg285004 as well as the comment immediately following it.

My point is that Hiei- already retranslated this entire game but it kinda got discarded since it was submitted to another project that didn’t really accept it and was trying to do things differently, but you could totally use Hiei-’s work, Hiei-’s profile is here: http://www.romhacking.net/community/1586/ Maybe Hiei- still has their translation of this on their computer. My point with mentioning this is, after I discovered this while reading through the forums, I thought, well, this unreleased retranslation would be very very useful especially since its creator says it is 100% complete. Too bad it never got released as a patch.

You aren’t actually planning on doing a retranslation from what you said, only uncensoring and updating and relocalizing it, but, Hiei-’s unreleased work translates everything including the parts that were censored or left out of Ted Woolsey’s version, so if you are reinserting those parts it would come in handy.

As far as names I think generally the 3D Remake versions released earlier in 2018 for PS4, PS Vita, and MS Windows of Secret of Mana would generally have the best names for most things although I agree, you might want to keep older names for other things, I trust your judgment on this. You don’t really need a copy of the game to find names of things, you can find things like lists of weapons, armor, accessories, characters, game locations, etc. online and see what has changed between the SNES release in English and the 3D Remake in English.

EDITED: There is a Secret of Mana Editor by Moppy you can use. I updated Romhacking dot net’s version, at http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/985/, from the outdated version 0204 to the latest version 0213 that is at its official site, http://somedit.blogspot.com/, so now, either site you get it from, you get the latest version. Anyway this editor may be helpful to you although from what I have read it does still have some bugs and is not entirely perfect so I would be careful with it. (Originally I posted this before Romhacking.net had the latest version approved, I edited it now that everything is up-to-date.)

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

« on: October 03, 2018, 08:58:46 pm »

- Sword of Mana (GBA)
I great idea for a hack would to be to circumvent the Amigos System in Sword of Mana on Gameboy Advance so you can complete all the quests in the game. As is, you cannot complete quest 41 as it requires showing an Chekov a summon card only acquirable via registering friend to your game. Perhaps even a hack that marks the quest completed.

I managed to circumvent that that system in Sword of Mana on Game Boy Advance not using ROM hacks but by using cheat codes to obtain everything in the game including the summon card in question. I will just offer advice on what to do to get the summon cards, I cheated for plenty of other things in the game but since that is all you are interested in I will limit things to that.

First you need to turn on a GameShark “Master Code”, for the code giving you all cards to work:

9635298FE5AE
AED3324A4E11
9B1A965409FD

Next, here is the actual GameShark code that gives you all cards in the game:

B10396444D7E
2D50D6581661
CCD1E8D83740
9CE7A5646C71
CCD1E4C8E760

Put all those codes in your emulator and you will have all the cards. Then just show each of the 7 summon cards to Chekov and you can REALLY complete quest 41 (he only needs to see one to “clear” the quest but he will keep going for all 7).

Source: http://www.neoseeker.com/seiken-densetsu/gameshark/gba/

Another much more tedious method that can be done in emulators is basically described here: https://mana.wikia.com/wiki/Seven_Wisdoms That describes how to do it using two Game Boy Advance systems connected with a link cable. But it can also be done with an emulator able to emulate two GBAs running at once that are connected by a link cable. mGBA, NO$GBA, VBA-M, and VBALink can all do that. VBALink is slightly more advanced in the linking emulation because it can emulate a link cable over a network, while the others can only do it on the same computer. I think VBALink might also support emulation of the GBA wireless adapter but I am not sure. Anyway since Sword of Mana just uses the link cable and not wireless card for GBA, there is much better support for it in emulators if you want to use the long, tedious method. A method that does not involve any cheating or hacks at all, but is annoyingly time-consuming to get up to 100 Amigos in order to get all the summon cards.

Yeah so, I prefer just using cheat codes. Much easier! Anyway I am just giving you these workarounds because although it would be nice to have a workaround to the Amigos system via a ROM hack, you can immediately use either of these solutions (cheat codes or emulating a link cable). One of which is easy and gives you all of the summon cards immediately, the other of which is annoying and takes too long. Still if you refuse to cheat and want to do everything 100% legitimately you can try the more tedious method I outlined. I think that is silly though, much better to just put in the cheat codes, get all your summon cards, and be done with it.

13

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

« on: September 27, 2018, 10:37:08 pm »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amkDRjV16fQ - So something like this then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQU_FbQnJg4 - And like this.

It's definitely possible on both, but I don't think there's enough ROM space to even do so, especially for Star Ocean. That game is filled right to the absolute brim.

Tales of Phantasia can be expanded to 8MB and be usable in most emulators nowadays at that size, but in the case with Arche in the video I did there, I had to move a few voices into a new area due to them NOT being two voices spliced together.

It's not terribly difficult, but it's also not super easy to do either.

Whoa, good job! If you put out any hacks for those games like what I see in those videos I will be delighted! I didn’t call THIS easy, I said that about replacing a pretty small amount of text in the Zero Wing intro, and I didn’t mean SUPER easy for that either, I just meant, much easier than translating an entire RPG from Japanese into English (e.g. much easier than translating Final Fantasy V or Tales of Phantasia or Star Ocean etc.).

Substituting audio in Tales of Phantasia or Star Ocean for Super Famicom is definitely quite a lot harder than that, it involves audio codecs and ROMs that start out at 6 MB and such. And then to test the audio, well, that is also quite a bit more complicated too since you need to do the actions that trigger the different audio clips. For instance, in Tales of Phantasia there is the intro, a few cutscenes, the J-pop song, various spells and named attacks, quite a bit. Actually quite hard! Your work so far is pretty impressive.

As far as 8 MB ROMs those are supported in higan/bsnes, Snes9x 1.54 and later, and the ZSNES 8 MB custom build by FuSoYa, as well as multi-system emulators based on those previous ones, so that is pretty much standard thanks to FuSoYa unless we are talking about people that still use ZSNES and do not use the FuSoYa build.

14

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

« on: September 27, 2018, 10:16:30 am »

Speaking of text editing on games, someone should fix the Sega Mega Drive game Zero Wing’s horrible “Engrish” translation and remove all the ridiculous broken English that has turned into memes into an accurate translation with proper grammar. There are only a few lines of text that need to be changed.

There is even an accurate translation already available in text form on Wikiquote here, although it is a very literal translation, I would change it just a little, make it sound more like colloquial English but without altering the meaning: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zero_Wing Legends of Localization also has its own basic translation that, while accurate, needs some polishing: https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-take-a-peek-at-zero-wings-all-your-base-translation/ There is also a third not-quite-as-accurate but more colloquial translation on Wikia: https://villains.wikia.com/wiki/CATS

I’d use those 3 translations as a guide, in order to get a good script. Of course, I don’t know how much space there is on the screen for text or in the ROM for storing text data, and it also has to fit with the timing of the opening scene too with the visuals and sound effects and background music. But it seems quite doable compared to other translations, given how little text needs to be changed compared to, say, an RPG or visual novel.

This would probably require very little effort given how little text there is in the game, if you know how to edit text in games. Since the most common version English-language players play is the European English-language ROM for Sega Mega Drive, I would suggest just having it be a patch for that.

Basically all that needs to be changed is the opening. The rest of the game Zero Wing is fine. There is also a closing that is in bad English but apparently it is only present in the arcade version of the game released in Europe, not the Mega Drive version. In the arcade version, CATS is still alive at the end and the war is not really over, but in the Mega Drive version CATS is killed when his battleship is blown up and you win at the end, meaning, the closing credits about CATS still being alive and the war not being over are not in the Mega Drive version and thus no reason to translate text that isn’t there.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

« on: September 26, 2018, 03:50:01 pm »

Is there a tool to edit texts in Gargoyle's Quest II on the NES?
The game is supposed to be better thanks to its RPG aspects, but the dialogs are barely understandable, and certainly not immersive, which is a shame.

Not a SPECIFIC editor for that game that I know of but I found this hack here: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3684/. That hack deals with restoring some of the text that got censored so obviously the author of it, one K.K. Drunkinski, knows how to hack the text of that game. So definitely at least one person figured that out.

Also there is a whole category for script extraction/insertion utilities here: https://www.romhacking.net/?page=utilities&category=14&perpage=100&utilsearch=Go (only look at the ones with “N/A” or “Multiple Games” listed for what game they work on, the others only work on specific games and not this one). Some of those can be used to edit text but apparently you need to know certain info like offsets or whatever, I have absolutely no clue how to do it. Hopefully at least some of them have documentation to explain how to use them, or maybe there is a video online explaining it or tutorial or something. Apparently hex editors are also useful from what I looked up online, although I don’t understand exactly how. I did a Google search for tutorial videos and there are a whole bunch of them on YouTube you could watch: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+edit+text+in+nes+games&num=100&tbm=vid

Anyway hopefully someone else here actually KNOWS how to edit text in ROMs and might be able to explain which of those utilities is good and how to edit the text in an NES ROM. And how to find the offsets for where the text data is located. I told you all I was able to figure out, which was very little, but hopefully better than nothing? At least I think I gave you maybe some good leads on where you could START looking for answers.

But yeah as far as a specific utility for editing the text in that game. No, sorry, can’t find one online, pretty sure that no such editor for that specific game exists. Try those utilities, or those videos, or maybe contact the author of that hack. Or maybe someone else here who is a more seasoned ROM hacker could help tutor you in how to edit the text in a ROM. I don’t even know how to do it myself, though. Maybe I should take a look at some of those videos. This is a skill I would like to pick up, too.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

« on: September 25, 2018, 04:30:55 pm »

Man that is such a dick move from them.
I hate when romhackers start charging fees to release a hack.
Who the heck do they think they are?
Official devs? LOL

I agree, but at least he asked for money via PayPal instead of BitCoin. If someone asked me for BitCoin... yeah not gonna happen. That stuff is WAY too complicated. At least ordinary people can use PayPal without having to spend endless hours studying how to do it like with BitCoin. At least this isn’t the dark web... ROM hacking is definitely way more legit than HACKING hacking.

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Newcomer's Board / Submission of 2 games to database, Zero Tolerance & Wall Jump Ninja

« on: September 25, 2018, 12:45:59 pm »

Hi. I have submitted a freeware Sega Genesis game, Zero Tolerance, to the database. Right now it is in the queue and my screenshots of it are in the scratchpad (the ROM itself, I linked to the official website for instead of adding to the scratchpad). On the website of the company that made it, Technopop, Randel Reiss, the owner of its copyright and trademark, makes it available royalty-free for download and distribution as you can see here: http://www.technopop.net/#pgbldblk326 This makes it freeware and perfectly legal for this or any other website to host, so I added it. It is listed on many sites that list freeware games, including Wikipedia’s list of freeware games that were once commercial.

However the submission form for games does not allow to specify an author not listed in your database. I specified “R” as the author, short for Randel Reiss, but I would really like the author to be listed as either Randel Reiss, or better yet, Technopop, since they are his company and other people were involved in making it to, although he was in charge of development as the producer, and is also the person who made it available for free, legally. I was not able to upload it without specifying an author, on the form, and the form also did not allow me to add a new author.

Anyway I hope that someone who is able to create new community entries can create a new entry for either Technopop or Randel Reiss. Preferably Technopop since a bunch of people were involved with making this game. It is quite rare for a formerly commercial console game to be made freeware like this, and I suppose that since it was originally developed by a game company before made freeware it is not technically homebrew, but it is not as if this game is outside the scope of this site, and also it is perfectly legal for you to distribute, it says so right on Technopop’s official website which I linked to. So I hope this submission is accepted and you can correct the “author” field. Thank you.

In the meantime, anyone who wants to legally download the game can download it from Technopop’s official website, before it is added here, or in case it gets rejected for not technically being homebrew or something like that. I would also note that on the old site Zophar’s Domain, Zero Tolerance is one of the 27 100% legal-to-download Sega Genesis games they have, although they mistakenly list it as “public domain” when actually it IS still technically under copyright, just freeware: https://www.zophar.net/pdroms/genesis.html Open-source software under GNU GPL and stuff under Creative Commons licenses is also technically copyright too, but it is still under a free license, this is basically the same situation except Zero Tolerance does not have any source code freely available, just the ROM.
September 29, 2018, 03:38:54 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)I submitted another game to the database, this one a homebrew game for Atari 2600 called Wall Jump Ninja, made by a ROM hacker who goes by the name walaber. Unfortunately yet again I was unable to find the ROM hacker’s name in the list, the closest I could come to his or her name was “Whatever”. Hopefully if/when the Wall Jump Ninja for Atari 2600 submission is approved, the ROM hacker name can be changed to “walaber”.

The submission form for homebrew games STILL does not allow to specify an author who is not already in the database of contributors, unlike the submission form for hacks and probably also the forms for translations and utilities. Somebody should really fix the submission form for homebrew games so we can list an author not already in the database. Anyway since this is an actual homebrew game that was first developed in 2015 and the most recent version came out in 2016 and the author published the ROMs for it (NTSC, PAL, and PAL60 versions) for free online, and it was never a commercial game, this ought to be completely non-controversial to add to the database, the only problem is getting the author’s name right: walaber. Oh and here is the post where the latest version of this game was posted online, in case anyone wants to check it out before it gets approved (I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be approved): http://atariage.com/forums/topic/232200-ninja-wall-jump-game-wip/page-9#entry3506511

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Gaming Discussion / Re: De-patching?

« on: September 24, 2018, 09:08:43 am »

my translation patch for evangelion: girlfriend of steel

I just wanted to say that it is AWESOME that you translated that game, Evangelion: Girlfriend of Steel 2 (listed here), and anyone who translates Evangelion games is automatically someone I think is just the best. And also I made a mistake in my post which you and others pointed out, and I corrected it. Sorry about that! Seems XDelta3 is the best. BPS just has smaller file sizes than IPS and is able to handle bigger files than IPS... NOT XDelta3. XDelta3 makes smaller files and is also much faster, according to literally everyone who has actually used both patching systems and commented here. I misread the information about BPS online and I am a dummy.

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Personal Projects / Re: Final Fantasy IV Namingway Edition (updated to Version 1.85)

« on: September 24, 2018, 08:16:05 am »

I wrote a very nice and detailed review of Namingway Edition: https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/3747/#review. I highly recommended it as my favorite way to play Final Fantasy IV, while going through a list of all the other options and comparing them in detail.

Anyway I am glad to hear from Rodimus Primal. I hope you like my review, which was a very honest review but also very positive. And it also shows one of my predictions in the review, namely that Rodimus Primal will most likely put out another version that fixes most of the remaining issues, is probably correct. Which is one of the reasons I recommended it so highly. I also tried to be fair to Spooniest since I have not played J2Evisceration yet. But the fact that J2Evisceration stopped immediately at version 1.0 and no updates have come out since then to fix any issues reported in it, well, that is something that I do know, and Namingway Edition fixing issues that are reported in it, that is a definite advantage that I know exists, even without playing the other version.

You do know that Project II released a new version recently on September 4th, about 3 weeks ago, yes? Obviously you do. I assume you will base your work on the latest version of Project II with all of its fixes, quite excellent work by vivify93 there. Good luck, I wish you the best Rodimus! Judging by your past work, I know you can do it.

I understand taking time off to do other things, the same thing happened to me with a GNU GPL’d open-source game I was the most active developer on for awhile. I got totally burned out on it for a whole variety of reasons and ended up just not being active anymore. I made a TON of improvements to the game, lots of features added and bugs fixed, spending countless hours on it over about a year and a half, and did not get the kind of positive feedback I was expecting. And a bunch of other things made it stop being fun to develop anymore too, like bugs that were too hard for me to fix, or trying to merge a fork where they refactored the code completely and it was almost impossible to merge, or dealing with a lead developer who was mostly AWOL but was the only person who had the power to make new official release versions but kept not doing it even though I REALLY wanted him to, at the very least, put out a beta release, I would prefer a stable release but he wouldn’t even put out a beta. He just stopped releasing builds, but wouldn’t give anyone else admin rights to the SourceForge project so we could release builds! So annoying! And then for some users they saw we had not had any official releases in quite some time and they thought maybe development was dead, or they were playing the old version without the latest fixes. So I had to be putting out all these unofficial dev builds and posting about them on the forums and wiki for the game and getting people to play those instead. It just got to be a huge pain in the rear end and I just ended up stopping it because I got sick and tired of it and it wasn’t fun anymore. Thankfully since I stopped working on it, other people have taken over and they HAVE put out new versions that include all my improvements.

So I know how that is. Which is why I want to let you know you are doing a GREAT job! Because I know that developers sometimes need to hear that... I know that firsthand. Anyway thanks for all your work on Namingway Edition, you are doing a great job. I hope that you continue working on it, I really appreciate it. If more people had told me things like that about my contributions to that open-source game, I would have kept working on it longer. Since you actually get to be in charge of your own project and don’t get into fights with other developers, in some ways you have things easier than I did on that project. The game I was the most active developer on had quite the active forum site where the players and developers would talk. A ton of people played the game I was working on. That was the main thing that kept me going, as long as I did it, was how many people were counting on me and enjoying the game. I had started out as one of them, as a regular player, before I got involved in development, so I could see things from their perspective. But it just got to be too much for me to handle and it was overwhelming.

I hope that doesn’t happen to you!! Keep up the good work!

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

« on: September 23, 2018, 08:18:15 am »

You know how there were 2 games made for the SNES that had actual voice acting in them? Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean.

Tales of Phantasia got fully translated, both the text done by DeJap Translations, and another translation group, Topping Translations, did the audio. The 2 translations were combined into one that works with regular, non-interleaved ROMs by Spinner 8 and you can find it here: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/2335/

Star Ocean got its TEXT translated by DeJap Translations, same as with Tales of Phantasia, and you can find that here: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/452/ However, nobody ever bothered to translate the audio from Japanese into English as it was done for Tales of Phantasia.

Somebody needs to do an audio translation patch for Star Ocean for SNES, the way Topping Translations did it for Tales of Phantasia for SNES. Nobody even needs to do any voice acting. The enhanced remake, Star Ocean: First Departure, for PlayStation Portable, already has English voice acting, in fact quite a lot more than the original.

The relevant audio that is equivalent to audio used in the original SNES version just needs to be extracted from the PSP version, converted to the form used in the SNES version of Star Ocean, and then put into the ROM to replace its Japanese voice acting. OK maybe I was making it sound easy when I used the word “just” in that last sentence, actually it would be quite difficult, but the point is, no actual voice acting would need to be done, just ROM hacking, a single person with enough ROM hacking skills could do this. And it would be AWESOME.