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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Help with editing complex NES sprites / tilesets?

« on: August 19, 2019, 10:43:58 pm »

Wish I'd known about this before I went through the trouble of extracting about half of Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin's untranslated graphics into a less useful ADF+DAT format.  At least I got compressed and uncompressed CHR data from it so it's not a total loss...

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Translation rejected but cannot submit as Addendum

« on: May 31, 2019, 02:10:10 am »

You've accidentally looked at the submission rules for hacks, when you should've been looking at the submission rules for translations.  You can submit this as a translation addendum.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: How to change individual tile palettes in Super Mario Bros. (NES)

« on: April 10, 2019, 11:41:37 pm »

http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_attribute_tables

You'll have to change whatever ROM data is used to set the attribute tables for that screen.  If I'm counting correctly (and assuming that empty areas use palette 0), you'll have to change whatever is written to PPU addresses $27E9-27FE (the bridge) from $#0A (00001010) to $#05 (00000101), and change $27E7 (the axe) from $#53 (01010011) to $#51 (01010001).  (The PPU addresses might be $23xx depending on which nametable that room is written to.)

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Regarding Updates on Patches and Translations

« on: March 20, 2019, 09:23:58 am »

Before I answer your question, I'd like to point out that if you click on the date in the Last Modified field, you'll actually find that the updated patch was indeed released on June 29 as stated, thus meaning that it's correctly sorted in the list, making the general answer to your question "yes."  However, there are many other patches that aren't sorted properly in terms of when they were actually posted on this site.  For example, this patch was created in October of 2016, but wasn't posted to the site until March of 2018.  If you sort by date, this patch appears under October 2016, so you wouldn't have seen it when it was posted if you were relying solely on this function.

That's what the "sort by added" filter is for.  Using that gives you a list of patches in (reverse) chronological order of when the patch was first posted.  Of course, this has the opposite problem of ignoring when the patch was updated (which you incorrectly surmised was the flaw of the "sort by date" filter).  So you'll have to look at both lists to be 99% confident that you have seen all of the latest patches and the latest updates to those patches.

However, this still isn't perfect.  I will point you to this example of a patch for which the last update was posted in July 2017, but shows as April 2017 on the Date list and November 2016 on the Added list.  So the best way to make sure that you don't miss anything is to click on the "See More Translations..." link to the right of the page and look through the list of Last Updated Translations on a semi-regular basis.  The Latest New Translations list scrolls too quickly for casual persual due to all of the Spanish translations, but new patches will show up at the top of the Added list anyway so this shouldn't really matter.

I suppose there could be a "sort by modified" filter, but it would only be useful for these edge cases and largely non-useful otherwise (since you'll end up having a lot of patches show up at the top of the list for minor things like checksum corrections and image additions).

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Need advice on a sensitive topic for a retranslation.

« on: February 13, 2019, 08:49:03 pm »

That sort of reasoning is incredibly easy to turn around.

Yes, that's how reasoning that's almost entirely based on a differing set of priorities works.  Here's another example:

The factors for and against a change like this need to be weighed for each individual change, and shouldn't be decided by blanket ideas of offensiveness and moral purity. And when I put "someone might be upset because this translation seems to change the author's original intent" and "someone might be upset because one bad word was translated correctly in an old game they might not even have known about" on the scales... the second carries zero weight, even in what I would consider this generally inconsequential issue, where the odds of either of those possibilities is low. A video game is not a hate group or polemic, it's not necessary to sanitize every single wart of the past on general principle for the future's edification, especially since the mistranslated content is still available.

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Programming / Re: How to solve problems using programming (thinking like a computer scientist)?

« on: January 21, 2019, 01:59:07 am »

Though my acquaintance with programming is pretty much entirely at the hobbyist level and I don't do anything remotely related as a job, I think most programmers would agree that another useful tip is just to write whatever comes to your mind that might solve the problem and try it.  If it doesn't work, then figure out why, make the appropriate changes, and try again.  Doing something and failing is a far better way of learning and solving problems than staring at the screen because you want to make something perfect the first time.  The computer is generally far quicker and more accurate at pointing out your mistakes than your own brain is.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: WANTED: Metal Max English translation, bounty 999,999 G (FULFILLED)

« on: December 09, 2018, 09:54:26 pm »

Nice!  I was always planning on playing the remake eventually, but this will work fine too.

In regards to the readme, I would've went with "Gonorilla Clan" myself, but maybe that's a little too gross...

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Artelius' Weird Dictionary

« on: November 23, 2018, 05:24:00 am »

Artelius' way of using a dictionary is very crude and inefficient to my eyes.  $04 is actually a quasi-end-token that tells the game to immediately go to the next pointer in the pointer table.  Thus, the pointer table itself tells the game what dictionary entry to grab.  $05 is the actual end token, while $01 is a page break.  So the text in the game looks something like this:

Code: [Select]

(Text 1)
the <$04>

(Text 2)
more <$04>

(Text 3)
you <$04>

(Text 4)
give, <$04>

(Text 5)
get.<$05>
So if the pointer table looks like this:

Code: [Select]

(Text 1)(Text 2)(Text 3)(Text 4)(Text 1)(Text 2)(Text 3)(Text 5)
you get

Code: [Select]

the more you give, the more you get.
At any rate, here is a dump of most if not all of the Japanese text in the game.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Metal Slader Glory .ips format patch

« on: November 04, 2018, 07:45:32 pm »

Another thing you should know is that IPS isn't usually used for expansions since IPS doesn't handle those very well, and the patches often include big chunks of the original ROM.  I should probably replace my patch for 4 Nin Uchi Mahjong with a BPS patch.

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Help Wanted Ads / Re: [Art][NES] Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin: Okhotsk ni Kiyu

« on: November 02, 2018, 10:17:18 pm »

Translation is now underway, but the Japanese art will still need to be modified.  I will have more details than I've already mentioned above when the translation is inserted and playtesting is underway.

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Personal Projects / Re: Translations of early Famicom games

« on: October 09, 2018, 10:05:32 pm »

Thanks for mentioning that. You can probably assume, but I haven't offered to help with that since not only am I working to dump all remaining Game Gear game scripts, but I'm also on the hook to finish translating a couple scripts like Bahamut Senki and Shinseiki Odysselya. I'd like to see it done, but for now it makes more sense if someone else offers to help with Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin.

Yeah.  Like I said, it's a big script.

I hope my table file helped at any rate.

Unfortunately, Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin has a pretty complicated text subroutine.  Something like ten different types of control codes.  The pattern table only properly maps to the first 0x40 characters (i.e. the space, the non-dakuten hiragana, and the punctuation).

Rob

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Personal Projects / Re: Translations of early Famicom games

« on: October 09, 2018, 01:35:11 am »

I have also dumped the script for Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin, and would be highly likely to complete a hack if I can get the requested help.

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Help Wanted Ads / [Art][NES] Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin: Okhotsk ni Kiyu

« on: October 05, 2018, 04:58:18 am »

I have reached a point where I am reasonably confident that I can deliver a high-quality translation hack of the Famicom version of Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin, the sequel to Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken and the second of the Yuji Horii Mysteries.  The main help that I need is a competent translation of the script, which is linked below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x4i2rcia869cblv/hokkaidoscript.zip?dl=0

I am nearly certain that this is the entire script for the game aside from a few incidental things related to starting the game.  As you can see, it is quite large, so I do not expect a quick response to this request.  As I feel that this game actually merits the effort, I'm also asking for help with converting any artwork from Japanese into English.  There are a few examples of this, most notably the title screen and a couple of in-game title cards.

If there is any doubt about my part in this, allow me to say that I've already reinserted the Japanese script into an expanded ROM without making use of the dictionary and embedded pointer subroutines that allowed the programmers to compress the text sufficiently, and have converted the pointers to 24-bit.  Preliminary testing suggests that this worked without any major hiccups (the one bug I ran into I am now aware of what caused it, and fixing it will be easy particularly once I have a translation and can use the dakuten and katakana subroutines for more coding space).

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Villgust FC (re)translated!

« on: October 01, 2018, 02:06:30 am »

Thanks for the shout-out.  I still haven't done a high-quality translation hack for a game that I thought was worthy of a news post, so...

I knew the translator for Villgust Gaiden (and Venus Wars, which could also use a rehack) back in my Usenet days.  He was a typical nerdy teenager, and his liberal addition of profanity was not at all surprising.  I think his favorite game was FF5 (which we all referred to in the mid-'90s as "FF5j" for some reason, even though it was 'j' by definition) and he was also deep into the ZZT/Megazeux scene.  There's still a lot of his posts on Google Groups.

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Help Wanted Ads / Re: [Technical][NES] Outlanders

« on: September 25, 2018, 09:59:33 pm »

Heh, on that note, I read on a Japanese site (https://www25.atwiki.jp/famicomall/pages/23.html) that entering the password "ざ" (za) will give you max stats. If that's the kind of thing that might make this game more tolerable, it might be nice to determine what character "ざ" is in this translation, and mention the cheat in the readme.

From what I can tell, that password would break the game pretty badly, since you have some items and abilities that you couldn't possibly have without other things that you don't have.  But looking at the password reminded me that I hadn't tested the game in Nestopia, which revealed a differing behavior between that and FCEUX (which might have also manifested when playing on real hardware) that I needed to fix.  So that's a serious bug averted anyway.
September 26, 2018, 11:49:57 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)The submission was rejected due to a crash on the first dialogue box.  Could anybody look at this for me?  I want to make sure it's not something weird on my end.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t2ayv87rwfgr2f6/outlanders.bps?dl=0

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Help Wanted Ads / Re: [Technical][NES] Outlanders

« on: September 25, 2018, 06:41:38 am »

Welp, after a few days of playtesting and tedious little hacks, it's done.  If you or Eien want some notes in the readme, I'll be writing it up and submitting everything tomorrow morning or thereabouts.

BTW, I don't recommend anyone actually play this game, at least not without cheats.  It's very obviously programmed by Micronics.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: War of the Dead (PCE) translation patch... happy 30th anniversary!

« on: September 08, 2018, 01:03:21 am »

Yeah, I checked the readme to make sure I hadn't missed it.  You might be thinking of X-SERD, which just plain doesn't work in MagicEngine IIRC.

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Help Wanted Ads / Re: [Technical][NES] Outlanders

« on: September 07, 2018, 03:07:26 am »

Thanks!  Fits in there quite snugly.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: War of the Dead (PCE) translation patch... happy 30th anniversary!

« on: September 07, 2018, 02:18:21 am »

Sorry for the necro, but I just wanted to note for any weirdos like me out there who prefer to use MagicEngine for PCE play that in that emulator, text mysteriously starts disappearing about 75% of the way into the game, around the time you have to thoroughly explore the ruins.  Probably related to the small expansion that was done.  It works fine on RetroArch/Mednafen.  If you've already made progress under MagicEngine, just get a password (the text asking you if you want a password is missing, but the password itself shows up if you just press Button I).

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Help Wanted Ads / Re: [Technical][NES] Outlanders

« on: September 06, 2018, 09:42:47 pm »

I do remember Pocket Zaurus using the same setup, which my friend DvD hacked. He hacked the game to display 2 lines per string by hijacking the dakuten row.

I changed a dakuten control code to a line break to allow for an arbitrary number of lines per string (usually 2 or 3).  The text window is big enough to where this shouldn't present any major problems aside from having to move text around.