[MD] Moving Adventure Psy-O-Blade

[mziab]

* the description text in the living room, which seems formatted for a smaller window, because it's indeed formatted for a small window : this text can happen twice in the game, one of these being in a small window. To fix that would mean creating a special event to select between two texts, being the same, but formatted differently. I may do that in the future, but I'm not sure it's worth the pain (I have an idea about how the event flags work, but I'd have to check if there are free flags in the RAM).

Well, one way to resolve this would be to implement automatic line-wrapping, which could be pretty simple if the game stores the currently displayed string in a buffer and window width is easily accessible. Not many translations do this, even though the overhead is negligible. The only patch I personally know to do this is the Front Mission translation by F.H. It's a nice thing to have to be sure.

[tryphon]

Good idea indeed. It's worth a try. Window width is accessible when the window frame is drawn, but I'm not sure it's kept after that (but it shouldn't be too difficult to save it).
November 25, 2014, 04:35:22 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
New version today : download it here.

Changes :

* 8x8 VWF for the main script
* All typos reported hopefully fixed
* Fixed weird characters in the intro text
* Fixed crash in the intro text

To do before final version :
* 8x16 VWF for intro text and ending text
* recode splash screen and add PresidentLeever and boombafunk in the splash screen
* implement automatic line-wrap

I played the game up to the end, so it should work.

Please continue to report typos and bugs, before I submit the translation to the site.

Many thanks to all who contributed, and who will

[goldenband]

As I said over on Sega-16, my wife and I just played through the whole game on real hardware (EverDrive-MD on a Genesis Model 2) and using the latest patch. You all did a wonderful job with it. Here are the issues I found:

Crashes and Graphical Issues

The only crash I saw was in the battle vs. Arthur in the room with the proton gun. When I threw the uppermost "Part" at him first, the game immediately crashed, and he only got out the letter "A" (instead of saying "Aargh" or whatever). I had to power-cycle the console to resume play, but when I did, I threw a different item at him first, threw the top "Part" item at him last, and had no problems. (However I reset again when I realized that I probably didn't need to throw anything at him.)

The game itself was free of graphical issues, but the ending credits had some problems. Almost all of the job titles, and many of the people's names, had their last couple letters corrupted. Also, the very last screen had a white-dot pattern overlaying most of the screen, but not the portion to the left of the final character portrait. This looked to me like tile corruption.

Spelling/Grammar Errors and Typos

Here's what I found, with errors on the left and corrected version on the right. Sorry I can't specify exactly where all of it was:

adjustement > adjustment
embarassing > embarrassing
other various > should be "various other"
unusuable > unusable
syncronize > synchronize
morse code > Morse code
vaccuum > vacuum
the each particle > I think it should just be "each particle", IIRC
Acccording > According
purprose > purpose
dissassemble > disassemble (not sure whether I actually saw this one, it went by too quickly to be sure)
principle mission > principal mission (grammatical error)
Articificial > Artificial
Hybernation > Hibernation
as good as dead.I > as good as dead. I (space is missing)

There were also two other bits of weirdness:

"Material Room" vs. "Materials Room" -- it showed up with both names, but should probably be standardized.

Finally, at one point Keith said "...Mark is..." for no apparent reason, and it didn't really make sense. Is that in the original?

BTW the character names at the beginning (overlaid in white atop the graphics) are very difficult to read, at least using composite video on a CRT. But it's not a big deal.

Huuuuuge thanks for all your work on this!

[tryphon]

Thanks for this detailed report.

I'll check bugs carefully. If you played with the last version(with VWF), I know the end is broken (I'm currently adding a new VWF for it).

I didn't notice the bug vs Arthur. Fixing it will be my priority.

I'll fix then all the typos and the inconsistencies in the script.

Do you remember where the "Mark is..." line occurs ?

For the characters' names at the beginning, it's in fact even worse in Japanese. I'll see if I can change the colors, or the palette used.

I'll credit you and your wife in the splash screen

[goldenband]

Do you remember where the "Mark is..." line occurs ?

Based on my notes, it was after the Arthur fight, and before the "morse code" typo. I think it was shortly after the "Psy-O-Blade" splash screen, but I could be wrong. It also had ellipses on both sides, if that helps.

I'll credit you and your wife in the splash screen

Awesome!

[tryphon]

Based on my notes, it was after the Arthur fight, and before the "morse code" typo. I think it was shortly after the "Psy-O-Blade" splash screen, but I could be wrong. It also had ellipses on both sides, if that helps.

Locating the text in the script is easy, locating it in the game is much harder. But the game is short, and you streghtened the possible locations quite a lot.

It's surely a Japanese sentence that is hard to translate when lacking the context. The problem with this game is that dialogues are scattered in the ROM. I could provide a script dump to Eien Ni Hen, but was unable to tell her which dialogue follows another.

Concerning the bug you mentioned, I tried to reproduce it with Regen. It's very strange : it never occured precisely where you told, but sometimes almost anywhere when picking any option. I never succeeded in reproducing it twice at the same spot. So I'm afraid it'll be a nasty thing to fix. 

I'll do my best.

[goldenband]

It's surely a Japanese sentence that is hard to translate when lacking the context. The problem with this game is that dialogues are scattered in the ROM. I could provide a script dump to Eien Ni Hen, but was unable to tell her which dialogue follows another.

I hope I'm right about the name "Mark" and didn't write it down wrong. Regardless, it was a single offhand comment that didn't seem to fit with everything around it.

Concerning the bug you mentioned, I tried to reproduce it with Regen. It's very strange : it never occured precisely where you told, but sometimes almost anywhere when picking any option. I never succeeded in reproducing it twice at the same spot. So I'm afraid it'll be a nasty thing to fix. 

The good news is that if you save beforehand, it's easy enough to get around the bug. And of course, if it turns out to be in the original game, you're not obligated to fix it!

[tryphon]

The good news is that if you save beforehand, it's easy enough to get around the bug. And of course, if it turns out to be in the original game, you're not obligated to fix it!

What I fear is that the bug can happen randomly on any menu entry (though very rarely). For example, I could select the menu entry that didn't work for you and I never had a problem up to now. To the contrary, I had problems with last entries...

I fixed a bug that was present in the original game, that forced you to select twice an option in a menu. I'll check if my fix causes this second bug.
November 30, 2014, 05:53:05 PM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
I've made some tests. The bug is in the original version. It occured 6 times out of 150 attempts, so it's quite rare.
I don't think I'll try to fix it, because it's a really nasty one to trace, and not a critical one.

It's certainly due to a routine that should have disabled VBLANK but forgot. I have no means to determine which one (unless I disassemble the whole code, doesn't seem worth it).

Thanks for spotting it !

[goldenband]

Hey, glad to help! And glad to hear that it's an "inherited" but minor problem. The game allows us to save almost anytime, so a rare crash isn't a big deal.

[Eien Ni Hen]

I hope I'm right about the name "Mark" and didn't write it down wrong. Regardless, it was a single offhand comment that didn't seem to fit with everything around it.

The good news is that if you save beforehand, it's easy enough to get around the bug. And of course, if it turns out to be in the original game, you're not obligated to fix it!

Just chiming in on this one. You're right, it's "...Mark..." in the English script, and the Japanese is the same thing: (・・・マーク・・・).

I think the speaker (Keith) is kind of muttering to himself that Mark is dead, but it's pretty vague in the original text.

Also, I can't believe there were so many typos in my translation. I thought I had gotten all of them during proofreading. :/ Thanks for catching them.

[goldenband]

Just chiming in on this one. You're right, it's "...Mark..." in the English script, and the Japanese is the same thing: (・・・マーク・・・).

I think the speaker (Keith) is kind of muttering to himself that Mark is dead, but it's pretty vague in the original text.

Ah, that makes sense. Would it be worth rendering as "...poor Mark...", or is that taking too much of a liberty?

Also, I can't believe there were so many typos in my translation. I thought I had gotten all of them during proofreading. :/ Thanks for catching them.

You're welcome! Typos are easy to fix and I'm glad to help, especially given the high quality of the translated text. I hope you're able to work on more Mega Drive games!

[Eien Ni Hen]

Ah, that makes sense. Would it be worth rendering as "...poor Mark...", or is that taking too much of a liberty?

That sounds fine to me.  And I'm glad you liked my translation. The Japanese script is poorly written, so I cleaned it up a lot for the English version.

Also, tryphon, you did a great job with the hacking! I like the way the VWF looks!

[tryphon]

Thanks, I did my best
It would be a shame if the game didn't look well with all the work you did

[akualung]

I've finished the game in about two and a half hours, it's very short but enjoyable. Didn't notice any bug worth mentioning. Thank you very much for this translation, Eien ni Hen. 

[tryphon]

If you played the final version I submitted 2 days ago, you had noticed the shoot'em up part is still easy (only 3 hits needed).

I uploaded another patch yesterday with the complete shmup, but it seems it wasn't taken into account.

Just in case, here it is !

If someone can help me telling how to update a submitted patch, thanks in advance.

[Digitsie]

The page's download got updated with 1.1 though the page itself just says 1.0

[goldenband]

I played through the first half of the game with the new patch, since I wanted to reach and beat the shmup minigame before considering the game 100% beaten. Everything looks terrific, and (though I was paging through dialog boxes quickly) I didn't see any typos or glitches. And thanks so much for the shout-out! That got a big smile from my wife.

Speaking of the shmup minigame...man, is that thing grafted on or what? I guess they were trying for a Galaxy Force II/Space Harrier sort of interlude, but it's not well-executed. It seems weird and out of place to me, and doesn't "flow" at all -- one of those levels that somehow manages to be easy and cheap at the same time.

[Svit]

I beat the game (v.1.1) on real hardware and I  found only one explicit jamb: