Wip projects for the 7th saga (Snes)

[Joehiyo]

Sorry for disappearing, I have been really busy.

I have made some modifications to elnard to load english text.
I had to transfer some asm and text compression table files from 7th saga to elnard to
get it to load 7th saga's english text. Here is a video showing the english text loading
in elnard.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/it84wb15qqyu650/elnard_english.mp4/file

Its probably not going to be completed for some time but hopefully sometime this year
we will have elnard in english. There will probably be 2 versions, one having the
japanese text translated to english and another using 7th saga's text.

I would be very happy even just having the 7th Saga translation back ported to Elnard because of the gameplay differences. I did some testing today, and even with the "Easier 7th Saga" patch I found that a level 1 Kamil with the same stats in both games was missing Wyverns 50% of the time in 7th, and only 30% of the time in Elnard, so something is still iffy, and this would definitely contribute towards Elnard feeling less difficult. Of course, a proper retranslation would be amazing, but I'll take what I can get   I just played Dragon Quest (the original!) for the first time last year, and when I revisited 7th Saga recently the influences finally dawned on me, and I appreciated it on another level.

[Joehiyo]

Encountering this graphical bug with the decompression patch that occurs after running from battle:



Can anyone else confirm?

[frikandel]

Yes! I had this as well.

[slidelljohn]

Looks like I missed a pointer. This updated patch should fix that issue.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/q0j70c1xmeoiy1h/7th_Saga%252C_The_%2528U%2529_%255B%2521%255D_GFX_Compression_Removed_%257Bv0.2%257D.rar/file

Unfortunately I don't have any new updates for Elnard to English. The project is still a go I just
haven't been able to work on it.

[Joehiyo]

Looks like I missed a pointer. This updated patch should fix that issue.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/q0j70c1xmeoiy1h/7th_Saga%252C_The_%2528U%2529_%255B%2521%255D_GFX_Compression_Removed_%257Bv0.2%257D.rar/file

Unfortunately I don't have any new updates for Elnard to English. The project is still a go I just
haven't been able to work on it.

I'll be testing this out soon and will get back to you with any issues!

I tried to send you a PM but your box is full (as seems to usually be the case ), but I have a group of people in discord currently trying to decipher how we might translate Lux's armor (シード, ルンシード, ライシード) for a personal hack I am working on to restore item and equipment names, and wanted to reach out and see if you had any ideas or read anything about this in the various texts and guides. Obviously it reads as the English word 'seed' with variations on it, but I'm looking more for the inspiration or deeper meaning behind it in order to translate it faithfully.

[DragonAtma]

I have to wonder if the second armor ("runshido") is a pun on "rancid". After all, that's the rusty ("brown") armor.

As for modding 7th Saga, I've been a bit sidetracked by other projects; it doesn't help that I haven't found the table for what graphics are used by what monsters. Adding more spells may or may not be a pain; I don't think I've really looked at it, but since I plan to add some (Fire 3 and Ice 3 are needed, but I hope to add a few more) I'll have to find out how to make them work properly sooner or later. Dr. Fail's guide covers spell data at 0x07018, but since it doesn't cover what exactly they do (Spell X does damage, spell Y raises a stat, etc.), the info must be somewhere else.

[Zorlac]

Looks like I missed a pointer. This updated patch should fix that issue.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/q0j70c1xmeoiy1h/7th_Saga%252C_The_%2528U%2529_%255B%2521%255D_GFX_Compression_Removed_%257Bv0.2%257D.rar/file

Unfortunately I don't have any new updates for Elnard to English. The project is still a go I just
haven't been able to work on it.

Elnard to English is and has been on my retro wishlist for years. Take your time and do it justice. Most importantly, thank you for taking on this project! I have fond memories of 7th Saga as a kid and have always wanted to play thru the Japanese version with a proper translation.

[slidelljohn]

@kyuwert
Sorry about my inbox being full. I have some messages that I don't want to delete yet. I can always be reached in the forums but sometimes it takes awhile before I can reply. Unfortunately I do not know anything about the Japanese language so I wouldn't be much help with that. The only thing I can do for the translation is the programing side. Hopefully after I get all of the 7th saga text inserted into Elnard and everything working correctly someone fluent in Japanese will help with creating a authentic translation from Japanese to English. The guide books I have will be archived eventually and they could possibly help with translating the Japanese to English but I'm not sure when they will be archived and uploaded somewhere. When I archive them I wont post any links(hopefully everyone understands) but google is your friend.

@DragonAtma
I have some docs for the enemies that will help you until I create some tools for adding enemies. These docs are not finished, they have typos, some of the asm might not have been disassembled correctly, and some of my notes could also be wrong. These docs are definitely not ready but they should be shared because I have been sitting on them to long. The docs include data for sprites and animations, compressed gfx locations, and enemy AI scripts. The Hermit doc is the most complete with notes.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/4izrwglr4z54ykc/enemy_data_docs.rar/file

The plan is to create a extractor to extract all of these docs for the enemies into files and folders to help
make creating new enemies easier when compiling a new rom image.

I also have docs for spells but they are not as complete as the enemies. The spell docs (if I recall correctly)work similar to the
enemies. Ill see about getting you some of those docs as well.

I really want to add some of the Phantasy Star enemies to 7th saga but I want to remove all of the dithering from their gfx before adding them. There is also a couple of enemies I want to add that are in Mystic ark. Some of the bosses from Phantasy Star games and Mystic cant be added due to vram limitations in the rom but I have 2 different things planned to fix the limitation issue.

1. Remove mode 7 from battles
2. Modify 7th saga to use my snes modchip to double the video ram in the snes.

@Zorlac
I also have fond memories of 7th Saga as a child. I 1st played it in 94(i think it was 94) when I was 11. That was around the time I started having bad PTSD symptoms and for some reason playing 7th saga helped me. I guess it helped me block everything out.
I still don't know why playing 7th saga helped me so much at that age. I don't know if it was the challenge or if just playing something helped me. I'm leaning towards the challenge it gave me but it might have been both.

[DragonAtma]

It's a new year's eve miracle; I can return to modding 7th saga (and possibly even add new monsters!). Well, almost; unfortunately, there isn't enough room to add more slots, so unless the x30020 table is moved, I'd have to cut monsters down to the ~93 slots available. So I humbly request a table move, ideally to the x7EA00~x7FFFF space (I used up some of the previous empty space for expanded weapon and armor tables... and, for sanity, expanding all weapon, armor, and monster names to 8 bytes whether they need to or not).

As for spells, I can always reuse the graphics with a new palette (at least for now), so they're lower priority; I will eventually need to get new spells workable, but that can be put off, as the new spells generally show up later on, and the only truly unskippable ones are Fire 3 and Ice 3. It'd also be nice to let apprentices learn 24 or even 32 spells, but again, that's lower priority (while I'm aiming for 24 spells on Esuna and Valsu, I also have trimmed lists that only have sixteen spells).

Finally, there are some formulas I'd like to change, but since they don't break anything, they're lower priority. But if you want to look into them, here are my proposed formulas:

Effect spells [including vacuum]: (SpellPow*UserMag/TargetMag)-TargetRes [they never used the spell power byte,. but we can!]
HP/MP catcher: ((SpellPow + UserMag-(TargetMag/2))/2) [and uncapped, of course]
Stat gains on levelling up: int((BaseGain + rand(0,31) / 16) [so they're more granular]

Sometime I should do something to make weapons more interesting, but I still haven't decided what to do (and I feel like I already pester you too much!). In any case, thank you again for your assistance; I would never be able to make 7th Saga Second Quest workable without modding help.

EDIT: I should add that I also did some looking for new monsters (I'd need to do a bit of editing to make them match the art style, but I can do it). My decision:

Secret of Mana: Gorgon Bull, Fire Gigas, Metal Mantis, Spiky Tiger
Illusion of Gaia: Castoth, Solid Arm

And if they take up too many tiles, I can always decrease the number of frames or simply skip them. We don't need Gorgon Bull using three different physical attacks!

EDIT 2: Unfortunately, we'd also need more room for palettes. There's some data after the current palette table (x10000-x10C9F) which even appears to be palettes, but it likely involves some other (non-monster) palettes, so overwriting it would not work too well.

UPDATE: We have enough rom for palettes (I think); unfortunately, the palette data I got is wrong. Zeroing out x10000 through x100FF (which are marked as the first eight enemy palettes) doesn't change any enemy palettes, but it absolutely blanks out chunks of Rablesk (specifically the gray doors/windows and the green/orange grass and trees):



Fortunately, I did a bit of looking, and the Trick palette's first five colors (2925 2300 8608 EB0C 7111) are at x12A20. Sure enough, zeroing out a couple nearby palettes gives us an entirely black Titan! I may or may not need to look for more palettes, as there's some oddness for the palette placement of post-Gorsia enemies.

[KingMike]

@Zorlac
I also have fond memories of 7th Saga as a child. I 1st played it in 94(i think it was 94) when I was 11. That was around the time I started having bad PTSD symptoms and for some reason playing 7th saga helped me. I guess it helped me block everything out.
I still don't know why playing 7th saga helped me so much at that age. I don't know if it was the challenge or if just playing something helped me. I'm leaning towards the challenge it gave me but it might have been both.

Well that is sad to hear that you were having such troubles in your life at that time.

(as I much as I don't think 7th Saga personally gave me a good experience, chiefly due to the difficulty, when I first played it in 1998. The games I played after it, FF6 and SoulBlazer were much more fondly memorable. But that's just me.
If playing 7th Saga worked for you, then that is wonderful.  )

[xZabuzax]

I played the hell out of The 7th Saga in the mid-90s and man, I loved this game. Yeah, I know it was difficult as hell to the point of being retarded but still, it was fun going to a new location and grinding for hours just to get to another location.

I was a kid there so I had all the patience in the world grinding and having fun out of it. I'm an adult now and I don't have this type of patience but still, I have a lot of good memories of this game. I finished The 7th Saga once in a real Snes in the mid-90s and 2 times on an emulator in early 2000.

I freaking loved the OST and there was just something really cool about that battle system and mode 7, I wish more RPGs did it like The 7th Saga in that battle system. The characters & monsters' sprites and animation were pretty damn awesome, it was fluid and pretty. Breath of Fire 2 was another game with pretty cool graphics in the battle system. Yeah, I know games like Final Fantasy 3 are better but I disliked the battle system on that game, I hate when the characters & monsters barely move, Final Fantasy 3 has a pretty damn good story but a mediocre battle system IMHO.

Anyway, fun times.

[DragonAtma]

I don't know if it's been found before, but E7236 through E8235 records where overworld encounters are. It's 64 columns wide, and RHN doesn't like that sort of width, so here's a link instead:

https://postimg.cc/hzvpqPw5

As you can see, the staff at Produce were very generous in assigning encounters (not only are mountains almost completely assigned encounters, but they spill into the ocean so much there's a solid line of encounters form Barluca (x12,x13,x14) and Eygus (x06) to Melenam (x07) to the main continent. There are also a few anomalies.

Apologies for the small font in the pic, but like the last decade-plus, my new year's resolution is 1920x1080.

[MD_Prometh]

https://goldenagerpgs.com/sfc_snes/elnard_the-7th-saga/

Quite a significant amount of differences then

Looking forward to the Elnard fan translation whenever that happens

[frikandel]

I loved 7th saga back when it was released . I could only rent it here in Europe at first and would do so often. I somehow loved the stat-based difficulty of it all and always wanted to solve the mystery of how apprentices got so much stronger than the player character. I felt something was "off", not necessarily in a bad way, about the difficulty but thought it was part of the story. This gave the game a certain mystique for me which other games did not have.  Only last year did I learn it was due to a localisation error.

I had a great time with it then and I think it has aged (very) well. To think it has almost been 30 years since I first played this just blows my mind

[Joehiyo]

Was working diligently on my item name expansion/retranslation hack for 7th when...

https://imgur.com/kmmOhvi

Unfortunately with menus being sprite based, I knew this possibility was coming. We increased the item name character count from 7 to 14, and already had to make many changes to address slowdown. It's fine in emulators or devices (Super Nt) that include a sprite limit-removing feature, but I'm not a fan of making a patch that isn't fully compatible with a standard SNES. The only options here are to limit the item list in battle to 2 items (which is way too unreasonable) or limit item names to 10 letters or less, which also isn't great because many of the retranslated names are longer than that.

Either the game's menus need to be reprogrammed or a compromise must be reached. Expanding the length from 7 to 10 characters AND using a VWF would probably be okay, if that's even possible, I don't know. Otherwise, I could still release the patch as-is, meant for use with emulators. I might as well, considering how much work went into it and the fact that it's almost done.

slidelljohn, did you have any ideas on how to handle this or did you not make it to that point yet?

[DragonAtma]

I am not a SNES programmer. I am absolutely not the best person to ask for programming advice.

That said, a quick test shows that the item list has no problems overlapping enemies during the Romus fight.


So if you hunt down the monster-drawing function and adjust it to immediately redraw the item list afterwards, that may fix things.

[KingMike]

I'd suspect bosses aren't a good example.

Not sure what kind of technical tricks they could be pulling off, but possibly such big boss sprites are background layers?
(I know Mode 7 is essentially a one-layer mode, which is why I wonder if they're doing programming tricks to use two modes for different parts of the screen.
Kind of like how a few JRPGs reportedly can use one of the high-res modes JUST for the text window part of the screen to display higher res kanji.)

[Zorlac]

Any status on the Elnard translation? No rush, just looking forward to this! 

[DragonAtma]

While I have no info on the Elnard translation, I should belatedly point out to KingMike that bosses are drawn the same as all other monsters; they're big but have limited frames and often depend on mirrored blocks(7th saga uses blocks of 32x32 pixels). The final boss, in particular, has exactly one frame and twelve blocks (magic and attacking are simulated by palette changes). Even Chimera (one of the earliest ordinary monsters -- and no, he looks nothing like the Greek chimera) uses more blocks!

Presumably Kyuwert's issue was from Spideks being animated when idle (most enemies are, but not all). I still think that redrawing the item list immediately after [re]drawing enemies should fix things.

...A quick youtube check shows spell lists being drawn fine over animated enemies and bosses (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAvUuyAawvA -- warning, spoilers and a guy talking), so my best guess is that kyuwert's edit only updated the area covered by vanilla's item/etc. lists (so the proximity of the cutoff to the Spidek was coincidental). Kyuwert, are you up for testing a battle against a Serpent with the edit from reply #134?

[slidelljohn]

I don't know if it's been found before, but E7236 through E8235 records where overworld encounters are. It's 64 columns wide, and RHN doesn't like that sort of width, so here's a link instead:

https://postimg.cc/hzvpqPw5

As you can see, the staff at Produce were very generous in assigning encounters (not only are mountains almost completely assigned encounters, but they spill into the ocean so much there's a solid line of encounters form Barluca (x12,x13,x14) and Eygus (x06) to Melenam (x07) to the main continent. There are also a few anomalies.

Apologies for the small font in the pic, but like the last decade-plus, my new year's resolution is 1920x1080.

I'm pretty sure this was already posted here (post #46):
https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=31858.40

After I fully complete the elnard in english patch I work on remaking the decompression patch. After the decompression
patch is remade Ill make a enemy editor.

@KingMike
I like 7th saga but if I was to rate my favorite rpg for the snes that I played as a kid it would be FF3. All of the rpg's I use to play were:
7th saga
brain lord
breath of fire 1
breath of fire 2
final fantasy mystic quest
final fantasy 2
final fantasy 3
secret of mana

@frikandel
When i first starting playing the 7th saga I rented it as well. After some time I bought it used through funco in the US.

Was working diligently on my item name expansion/retranslation hack for 7th when...

https://imgur.com/kmmOhvi

Unfortunately with menus being sprite based, I knew this possibility was coming. We increased the item name character count from 7 to 14, and already had to make many changes to address slowdown. It's fine in emulators or devices (Super Nt) that include a sprite limit-removing feature, but I'm not a fan of making a patch that isn't fully compatible with a standard SNES. The only options here are to limit the item list in battle to 2 items (which is way too unreasonable) or limit item names to 10 letters or less, which also isn't great because many of the retranslated names are longer than that.

Either the game's menus need to be reprogrammed or a compromise must be reached. Expanding the length from 7 to 10 characters AND using a VWF would probably be okay, if that's even possible, I don't know. Otherwise, I could still release the patch as-is, meant for use with emulators. I might as well, considering how much work went into it and the fact that it's almost done.

slidelljohn, did you have any ideas on how to handle this or did you not make it to that point yet?

Unfortunately the text in battle is made of sprites. Since the text is sprites there will be sprite limits which can
cause sprites to disappear. This is one of the reasons why I want to remove mode 7 from battles. With mode 7 removed
I can have text as a background layer instead of sprites. With the extra vram space it can be used to make bigger enemies that are in games like mystic ark and phantasy star or possibly add another character to your party.

@Zorlac
Sorry for the delay. It is about 50% complete until its ready for a official release but I finally have a beta
patch for everyone to use. With the beta patch you might be able to play the whole game without running into
any text issues but there could possible be some bugs. I need to dissemble part of the rom to see if I missed
any of the text pointers that are in ASM instead of data. I also need to organize all data changes and return rom to
original size for the patch to be fully complete. Enjoy!

beta patch elnard english