[Archived] Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas.

[NeoTorpor]

Hello! I am new at this forum, so far i have a bit of experience with assembly. After several months of digging, Would be a romhack porting Harvest Moon GBC to NES? Or just pure bootleg?. I don't know where to ask this so i took a shot and posted it here. Since there is a Harvest Moon NES bootleg made by some Chinese team with very annoying music and there is no translation (yet). It seems that the dudes "ripped off" the data from HM GBC and it's a pretty dirty way to do it but very interesting. So, could it be a romhack or a bootleg? Thank you.

[KingMike]

No, they are completely different hardware. You cannot port from GBC to NES.

[NeoTorpor]

I mean, using the data which is already made and coding it to the NES hardware. Sprites, Music, but making the code by myself. Or maybe with the aid of any disassembler. The Chinese team did it with the bootleg, the graphics came from the GBC version of the game. The gameplay can be found via youtube as "Harvest Moon bootleg".

[Psyklax]

No, they are completely different hardware. You cannot port from GBC to NES.

Well, I think those two sentences are not mutually exclusive. Yes, the NES and GBC are completely different hardware, so taking the code and placing it into the other system is impossible. But I wouldn't say you "cannot" port, because what's a port, after all? You can port anything to anything. The problem is that you'd have to write the game from scratch. Sure, you might be able to imitate some of the logic, but given the difference in hardware, it would be a totally new game.

[Chronosplit]

Someone just tested it out, The version of Trials of Mana that was extracted from the collection is not compatible with every single hack for SD3.  This shocks no one, I'm sure.

Anyhow, it'd be great if we could get the 3 player back up and going but the situation sounds like it'll take some doing.  I'm probably asking for a taller order than I'm thinking.  EDIT: Looks like 3-player already works after all.  Bugfixes do not.

[SergeEXE]

Someone just tested it out, The version of Trials of Mana that was extracted from the collection is not compatible with every single hack for SD3.  This shocks no one, I'm sure.

Anyhow, it'd be great if we could get the 3 player back up and going but the situation sounds like it'll take some doing.  I'm probably asking for a taller order than I'm thinking.

I also just tested out the Bug-fix patch from the Insane Difficulty forum, which unfortunately did not work. I would very much like those fixes more than just about anything else and registered after testing to suggest it.

[KingMike]

Well, I think those two sentences are not mutually exclusive. Yes, the NES and GBC are completely different hardware, so taking the code and placing it into the other system is impossible. But I wouldn't say you "cannot" port, because what's a port, after all? You can port anything to anything. The problem is that you'd have to write the game from scratch. Sure, you might be able to imitate some of the logic, but given the difference in hardware, it would be a totally new game.

Oops. Wrong intent. I meant as in "cannot port by simply hacking the ROM", would need to write new code from scratch.

[Shade Aurion]

Perhaps now that there is a complete spanish translation of Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, it would be easier to do an english translation :3

[Dzumeister]

There have been title hacks for Seiken Densetsu 3 before, so I was hoping someone could make one that takes the Trials of Mana logo from the new localization and add it to the title screen and intro credits crawl. It would be great if the patch could work with Neill Corlett's translation, too.

[WeebeeGeebee]

Here's a hack idea - Take the title screen from Trials of Mana and copy it. Then take the small font that was already in the Niel Collette patch of SD3, the spell and item information font. Scrap every bit of the big text from the game's memory. That should make room for more dialogue space. This idea would basically be what Secret of Mana Relocalized is, but for SD3. A condensed font. Dialogue more closely following the Japanese script. And if it's even possible - fixes for some of the stat effects that didn't get implemented due to coding errors.

Even in the official Trials of Mana translation I've read that none of those bugs were fixed. Also - the M's. Even on the old Niel Collette patch the way the "legs" of M's blur together always drove me crazy. Not on the big font, those were always clear due to the size of them. But the M's in the spell /item font would mash together especially on CRT Svideo, and this is a thing even on the new translation. I've always thought... Why not take those lowercase W's - invert them and use _those_ as M's? It would still look fairly clear since the little divits in the lowercase W is very pronounced.

https://ibb.co/v13ZLck
An upside down W makes a much better M. It just looks easier to distinguish.

[Dzumeister]

Here's a hack idea - Take the title screen from Trials of Mana and copy it. Then take the small font that was already in the Niel Collette patch of SD3, the spell and item information font. Scrap every bit of the big text from the game's memory. That should make room for more dialogue space. This idea would basically be what Secret of Mana Relocalized is, but for SD3. A condensed font. Dialogue more closely following the Japanese script. And if it's even possible - fixes for some of the stat effects that didn't get implemented due to coding errors.

Even in the official Trials of Mana translation I've read that none of those bugs were fixed. Also - the M's. Even on the old Niel Collette patch the way the "legs" of M's blur together always drove me crazy. Not on the big font, those were always clear due to the size of them. But the M's in the spell /item font would mash together especially on CRT Svideo, and this is a thing even on the new translation. I've always thought... Why not take those lowercase W's - invert them and use _those_ as M's? It would still look fairly clear since the little divits in the lowercase W is very pronounced.

https://ibb.co/v13ZLck
An upside down W makes a much better M. It just looks easier to distinguish.

A VWF would be more desirable than either the localization's or Corlett's smaller font, I think. Or even injecting Chrono Trigger's font, similar to how the Secret of Mana Relocalization/FuSoYa patch did theirs: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/snes/patches/18readme.txt.

I personally just want the Trials of Mana logo for the title screen and opening credits crawl. The fan effort we got years ago is more than suitable.

[Foffy]

I suppose my idea is also a request for help in the possible chance it's not hard to learn the skills. My general question is how easy would it be to edit GBA sprites? From what I understand, color palettes for NES and SNES games played a role in what sprites were colored as, and the two games I was interested in dabbling with are both SNES ports/remakes/updates, them being SMB3 and SMW. More specifically, I was interested in recoloring the Koopalings to better match their artwork, as I believe they just used colors they had in the SNES version of SMW with zero consideration for the artwork of said characters, and the SNES version of SMB3 just seems to have visual oversights all over the place. I was curious as to how simple or complicated this can be, seeing as I'm largely interested in recolors with the potential of maybe using more fitting sprites made in that style.

[WeebeeGeebee]

A VWF would be more desirable than either the localization's or Corlett's smaller font, I think. Or even injecting Chrono Trigger's font, similar to how the Secret of Mana Relocalization/FuSoYa patch did theirs: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/snes/patches/18readme.txt.

I personally just want the Trials of Mana logo for the title screen and opening credits crawl. The fan effort we got years ago is more than suitable.

Well. The ROM for Trials of Mana has already been extracted and is circulating the internet. I'm sure someone out there can figure out how to extract the title screen and create a patch to put _just_ the title screen into the old translation. But what I would really want to see is a version that tries to combine the best of both.

Scrap out the bigger text from the memory to free up space. Take the item / spell information font from the old translation and use that as the main font. Swap the lowercase M's for inverted lowercase W's. So that the m actually has distinguishing features. Ridges. And a middle leg that _doesn't_ go all the way down. I have always hated the M's in that font, how they just blur together. Even in the new official localization the M's just blur because of how close the "legs" are in proximity to each other.

Copy as much of the "official localization" text as possible. Names for characters. Spells. Items. Places. Etc. Then bring that over to the old Niel Corlette translation after implementing a smaller font. Or VWF, or whatever.

Personally I like FuYoSa's SoM font but it would probably look very out of place in SD3 / Trials.

The official localization font is honestly just _too_ small. It's hardly legible from a distance. But they made this for Nintendo Switch. They figured people are more likely to be playing this in handheld mode than on a TV.

The new font is tiny even compared to the old Niel Corlette font.

https://ibb.co/tswp1yF
New "press A to select character"

https://ibb.co/6svTpxZ
Old "select a character and press A"

And something I actually wonder about.

In the old translation, the intro scroll backstory uses the same font as the in game dialogue boxes.

https://ibb.co/8zQ6h3h
Old intro scroll.

https://ibb.co/ZNLXDYg
Old game dialogue.

The text is being recalled from the same place. It's the same font in both places.

But in the new official Square translation, the intro scroll font is a different font from the in game dialogue font.

https://ibb.co/CJKrJzR

It's actually a better font than either the new localization's small font or the old Niel Corlette item / spell information font.

It's small without being too small. M's aren't blurry. The text actually looks nice from a fair distance, so why didn't whoever Square hired to romhack their game just use this as the main dialogue font the same way Niel and his team used the same big font across both intro scroll text and dialogue text?

Sure it probably wouldn't work as good in the tight spaces in the menus like the super condensed font, but it would certainly make a much better font for the actual game dialogue.

I don't see why they'd make such a nice medium sized font for the intro scroll and then choose the tiny little menu font for in game dialogue boxes instead, makes absolutely no sense.

[Dzumeister]

Well. The ROM for Trials of Mana has already been extracted and is circulating the internet. I'm sure someone out there can figure out how to extract the title screen and create a patch to put _just_ the title screen into the old translation. But what I would really want to see is a version that tries to combine the best of both.

From what I've seen of the localization, the fan translation is close enough and is definitely more than serviceable. You're not missing much (if at all) other than some rewordings.

Personally I like FuYoSa's SoM font but it would probably look very out of place in SD3 / Trials.

The Trials localization's dialogue box font already looks so out of place.

[WeebeeGeebee]

Is the Trials dialogue font a Variable Width Font? Can the Trials rom be edited to change that font? Can the title screen from Trials be grabbed and transplanted back into the Niel Corlette patch?

[#]

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[Googie]

I wanna see this guy...



In this game.

[ArstanNeckbeard]

I also read the news about [Romancing SaGa 2] cancellation. For the remake I agree in that the visuals while not a complete turn off (at least to me), does lose the charm it once had. Wish that SquareEnix had included an option to play it with the new graphics or with the original, like how Wonder Boy and the Dragon's Trap allows.

I'll chime in to bump this. I've bought RS2 on both Android and Steam and can't get past the backgrounds, deformed sprites, and gameplay changes. Hopefully someone picks it up.

[tvtoon]

Is the Trials dialogue font a Variable Width Font? Can the Trials rom be edited to change that font? Can the title screen from Trials be grabbed and transplanted back into the Niel Corlette patch?

The ToM font is VWF, unlike the original one. Both are at the same address 3E2F00, uncompressed but the SD3 uses the 2BPP linear format.

The title screen is close to that, also uncompressed in ToM, and by watching what have been done, I think it is trivial to change the stuff on SD3.

[PublicEnemy1]

I don't know if it counts as a hack or a translation, but I'd like to see somebody try to re-implement Dragon Quest 4 DS's party chat back into the English version, using the script from the mobile game. I don't have a phone, nor do I particularly like mobile controls. I'd like to experience the game in full, and mostly blind. I have most of the Dragon Quests except 4, 6, and 7, and I'm doing a marathon of all of them in celebration of the Hero getting into Smash. 4 is on sale at my local game shop.