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Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Gideon Zhi
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Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 06-25-06 04:20 PM, in My New Rom Hack: Super Penio Brothers! Link
Originally posted by Penio
This hack, I changed all the graphics to penises! Its really really funny, go check it out.

I put three screenshots, AND, AND The IPS that you need to patch to a mario rom. Just play its its hl play it, its hILARIOUS! lol
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-01-06 12:10 PM, in VWF/ASM tutor? Link
VWF is not an easy thing to implement, especially not if you want to allow for 16x16 tiles maximum instead of just 8x16. It's also almost impossible to do on an NES, due to the NES not having any real vram to speak of, so if that's what you're thinking about trying to do then you might as well forget it.

Here's a link to a simple DTE decompression routine I wrote for Megami Tensei 1. It allows for letter-pair indexes between #$30-7F in the script.

If you check the last post here as well, I have a fairly substantial writeup on how to convert a 16-bit relative load into a 24-bit absolute load.

And lastly, if you didn't understand any of what I just said, it's not time for you to start trying to do a vwf yet, sorry
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-03-06 10:39 PM, in Dark clouds gather on the horizon... Link
I'm with MoN on this. This is quite exciting.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-04-06 05:57 PM, in Translation: Treasure of the Rudras v2.0 Link

Three years to the day after the initial release of an admittedly rather spotty translation of Squaresoft's "Rudra no Hihou" the new version is ready! It includes quite a few improvements, including a fully variable-width font for the dialogues, a brand new and wonderfully written script, a redone opening sequence and extra letters for enemy names. The real star of the show is the script, though! It�s been fantastically cared for by M of Returner Games, whose work on Front Mission: Gun Hazard you may already be familiar with.

This patch is an almost completely new animal, and if you ever thought at all that the writing might�ve seemed a little flat in the old version, be sure to give this one a try!

Relevant linkage: Aeon Genesis
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-05-06 12:34 AM, in Translation: Treasure of the Rudras v2.0 Link
Yeah, there can be conflicts in emulators between SNES Hires and various graphics filters. I don't really know why; I just hack the games

Since Leno (on IRC) is expressing doubt about the quality of the font work, let me assure folks that the reason for the blur in the image above is due to resizing the image in Paint Shop Pro. The full-size image follows:
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-10-06 06:05 PM, in Translation: Treasure of the Rudras v2.0 Link
The spell system is based on a large dictionary of approximately 2,000 words, which it seeks through when you enter a spell name. Each word is accompanied by two bytes which determine its cost, strength, and effect. For the English version, we simply translated all of the words in the dictionary. We added a few, too, based on other words in the database; thus, spells from the Megami Tensei series work. There were a number of interesting entries in the database, including a reference to the 70s super robot anime "Raideen."

Functionally the system should behave approximately the same in English as it did in Japanese. There may be a few extremely small differences, especially insofar as allowing for twice the number of letters goes, but most of it should work fine, since it was originally syllable-based anyway.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-10-06 11:45 PM, in Translation: Treasure of the Rudras v2.0 Link
That's not a typo, that's just the system unfortunately not working correctly. You'll find that it's not supposed to just look up "teonus" from its database; rather, it starts at the last letter (I think) and does a binary search for the longest match. Once it's found one, if it hasn't built an effect for the full word, it does a binary search starting at the next as-yet unused letter. In this case, it could be finding "Eonus" in the list and using that as a full word-piece.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-11-06 02:52 PM, in Any freaking windows compatible hex editors? Link
I'll echo the Windhex32 statement. I learned on Snowbro's Hexposure program; Windhex simply feels like a Windows evolution of the program. It's intuitive, very easy to use, fast, and quite small so I can have multiple instances of it stacked on top of each other.

Windhex rules, plain and simple.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-13-06 11:52 AM, in does anyone know of any good text editors Link
No, since the .tbl format is a romhacking-specific convention (established by Thingy way back in the day) and Hex Workshop is commercial software, .tbl files are not supported. There are character map files you can tinker with, but their format is obtuse and only supports single-byte equivalencies.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-15-06 02:52 PM, in What's a good nes hex editor? Link
I've noticed a lot of "blahblahblah which hex editor blahblahblah" threads lately. Maybe we should make a sticky thread about hex editors? :p
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-23-06 02:13 PM, in Uniracers - found some things in the memory editor Link
Originally posted by BGNG
A lot of the time, you'll find data in ROMs that never amounts to much. In the old days, you could find some pretty sloppy stuff. I've even heard of a game that had some of its source code ending up inside the commercial ROM in the end. While finding text within ROMs is always a good indicator, it doesn't necessarily mean those features still exist. (Does the Map Select thing still work in the retail Ocarina of Time game? I'm not sure it does)


Here are a few nifty whoopsies and cool finds in a few games:

Monstania (one of my first major completed translations) had text and equipment relating to a fishing minigame that never made it into the final product.
Dragon Quest 5, apparently, had a phone number belonging to one of the devs buried in it.
The PAL-region release of ICO (for the PS2) necessitated a DVD-size disc (instead of a CD, like the NTSC-US and NTSC-J versions) because the devs accidentally left the game's full sourcecode on the disc!
And finally, Mystic Ark (another of my translation projects) seems to have a fully-functional debug mode in it. Or at least, I'll be pissed if it's not at least somewhat functional - I spent a lot of time rewiring the debug menus in the text :p In order to activate it, I think you need a "Debug Crystal" item, but I'm not sure how to use it. I haven't tried obtaining it yet, waiting for the English scripts to be fully functional first.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-28-06 11:19 PM, in Sutte Hakkun Link
I love Sutte Hakkun! Neat little game.

Unfortunately, the only data I can provide is text storage information (as I'm working on a translation of it) but I've a feeling that's not what you're looking for.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 07-29-06 06:17 PM, in Sutte Hakkun Link
Well, I've got tables (full kanji, I think); I've figured out the text storage (fairly simple) and I've replaced a bunch of the graphics. See here.

I've also got someone to translate, I think, but he's gotten really busy of late and I dunno if he's still in or not.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 08-06-06 07:31 PM, in Blaster Master(NES) upgrade ideas thread. Link
How about fuel conservation for the Hover engine? Allows twice as much air-time as an un-modified engine. (ASM-wise it should be fairly easy to do; just add an auto-toggle in RAM to only decrease the hover gauge for every other execution.) Or perhaps alter Dive so you still move sluggishly (even if it gives free movement) and you need a hydraulics upgrade to get the speed Dive would normall offer? Gun strength/tank armor?

Just some thoughts!
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 08-13-06 01:18 PM, in Figuring out SOE text Link
Originally posted by Zer0wned
(SOE = Secret of Evermore)
Here's what I've gathered so far regarding how SOE handles text:
Generally, it stores full words to be repetitively re-used (change 'axe' to 'cat', and every occurance [with exceptions, mentioned ahead] will be "cat" instead of "axe"), alternates with capital letters are stored seperately.

On rarer occaisions, full sentences/descriptions are stored. For example there's an easter egg where if you pester a chicken too much, you get smote by the gods. All the accompanying text is in one place and consecutive. (so "TAUNT THE GOATS IF YOU WANT, BUT LEAVE THE CHICKENS ALONE" as opposed to it just retreiving the stored TAUNT,ALONE,GOATS,etc etc.)


This sounds like fairly standard dictionary compression. Your pointers are likely to be stored in a table somewhere.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 08-16-06 05:31 PM, in Figuring out SOE text Link
'fraid that doesn't help much. The LDA you've got there is a load from -RAM- not from ROM; it's likely a buffer containing the unpacked string. What you need to do is track backwards to figure out when it gets read from ROM and stored into RAM.

If you're using Geiger's debugger, try opening up the hex editor and navigating to the address (7Fwhatever); you'll probably see the entire text string there.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 08-16-06 05:42 PM, in Compressed? gba rom... Link
Here are a few things you might want to try.

First, scour the rom using a number of different display modes in TLP. Just because the game's a GBA game doesn't mean that all of its graphics are going to be stored in "GBA" mode. Very few SNES games store their fonts in "4bpp SNES" mode, simply because it takes up four times as much space as a 1bpp monochrome mode and twice as much as 2bpp "GG" mode.

Second, when relative searching...
1) Try using wildcards between your characters. Kawa's right - a lot of GBA games store their text in 16-bit mode, with an extra byte between each character. Those extra bytes help determine which character is shown if the font contains more than 256 characters, and most Japanese games contain -way- more than just 256 characters.

2) It may seem like a no-brainer to some, but only search for letters of like capitalization. Super Robot Taisen's names are great for this - you'll find "DAITETSU" in dialogue, that's something great to search for. But if you try looking for "Cybuster" or "Gespenst", your relative searcher will get confused between the uppercase and lowercase letters, and the accuracy of your results will decrease dramatically.

Third, and this may also seem a no-brainer, but a point to be aware of is that fonts and text are two very different things. When you're relative searching, you're looking for actual text data, whereas with fonts you're looking for visual, graphical data. They may be connected - each character in the font data is usually tied to one or two bytes in the text data - but they're not the same thing. Sorry if you already know this, but it wasn't entirely clear from your first post exactly what you were talking about You're not going to be relative searching for font data, and likewise, simply changing the font won't translate your game for you. (Unless your game stores its text -entirely- in pictures, which while incredibly uncommon, isn't entirely unheard of...)

Last, in the event that you do find one but not the other, it's always possible that any given game might compress its text while not compressing its font. The opposite is also true. Hell, one game I'm working on stores -part- of its font uncompressed, while the rest of it (and its text, as well) is very much compressed. It really depends on the game.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 08-28-06 02:07 PM, in ROM Hacking Utilities Link
For those of you who love hexposure and are pissed that it doesn't work in an NT-based Windows, you need to get yourselves Windhex32. It's basically the same program, but with better table support, more features, and is Windows native.
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 08-28-06 09:41 PM, in Translation Release: Dark Lord Link

After four long years of hard work, the translation of Dark Lord (NES) is finally ready! Dark Lord is an RPG told in twelve short-ish vignettes; I like to think of it as a Japanese videogame take on the western pencil & paper style of RPG. There's a fair amount of stuff to do in the game, and it's got one of the coolest "bad" endings I've seen to date! I actually prefer the game's bad ending to its real ending, heh.

Also featured in the update are screenshots for my translations of Esper Dream 2 (NES) and Madara (NES), and an update/fix for my Guardian of Paradise (PC) translation.

Relevant linkage: Aeon Genesis
Gideon Zhi

Keese








Since: 12-05-05
From: ...behind you! Boo!

Last post: 5910 days
Last view: 5907 days
Posted on 09-03-06 03:32 PM, in ROM Expanders Link
That's all it should take, provided your pointers reach the new area.
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Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Gideon Zhi


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