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| ROM Hacking | Ender |
| Translation | LittleBlue |
| Editing | Arrow |
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| Kanji/Kana Mapping & Tables | 100% |
| Font Replacement | 100% |
| Item Translation | 0% |
| Pointer Locating | 10% |
| ASM work* | 98% |
| Dialog Translation | 10% |
| Script Editing & Reinsertion | 0% |
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| February 9, 2006 |
Arrow contacted me the other day, and offered to help with script editing. A certified ACC addict, Arrow is the perfect person for the job.
On the ASM side, I've been working out a VFW scheme, I just have to make it work. I did implement a word-wrap function, making script insertion a lot easier, as the original version had line breaks inserted into the script as needed.
The script insertion tool still needs some work, as it is evolving with the script itself.
Finally, I've changed the font a bit from the first Arial-based version. It looks slightly better for the 8 x 14 font. See the screenshots above for comparison.
The font will have to be changed again if the VFW code works, but this will have to do for now.
We'll keep you posted. Ciao!
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| January 21, 2006 |
Phew! The script decoder now works on one-byte values exclusively, and I have the text decompressor up and running!
The last* bit of ASM hacking I will need to do is to clear the text output screen properly. The original version
cleaned up the screen on the fly, and I think it used spaces to overwrite any previous on-screen text. It is more efficient to clean up only what you need to display, but it doesn't work for me.
After this, I can go on to test script reinsertion. There's still the items and save selection text to be done, so
we're not out of the woods yet. Still, text decompression was a big hurdle, (or so i thought) and now that's
done, I can now consider a variable width font after the translation is complete.
I'll be cleaning up my posts and adding screenshots soon.
(Note: * - not including variable font width coding)
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| January 20, 2006 |
Good news! LittleBlue has finished translating script 4! Script 4 contains the dialog
for chapter 1 and the ending credits dialog as well. I've split the script into four parts,
according to how they appear in the ROM. Script 4 is the second shortest, with scripts 2 and 3
taking quite a lot of space, and 1 consisting mostly of chapter introductions.
The original ROM used 16x14 fonts. The first time around I managed to hack it
to use 8x14 fonts, but still using the same layout as the 16x14 fonts, so it was still
28 bytes per character. This meant that half of the font was wasted. With 14 extra bytes
unused per character that would be 1792 bytes gone to waste that could be used for
the script.
I've just managed to fix the code to use the adjacent bytes, so each character only
uses 14 bytes.
Over the weekend I hope to play around with the script decoder. The original script
used two-byte codes for kanji and special commands. I've decided that I can save a lot
of space if I trim down the commands to one byte. This way, I can arrange the encoding
as follows:
| $00 - $30 | Command Codes |
| $31 - $7F | Compressed text codes (for names, common letter combinations) |
| $80 - $FF | Character set |
Which brings me to the compressed text routine... this will be my next goal after
I get the single-byte encoding to work. This will be the key to fitting the translation
into the ROM without expanding it. With a good compression algorithm I think the translated
text could take up less space than the original code, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.
That's it for now! Thanks for tuning in!
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| January 17, 2006 |
LittleBlue has been working on the script steadily. We need someone more familiar with Akazukin Cha Cha to look over the script and tweak it to
give it that Cha Cha wackiness that makes the series so fun to watch.
I've located some dialog pointers but I'm not exactly sure where everything is. They seem to be embedded in the game script.
I've decided that since the dialog pointers aren't showing themselves easily it will be an ice-pick approach to hacking this game.
By this I mean I'll replace one line at a time without the benefit of a tool to do this for us. When we've located all the pointers
we can probably make a tool and release it for other language translations of this game.
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| January 11, 2006
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Its been three years since I started this project.
It's been sitting in the corner gathering dust, and I really didn't feel like picking it up again,
content to resign it as one of life's "missed opportunites". I had contacted another translator last year, and we got part of the starting script off, but thanks to my laziness to
look for the dialog pointers, the project didn't quite kick off as I'd wished.
Then LittleBlue contacted me, asking if I needed help translating on the project. I decided to get my sorry butt off the floor
and get to work figuring out everything I needed to know.
Surprisingly, getting back into ASM was a bit easier than I expected, and I began to catch up quickly.
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