Thanks for all the updates and hard work!

Nintendo didn’t even try to make the mother 3 ROM compatiable for any other translation. I mean look at all the hoops you guy’s have jumped through. It’s like your hacking Nintendo’s secret bank account.

Might take care of the blinking thing, too? Or does that just open up even more cans of worms here, because you’re making further mods to a crazy game?

> EDIT: And sprite text welding is on the to-do list, it has been since the beginning. Look at Menu Hacking #1.

You misunderstand what I mean by “where.” I meant “where” in terms of what order you’re likely to tackle the remaining problems in. I know it’s been on the list for a long time now!

But you’ve done so many great ASM hacks in such a short time, I guess I forgot that you’re relatively new to hacking, if not to translating…

It sounds like you’ve got a good idea of what needs to be done, though. But the devil is always in the details

To make sprites work, you basically first copy/draw your graphics into tile memory, and then you set up some stuff in OAM memory to tell the GBA the dimensions you want for your sprite, what palette to use, etc. You also give it the address in tile memory where you put the graphics. It seems like a hassle to do all that for text, but the good thing about it is that you can turn sprites on and off with a single bit, and you can specify x,y coordinates for the sprite very easily. Positioning non-sprite text is a bit of a pain since you’re basically dealing with raw memory addresses, and like you mentioned, in some bad cases a letter could span four separate tiles, each with non-consecutive addresses. That’s probably a lot of crazy jargon, but if you check out the debugging stuff in VBA you can see how a lot of this stuff works.

EDIT: And sprite text welding is on the to-do list, it has been since the beginning. Look at Menu Hacking #1.

I would’ve thought you’d save more time by doing it earlier rather than later, because it seems like you’ll have to redo some hacks once it’s in place?

But then again, you know more about this than I do, and I don’t blame you for not looking forward to it

In my mind, I see you going back to the grid, leaving the icon placement alone, then printing VWF letters onto the appropriate spots within the tiles. And I wonder, isn’t there spare *vertical* space, as well? So a letter might go through a + intersection of the sprites and end up being partially printed on as many as four different tiles…

Hmm, how did they arrange those tiles in memory? If they’re nicely contiguous, there ought to be an ugly little formula that lets you know where the pixels adjacent to any given pixel are in memory.

OTOH, I don’t know what icons (or fonts) look like in memory at all. And you have those weird status icons for antidotes and whatnot to contend with, too…