Comments on: Naming Progress

By: tonE

tonE — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:13:20 +0000

you cant access the sram unless playing on the computer with my cart (beleive me, I tried everything before messing with rom size, and even still it works fine and looks the same)…just thought id throw that out there.I didnt mean to open such a big can ‘o’ worms…once again, thats what i had to do to get it to work on MY cart.

it just boils down to this: I got a crappy cart…at least it somewhat works

By: Mato

Mato — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:41:42 +0000

Jeffman update coming soon

Anyway, if I were you, I would NOT trim the ROM at all. That would not be a good idea. Remember when the EPA guy shuts down the Ghostbusters’ containment unit even though they say that’s a bad idea? That’s the same deal here. Your ROM will explode and ghosts will come out if you’re not careful. Plus even if there IS some spare room at the end of the ROM (which there isn’t, we’d have put the script there in 16-bit format if there was) we’d probably be using that empty area for stuff for our hack.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:23:44 +0000

Yeah, but Mato has said that they’re probably going to have to end up using every last scrap of the 32MB max that Mother 3 comes as, the rom won’t be expanded any further and he’s made several comments about having to conserve space as much as he can.

Really, why bother trimming it if you put it on a flash card anyway, is cutting out a meg or two really going to make much of a difference when you’ve probably got a Gigabyte of space on your card anyway?

By: Nintendofan079

Nintendofan079 — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:46:12 +0000

@Alato: I do agree, because my Mother 3 ROM had about 30MB.

By: Exp HP

Exp HP — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:38:00 +0000

Hey Mato, this is going a bit back, but I’m wondering what you did about the Mole Cricket back when you were working on the battle script. I think the main problem with saying “Encountered the Mole Cricket” is that, well . . .

Let me compare to programming. I always find these comparisons useful, as you can easily represent anything in English with a program (but how you make the class heirarchy is up to you). This would be the Visual Basic equivalent of “encountered the mole cricket” (I would like to use C++, but it’s been a whole year since I last used it).
Dim MoleCricket As Character = New Character
MoleCricket.Alliance = “Hostile”

Notice the word “Dim” in there. “Dim” is a declaration keyword, the VB equivalent to the English “establish.” So what I’m trying to say here is that the word “Encounter” always establishes the object. And you can’t declare something twice in a program; if you were to also have “Dim MoleCricket” anywhere before those two lines, you would get an “Already declared” compiler error. So, likewise, establishing something twice is confusing, and that’s exactly what happens when we have a Mole Cricket before battle and then we “encounter” it.

Can you change the way boss battles open? Most bosses are established prior to battle, so can’t you have something like “The ____ attacks!” specifically for boss battles?

By: Anna

Anna — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:06:34 +0000

Kamion: Java is a good intro language and very common for CS 101 classes because it has C-like syntax which is common and makes it easier to pick up on other languages, and also introduces other concepts while being designed to be a bit more assertive about proper usage. It really is a good place to start if you dig deeper from there.

By: Alato

Alato — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:01:56 +0000

That’s right. However, trimming the ROM doesn’t corrupt it at all. Mother 3 is 32MB, but that’s because GBA carts only come in certain sizes(8MB, 16MB, 32MB, etc.). Let’s say Mother 3 is actually 30MB(I don’t know the actual exact size), it would go on a 32MB cartridge. Trimming just gets rid of that extra unused 2MB of space on the cart, so it doesn’t corrupt the game itself.

Unless when you say reducing, you mean something else.

By: Lol

Lol — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:34:32 +0000

@TonE
Usually, GBA flashcarts are formed by two different parts: SRAM (where the saves go) and NOR Flash (where the games go). SRAM is usually battery-backed. So even if you did fill up the NOR with the 32MB goodness of Mother3, you would still have free space in your SRAM (usually 32KB to 128KB) to save.

Also “reducing” the game size would inevitably corrupt the game in the later parts.

By: Mato

Mato — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:45:40 +0000

I generally always have deadlines, just this one’s tighter than usual as of late.

Jeffman’s been doing some awesome work with the naming screen stuff though. Not too long until we can cross that naming stuff off the to-do list

By: TheMetroidMan

TheMetroidMan — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:38:50 +0000

So Mato…you have a deadline this coming Thursday for your real work. Does that mean once your deadline is gone that you will have more time to work on this? Or are there multiple deadlines you have this month? Keep up the great work!