Alive
Whew, very exhausted after about two weeks of really intense real life work. Managed to finish it on time, and finish it well, and now I have some more time to spare for this here project. Trying to juggle real life and this project is tough sometimes, but having this blog helps, since if I were to disappear for just a few days people would notice and make sure I’m still on track 
So in a weird sense, this blog and the regular readers are pretty helpful in keeping the project going 
Anyway, as I mentioned in a mini-update in the comments of the last update, I’ve now got a little more time on my hands again and have started to finish up the sprite text hacking stuff. Though if you missed that mini-update, I wouldn’t blame you — there are over 300 comments in there and it turned into some kind of crazy message board there the last few days, most of the stuff very off-topic. To help make things better, please use the Starmen.Net forums if you want to talk with fellow fans about off-topic stuff and shoot the breeze and all that. Let’s keep this blog about MOTHER 3, okay?
I’ll have a real / better update in a day or two or three here, but for now, I’ll quickly mention that Jeffman’s been working on a little app that will let people use their Japanese ROM/Menu Patch ROM save files with our eventual final patch. byuu has also improved his patcher program, and in the process, it looks like it’s become even more simple for the end-user, so if you’re not a very computer-savvy person, it should still be really easy to apply the translation patch when it’s released.
This afternoon I spent time figuring out more about byuu’s new xkas assembler, it will streamline the project a ton and is basically a godsend to the project (and probably all other GBA hacks/translations from here on out, too). I’m doing the current sprite text hack with it now, and my giygas is it so much easier to implement hacks now. This should help shave a lot of time off, since we’ll no longer need to do all this really, really tedious work each time we need to write new code for a hack. I guess I’m creeping into technical blah blah talk again, so I’ll end it here
I’ll have a good, better update in a few days, for now, enjoy these random monkey pictures!
Until next update!
irc://irc.he.net/tomato <– Unofficial Mother 3 IRC channel
Wow. Things are looking great, and it’s just by chance I happened to visit right when the update went up!
I’m not stalking anyone, I swear!
I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO SAY MONKEY IN ENGLISH, AHHHHHH!
That was funny in my opinion.
glad to hear you were doing something while you were all holed up. We entreat mato, and everyone else interested in talking about off topic things, to join the irc channel.
mato can say on topic things there, if he wants.
I have no time x 100 to use IRC. It’d only distract me and slow things down too.
Two very enthusiastic thumbs up, Mato. My heart flutters when I see new updates.
Crap, my post is right before the topic closed, and with my bad luck I see this update only 4 minutes after it happened, so if I post now, my post will drown among the many posts that happen so early.
Okay, well, I’ll try asking here, anyways. Can I have your permission to have links that go directly to some images here? As in, the URLs found when you right click and go to Properties? Right now, I have the link go to the Preview page (which I don’t think I need permission for as the context of the images sufficiently indicates they belong to you). But there’s way too many pictures there, and I would just like to show a select few.
I guess those pictures are from before the gray name box stuff was finished? They look slick as hell, regardless.
well, maybe an irc channel will keep random off topic posts off the blog. fewer posts advertising it would be nice though.
In all honesty, I was starting to get a bit worried about the lack of updates (since I wasn’t reading the last update’s comments). Thanks for this one.
Oh, and I certainly enjoyed those monkey pics. ^_^
Hey can we name the next update “Still Alive”?
So…it’s come to this. People have abused the comments so much that you had to make that huge “Please Note!” sign, huh? Keep at it, guys! There’s no turnig back now.
No pressure mato but if you dont finish we’ll be after you
I laughed at that “Oh! Kangaroo!” picture.
You’ve done such a swell job with everybody else in the team, it makes me want to be a computer programmer too! :3
Dr. Meat: No, those pics are from a few hours ago. The gray boxes have a minimum width, so short names will tend to have extra space. It works almost exactly how the Japanese game does, so if you’ve played that or seen Japanese pics you’ll see that the gray boxes don’t act quite like one would expect.
Were these pictures taken before the gray name box stuff was perfected?
Whoops nevermind.
I’m used to “skipping” everything because of how many comments things get.
But I LIKE tedious technical mumbo jumbo.
umm mato doesnt it work if u keep the names same of the gba files and the saves? it worked for me last time…
like
mother3.gba (old) (menu patch)
mother3-1.sav
and if u rename the final to the one that u previously had, wouldnt it work?
did u add the “how do you say monkey in english?” bit because of the translation, did the japanese ROM actually have that line in there, or was it just for the fun of having that picture in the update?
Can0fMean: He doesn’t mean the filenames, he means the actual names of the main characters. For example, if you named Lucas “Lucas” in the menu patched version of MOTHER 3, or even the original version, it’ll show up as a bunch of garbled glitchiness in the final patch; actually, just about any name you’ve chosen will glitch up the game. The program I’m writing will internally fix the names you chose so that it doesn’t glitch up.
Do you know how to say “monkey” in English?
LoL XD
Asui: Monkey
“To help make things better, please use the Starmen.Net forums if you want to talk with fellow fans about off-topic stuff and shoot the breeze and all that. Let’s keep this blog about MOTHER 3, okay?” - Mato
we’re sorry, but it just gets kinda boring without new updates.
gotta have something to talk about;)
yay! It won’t be long now before the patch is finished.
Shouldn’t that read
Do you know how to say “monkey” in Japanese?
…or am I picking nits?
Yay for Monkeys! Even if they do touch the goods.
Hooray for an update.
More importantly than the update in full,
MONKEY PICS RULE
hooray for the randomness of Mother3
Why don’t you just have it say:
Can you say “monkey”?
I at first read it to mean that the Japanese game was asking how to say it in english (which makes no sense now that it’s in English). But now I think it means what I just suggested: He’s asking if the monkey can speak English because, in general, monkeys only speak in ooh-oohs, ah-ahs, and wild screams. Well, maybe that’s more chimp-speak than monkey-speak, but whatever.
I’m excited for this patch! Even though I’m unsure what a “patch” is . . .
*insert obligatory ‘omg lets maek babiez!111one’ post to emphasize my excitement about this update*
Dru: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_%28computing%29
or it could be this, I’m not sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_%28Unix%29
You guys are getting closer and closer each day. Every update is a big step as far as I’m concerned. ^_^
Hey Mato, what does “Haruki” mean? cuz I can’t find it, no matter where I look. whoops, gettin off topic again (srry)
kmeist: is it bad that whenever anyone says something like “still alive” or “cake” and “lie” in the same sentence, i think of portal?
it probably makes it worse if NO ONE knows what im talking about.
it’s a good thing you guys are making this patch for the computerly challenged, I’ll need all the help I can get for compys
Keep it up Everyone!
“For example, if you named Lucas “Lucas” in the menu patched version of MOTHER 3, or even the original version, it’ll show up as a bunch of garbled glitchiness in the final patch; actually, just about any name you’ve chosen will glitch up the game.”
Since I used kana in my save files for the names, does that mean I’m out of luck? From what I understand, both kana fonts are gone now, so will it work on my save files? I can live with glitchiness though, just curious
Hey Mato, I’m not sure if you want to keep the scripts exactly the same, but maybe you would want to consider changing that last screen to say “Do you know how to say “Monkey” in Japanese?” or some other language. I don’t remember if you said you guys were going to finalize the script later on though, but I’m sure you thought about this already. I guess my entire comment is useless ;_;
“Do you know how to say 猿 in English?”
oh and the cake is a lie
I guess I should clarify my previous post, I used katakana for the names since it was the only Japanese font I could use in the latest version of the menu patch. They are random Japanese names of people I know, so will it cause problems with the app that Jeffman is implementing? Thanks.
Awesome. I’ve been checking these updates daily and it’s great to see the progress you’ve made. I tried playing the game in Japanese, but I got tired of having to switch screens every time someone says something so I don’t miss any of the story.
Mato, if you changed http://mother3.fobby.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/monkey7.png to read “Oh Monkey, Monkey, Monkey ♪, You tore my heart in two” you would be my hero for all of time. Doubly so, I suppose, since you already are. But, if that’s just throwaway text, it would make me, a few of my friends, and countless Musical Theater slash Obscure Japanese RPG fans ecstatic.
KMeist Hax, Jakimus Prime, and Neo: HOORAY FOR PORTAL!!!!!!!!!!
Hey, Was the “do you know how to say monkey in english” the exact translation for the JPN version or did you guys add it yourselves?
oh, and how do you use rss feeds?
Errm, “broke my heart in two,” not “tore.” But still. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?
Exp HP: It’s fine, so long as you’re not linking to huge files/too many files or doing something that would extremely drain our bandwidth. But I doubt that’s the case so you should be fine. I’ve already seen many people directly link our stuff for months now.
Can0fMean: It’ll work, but because we changed the character mapping, names in the old saves won’t work right with the new saves, and they’ll cause ugliness and trouble. aka what jeffman said oops heh
For those asking about the “monkey in English thing”, first, ugh, people overanalyzing stuff is bleh, makes me want to not post screens, but I know I brought it on myself
and two, but here is the original text.
Analyze away I guess
Just curious. As it stands, Mother 3 requires a bit of dummy space trimming to fit it onto a 256MB GBA Flash Cart as I learned when I played it with the menu patch. Is there a chance of making the eventual patch trim out just a bit of whatever dummy space is left automatically so it will fit?
With the third line shown on there I think that’s actually a pretty clever bit of dialogue and I suggest you keep it. Reminiscent of “XXXsterday,” in my opinion.
Just commenting to say encouraging things!
great job!
amazing!
fantastical!
MATO!!! THIS UPDATE MAKES ME WANT TO MAKE BABIES!!!!
Happy Aphrodine? lol
Whenever the updates go ‘dead’ for more then a few days I start to get worried. =p
Keep up the good work, Mato!
Overanalyzing things is the third most popular thing on the Internet, next to porn and blogs. But, I guess overanalysis overflows into both of those things as well, so…
Seriously, keep the updates coming. I enjoy reading them, ignore the people with too much time on their hands, and if it helps you out too by doing this, then great.
“LOL Mato is the katakana kanji lolz (no homo) ‘the’ translated liek ‘the’ liek we say it? is it the same as us everythng lol”
Let’s give the guy a break people, he does this for a living, don’t tell him how to do his job or make it worse than it already is.
> “Do you know how to say 猿 in English?”
Saru?
Err, wait…
OK, I’ve fixed some stuff in the sprite text hack and killed one bug that made text get garbagey sometimes. Now I’m messing with newlines, but it’s being such an annoying buttface. Maybe I should work on it with fresh eyes and a fresh brain tomorrow.
*crosses fingers for Mother’s day release*
I know, I know.
u___u
Now I’m messing with newlines, but it’s being such an annoying buttface.
You do seem to personify the game’s code frequently. O_o
and I agree with “Apteryx” up there, I wouldn’t mind if this whole translation was in primitive english that a 1st grader could understand as long as the story gets across through it.
Old West: I do that with pretty much everything, actually. If there’s one thing Disney taught me, it’s that everything is like a person.
Amen, brother. Toy Story did just that to me. I can’t look at an object without imagining it as a living creature.
OK, looks like I got newlines working finally. I’ll test it a little more and then sleep. So looks like two things squashed already. Just a couple more things and should be able to say this hack is done. Well, I guess I’d still need to do my optimizing thing too, so probably a day or two more on this.
I don’t really understand why jeffman would bother making a program that would allow people to convert their japanese savestates into the english ones. That would mean that, say someone is halfway through the game in the japanese save, the could convert their save into an english one and thus pick up halfway through the game, missing half of the story in english (assuming they don’t read japanese in the first place). If people are really content only getting half the story then I guess that’s their prerogative, but as for me, I’d rather start over so I can get the whole story. I mean, how many people out there speak japanese, and are also dying for an english translation anyway? That doesn’t really make sense to me. But I suppose I’m just one dude and it doesn’t have to make sense to me anyway, so more power to you. It just seems superfluous to me.
G.Wicks: It’s something we’ve been asked about for a long while by many people. It’ll also be somewhat useful to us for testing purposes, since we have like a jillion saves using the old format that we can’t really use now.
EDIT: BTW, the program will edit the save files, not savestates.
NICE thanks agian for doing this!!
Go monkeys
haha. The “don’t touch the goods” screenshot really got me. Kudos on the good work, mato.
Monkey?
I lol’d.
I lol’d hard.
Excellent work is excellent! Keep it up, Matoman!
Eat your sauerkraut!
And don’t forget to call your dad! He’s behind you 100%!
It looks as though the monkey can go anywhere.
You guys are awesome-amazing. I love this project and I can’t wait to play Mother 3 in English. Keep up the good work and I’ll keep as much of my off-topic crap to myself and/or on the IRC or Starmen.net.
MATO: Okay, cool. That’s reasonable. I was just curious is all. Keep on truckin’ then.
HEY LITTLE MONKEY YOU KNOW HOW TO SAY “SARU” IN JAPONEESSEE?
I MEAN. F*#@
I was wondering if you could get the final version to save in VBA for Mac
ok Mato.. This time.. For OncE!! (For JUST ONE TIME) I will not Be Asking About How much Meth you SMoke.. I Just wanted to Stop In to Say Your work look Good As Usual.. Keep up.. and Dont let Stress of Real Life Get you down my Friend.. Light at End of Tunnel (Not 2 mention Meth!! I know it true)
this is awsome! but, if i don`t get that voice in me to stop talking, i just might die of sispention!
I recently purchased Super Smash Bros Brawl, and it’s put my Mother 3 hype into overdrive…
Oh, cruel fates! Why must the road to glory be so long and treacherous?
not to get off topic, but I totally support the IRC channel. also support broken hearted monkey, but maybe “severed my heart in twain”…maybe not. i wonder if Giygas looks like Xenu because of our thetans imprinting 75 trillion years ago…
Monkey Monkey Monkey~ Monkeyyyyyyy~
I hate and love you guys, it’s both. You got me into Mother with this Project and now my purse is crying because Mother-Stuff is so expensive
hey Mato… If we were all to write a song on how much we love tomatoes… would you think of us a cannibals…or vegetarians?
id rather play the patch from the beginning, but thats just me
Man Mato, I want to be a game designer too, but seeing all this hacking, programming and stuff, Im having a “Duh…” moment xD But Hopefully I’ll get thru it
But Great Update though xD
Hm, I wonder where Mitch’s update drawing is?
yeah! Mitch drawing!
I’d post one myself but my scanner doesn’t work
Looks like you got that vwf thing to work! Congrats!
Bologna?: Even if you named your characters using kana, the program will still be compatible with it; however, due to the fact that we’ve removed the kana letters from the font set, you would be required to enter in an English name regardless. There’s really no point in settling for the glitches instead, since they don’t even resemble kana letters afterwards.
For the 0.7% of you who are interested in the program, how offended would you be by character name spoilers? I’m just trying to figure out whether or not I should implement a check in the program that sees if you’ve gotten certain characters yet or not, and if you haven’t gotten to them, it’ll hide that name from you or something. So for example, if you’ve just started the game and you’re on Chapter 1, it might spoil people by asking them to rename characters they haven’t met yet.
hey, let me know when you need testers for the patch
MasqueDeMask is right, releasing this on mother’s day would be so much more awesome, and this is already awesome.
@Rozgabound:
Yes. As a matter of fact I *am* happy!
*give you a high-five over the internet*
@JeffMan:
I’m the type of person who prefers to be spoiler-free, but I do not consider character names to be spoiler-iffic.
So I guess I’m trying to say is that I am one of the 0.7% of the people who is interested in the program and I would not be grossly offended by seeing a character’s name used as an example.
I think if someone is going to be using an old save from the Japanese ROM or from the Menu Patch ROM, then they’ll have already played the game a decent bit or have looked up info on stuff or played Brawl. Besides, most of the names you name in the very beginning and the others aren’t very spoilery (most, if not all, have been shown on this site/Itoi’s MOTHER 3 World I think) so it’s probably not a big deal to have the naming thing fix all names at once.
Hmm, maybe they should make the save slot fixer have an option to set names to the defaults? Seems like that would save some trouble for the person who mentioned that they renamed folks and might end up with garbage for names.
But then people who name their characters “Bob” and “Joe” will have to settle for “Lucas” and “Claus” for the rest of the game. Any name you guys choose, English or Japanese, will cause the game to glitch after the patch is applied.
IMO that’s probably fine. There’d be no way to please everyone 100% of the time. You can just mention in the readme or in the program itself that it’ll use the default names. Probably not worth spending too much time on the program since I imagine so few will need it.
Wow a 90 comments in 1 day O_O luckily they are mostly on topic.
Keep up the good work mato! You guys are pretty close to closing this project up! Mitch where is thou. We shallnt live without another masterpiece! Hope it has lots of monkeys =)
Fantastic. I’m glad to see another update, Mato. Keep up the great work.
I think the renaming program should try to determine the offset from the old menu hack to the new font and correctly carry your names over for you…
Just kidding. =P
Seriously though, that screen shot showing the sprite text hack in action made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside like only Christmas and touching moments used to. Damn you Mato for making me remember child-like excitement! Now I have to go do something mundane to calm my glee. =P
Kangaroo!
Sorry I’m tardy to the party, guys. Didn’t know about the update until I woke up at 1:00 PM EST.
Here’s one for you video gamers on this website. Sorry it’s sucky!
http://i31.tinypic.com/20gd6ax.jpg
Mitch, nothing you draw is sucky.
That is, indeed, awesome… And I really thought that it’d be only a matter of time until someone made a Portal reference XD
lol mitch <3 ya
WHOOOOOO!!! NEW UPDATE!!!!!
I still love doing that;)
But seriously, great work Mato and Jeffman!!
I hope nobody here dies or something before the patch comes out.
Woot Thanks for working on this, I love you.=P
Like that one sign said, “Thanks for reading this sign, I love you.”
Arashi: My dad told me like a zillion years ago that it means “spring/springtime tree” and as he’s a Japanese guy I assume he would know.
And hooray, an update! Ugh, I can’t wait for this to be completed (and I liked Poo’s comment..)! I’m just about done with the original Mother and not at all looking forward to the approaching dearth of Earthbound-related fun. :/
Arashi: You should join the IRC channel when we’re brawling.
Back on topic, awesome art mitch, and I can’t wait for more progress on this!
Back to playing Brawl/EB on Wii/EB0 on NDS
@seedvt
Whoa, how are you playing EB0 on your DS? And EB on your Wii? That’s amazing, I would like to know how to play EB0 on my DS.
Anyway, great work, another update means one more step to competion. I’m rootin’ for ya’ll.
@ seedvt:
The IRC didn’t work for me, do you need some kind of special browser?
@tlazolmictia:
I figured it had something to do with spring (haru), but the ki part was like… what?
NintendoBrad: You can play Earthbound and Earthbound Zero on the wii by downloading an emulator with it, the emulator is only playable if you have Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess(Wii). Woo, today I beat Earthbound on the Wii =D
Also, soon I will be able to play Mother 3 on there too! A GBA emulator is coming to the Wii soon, but it will also require LoZTP.
Hey, just writing to tell you I think you guys are doing an awesome job! I just started playing Earthbound about a week ago (I’m about halfway through). Because of Lucas being in Brawl, I’m extremely excited for this fan-translation of a sequel to an awesome game!
Have you guys considered showing all your hard work to Nintendo and possibly making a profit on this when you’re done? Or is that illegal? :/
I tried joining the irc network, but i was immediately autobanned, due to a “blacklisted proxy.” Silly, considering I’m not running any proxies.
Arashi and Someanon: You need an IRC client if you don’t already, try mIRC or ChatZilla, and try this mirror: irc://irc.arcti.ca/tomato
NintendoBrad and eedracib: I have an R4DS for my DS, and you can use an emulator called NesDS to run EB0. You can also run EB on DS using another emulator, called SnemulDS, but there are a few glitches in terms of sound and video. Also, I installed the SNES emulator on my Wii without the use of the TP hack, as I have a modded Wii.
Really? A GBA emulator for Wii? That’s awesome.
Thanks for the info. That’s pretty cool, but I’ll still save up for an EarthBound cartridge.
I think JeffMan is the bee’s knees with super-sweet-tits-double-action #!Reload for doing all the work on helping the poor fools who want to apply the English patch in the middle of their Japanese playthrough.
That said, what damn fool in their right mind wouldn’t want to start the game over and enjoy all the hard work that went into the translation? I say you’re lucky GeoffMan bothers doing the patch to “save” you Japanese saves, and if that means the names you chose revert to default, so be it. I hope the fantrans team (I coined it, you heard it here first) can get this one done and move on to bigger and better issues with getting us Mother 3. Thanks again guys.
Perhaps it should say “Do you know how to say ‘monkey’ in Japanese?” Hmmm and such..
I really like how you have been translating the game Mato after reading those screen shots it really feels like a earthbound game its also good that you pretty much have finished the sprite text hacking.I hope that the program that Jeffman has been working on for people who played the menu patch and want to use that save to play the complete patch does not take too long for him to finish it because I feel that Jeffman should not waste his time on making a program to please lazy people who dont want to fully play the mother 3 with the complete patch from the begining and Mato your statement about there’d be no way to please everyone 100% of the time is very true man.
Mini-update time. Been toiling away at this hack this afternoon. It’s proving to be stubborn, since there are certain, rare situations that need to be handled that weren’t obvious at first. It’s very annoying, but I’ve fixed a few more things. I decided to have a look at other screens, like the shop screen. Some various problems occur with them, but that’s because I still need to fix the non-sprite menu text stuff too.
One funny thing was that I got it to print upside down somehow heh
This is one of those times I wish a super hacker would swoop in and save the day. I’m just a meager translator man.
More info as stuff progresses.
http://mother3.fobby.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/est5.png
What happened to the g there?
> So for example, if you’ve just started the game and you’re on Chapter 1, it might spoil people by asking them to rename characters they haven’t met yet.
Just have it ask for a rename on any characters who have non-default names
(And have it name anyone with a default name to the non-glitch default name.)
That would seem to be the easy way to do it to me.
I honestly wish all of the purist japanophile whores would stop nitpicking and actually mentioning that they want it to say “Can you say “Monkey In Japanese?”
There’s no way at all that it should EVER say that. Ever. Why? Because when the translation is fixed, there will BE no Japanese dialog left IN the game.
There’s a little thing called localization. And whether the purists like it or not (or whether or not they are able to understand it or not), the fact is that asking if a Monkey can speak Japanese in a game that has no Japanese in it, would be the epitome of stupidity the way it would come across.
The Mother 3 world doesn’t take place in Japan. It takes place in a fictional, alternate, created world, which is represented accurately in-game by whatever language is featured in it’s translation or region.
This should be handled precisely as if Nintendo themselves were scripting Mother 3 for English audiences. I’d expect nothing less. It should be well done, but nevertheless, it’s being put into English for a reason. Not just for readability. But also for comprehension.
Since it is being translated into English, it should assume by default that the English language is the one commonly spoken by it’s citizens, for this game as it is an ENglish translation PROJECT.
For example, here in Indiana in the US, where I’m from, do you see people randomly expecting other English speaking people in our towns and cities to suddenly speak Japanese? No, we don’t.
The translation project is in English. So if some guy expects a monkey to speak words in an English translation rom hack, he should say “Can you say Monkey in English?” and NOTHING else.
The point of translating a Japanese game to English is not to translate everything literally? If so, by that purist logic, one would also be expected to keep all sentence structure the same as the original as well.
So, please.. for the love of god… stop insisting on an inquiry about a Japanese speaking Money in a translation that will see no Japanese words in the final completed version.
It’s the kind of thing that only makes perfect common sense.
gah…those ppl talk to much…i think this coment box should have max 200 spaces ^_^ then all ppl could write is : keep the good work menz…instead of arguin that much about random stuff
i dont know if this crossess the line of ROM talk. but am i able to play GBA games on my R4DS? because i REALLY wanna play this on a handheld like its meant to be.
You can’t boot GBA games on just an R4, unfortunately. You need a slot-2 device for that.
Hey, Karma… chill out!
aww… thanks jeffman
Anyone who’s having fits about the “Can you say ‘monkey’ in English?” thing, PLEASE look at the context of the text that Mato posted.
Karma: In the Japanese version of Mother 3, everyone is speaking Japanese, yet that one person, Dona, says “Do you know how to say “monkey” in English?”. So it would make sense for her to say “Do you know how to say “saru” in Japanese?” in the English version.
Heh, I should just stop posting pics of everything but signs I guess
Anyway, I’m out of steam for tonight. There’s gotta be a better, more elegant way to make this sprite stuff work correctly, it just eludes me at the moment. Maybe a sleep-regained brain will help.
People need to stop questioning Mato’s translations of mother 3 because remember people Mato is a professional translator.
You know Mato, after this, I think you can consider yourself a super hacker AND a translator. Maybe not a Super-Duper hacker, that may, unfortunately come with Mother 4, if Nintendo doesn’t see this and realize the huge potential Mother has in the West.
And if Brownie Brown doesn’t get the project again.
I’m trying the Menu Patch, now I can understand much better. Thanks for making it!
Karma you seem to be confused. The above screenshot has NOT been localized yet. We were all asking for exactly what you think you want to happen… to happen.
I love that monkey so much. It is great to have you back Mato. You guys are doing a terrific job. I never expected such frequent updates for a project of this magnitude. It has already exceeded my wildest dreams and expectations. Keep up the fantastic work!
I went to bed, but as I was falling asleep inspiration hit. But now I’m tired again so I’ll have to pick up where I left off when I get up tomorrow/today/whatever.
Strangely enough, this is turning out to be more annoying than the battle text hack.
Lol don’t you hate it when that happens?
Sometimes if i’m doing a project, I’ll get some idea right as i’m following asleep rather than when I actually try to think something up, but I must do it or else i’ll forget in the morning.
Take your time man, no rush. Despite what some people here may say, real life is always more important. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.
The things that seem easy are always damn hard and sometimes the things that seem hard are pretty easy.
Life sucks that way.
Looks awesome, I love seeing new pics, quick question though,
There is a thread on Starmen.net that some Nintendo Rep Slipt and gave away info that shouldn’t have been givin away, according to the thread the rep said “it says here on was released in 06 but another one here says Q4 08″
So what do you think is up? do you think Nintendo is releasing Mother 3 in the fourth Quarter of this year?
Also, I’m a tad worried if you finish this by E3 of this year, what if Nintendo announces something Mother Related? the patch could be out by then and it could be harmfull to Nintendo’s sales.
I’m under the impression that English is considered a language of diplomacy, and Japanese isn’t. Role reversal wouldn’t make sense there.
Yay, thanks for another update.
Dont overdo yourself, we need that translation but you also deserve some of the “real world” live. XD
Fantastic work, I’m so impressed by the work being done here.
This contribution to the medium as a whole will not go unnoticed.
I was starting to get worried after not seeing updates for several days in a row…today’s one nearly made my day.
Keep it up, guys. ^_^
I beat MOTHER 3 in japanese with a translation guide a while ago, and was wondering about a little tidbit i had read on the internet- i figured you guys would know about this. After you beat the game, you can copy your beaten file onto second file’s space. After this, if you start a new game on the second file’s space, you’ll apparently have a “plus game” file. I heard that all the storyline will remain the same as the first time you played through it, but you will get certain abilities sooner in the game than you did the first time. Do you know if this true, or a hoax?
It’s true, but it’s a glitch more than it is a feature. You can keep equipment and PSI and possibly stats, but the equipment is kind of weird and glitchy.
Well balls, I just tried to get EBZero to work, and not only will the ROM I downloaded not play in NESticle, but the FCEU emulator I bothered to track down (as per Tomato’s instructions in the EBZero patch readme) can’t seem to install or do much of anything other than sit in a folder on my PC. I am not a l33t etc. person but I am no n00b etc. either, but I can’t seem to find any unpacking program or .exe for FCEU. Maybe the ROM I have for EBZero is also faulty, but I also don’t know what to do with the patch for EBZero save put it in the same directory as the EBZero ROM.
Le sigh. I shall go to bed without Steak tonight …
You’re using Nesticle? Do you write letters on papyrus too?
This is starting to get a little off-topic, so you might want to take this to the starmen.net forums. But you can try a whole bunch of other NES emulators, try nestopia, for example. Or Mednafen. Just do not use Nesticle, it is old, horrible, and the whole reason why there are multiple versions of the EB0 ROM. When the ROM was first dumped, Nesticle couldn’t run the ROM, so it had to be hacked to work just for Nesticle. But then that broke the copyright checking, which then too needed to be hacked. An ugly mess. So in short, stay away from Nesticle unless you’re still in the mid 1990s due to the consequences of special relativity.
First I want to say, you guys are doing amazing, I can’t believe how much motivation you have to get this done. I would of given up years ago, but now you’re almost there! Keep up the good work! Now my question: I am hoping to play the english Mother 3 on my ds, and I was woundering which flash cart you recommend getting?
is this patch going to be easy to apply with a mac? because i do not have a pc, and ive found it difficult to fint a rom patcher for mac… and if i cant play this when you guys finish it i think i will cry…
I think he said that the new patching program will be multi-platform. But I’m pretty much screwed if it’s for OS 10.4 or later. I’ve been having that problem more and more lately.
I wrote a 10.3+ patcher for the new UPS patcher, get it here…
http://opennestopia.staulkor.com/UPS.zip
Please make sure it works on 10.3 for me
It was compiled on 10.5, so I’m not positive.
@Mato’s screenshots of non-sprite menu text stuff:
Wow. I remember when the item descriptions weren’t displaying properly. Despite the obvious, the item descriptions look absolutely beautiful. I am looking forward to reading them when the project is finished. ^__^
**pretending that this post is germane to the subject at hand**
Hey, Mato, you said that between this project and real life that you do not have time to play non-Mother video games…
In that case you got to check this game out: You Have to Burn the Rope
**WARNING — SPOILERS**
You have to burn the rope to win the game.
Great work!!!
By the way, I’m in favor of keeping “can you say ‘monkey’” the way Mato has it in the screenshot, because if I read the words “can you say ’saru’ in Japanese” it wouldn’t make sense to me, and I think most of the English players would feel the same way.
Every time I look at your latest posts I can do nothing but wonder what an awesome job you guys do… I just want you to know that your work is needed by so many people that even people in Russia wait for the patch!)
Russia eh? That’s cool
Say, does anything in this pic make sense? It’s random garbage from a test I did back last June/July and it looked funny so I saved it
Unless some of that is Greek instead. I can’t tell. It just seemed Russiany to me.
haha, how do you say monkey in English is pretty funny. but wouldn’t it make more sense if she said “how do you say monkey in japanese?” it’s like a mirror, if japanese is changed to english then english becomes japanese right?
How difficult for people can this be? The screenshot at the top, I’m almost certain, has NOT been localized yet. I’m pretty sure in its current state it is *literally* translated. So the joke in Japanese is that the person is saying “DO YOU KNOW HOW TO SAY (then accidentally says the english for) “MONKEY” IN ENGLISH?”
So the transverse of that joke, if someone were speaking to you in english, would be, “Hey do you know how to say “SARU” in Japanese?” <– see its funny because they accidentally already told you. its a joke.
it’s a joke.
it’s a joke.
@tobor,
The third line that she says mato posted separately. It says she gave it away, so it should still be “Do you know how to say “monkey” in English?”.
How I’m tempted to replace that pic with the It clown so people will argue about that instead
The thing is, I’d imagine your average Japanese person is far more likely to know the English word for monkey than your average American is to know the Japanese for monkey. So maybe having him ask if you know how to say “singe” in French would be better for English speakers. Or perhaps use the Spanish.
Still, Demi and Mato have yet to polish the script, so I’m sure they’ll decide what’s best when the time comes.
> It’s true, but it’s a glitch more than it is a feature. You can keep equipment and PSI and possibly stats, but the equipment is kind of weird and glitchy.
It would be so cool if you could make a new game+ hack, even if it had to ditch any problem equipment, as an extra
> I am not a l33t etc. person but I am no n00b etc. either, but I can’t seem to find any unpacking program or .exe for FCEU.
There is no installer. Assuming you downloaded the correct thing, you just unzip it to wherever (make it a folder under Program Files or something), then run FCEU.exe (the one with a NES as its icon). Uninstall is similar: delete the folder.
If it weren’t for certain Windows things and the registry, most properly written applications would be able to work this way
If you can’t figure it out, Nestopia should work, too.
Hey Mato, Your the MAN! Keep it up. WOo!
Oh and Jeffman, you… well.. you are also the MAN! WOo! Wooooo!
And for that matter, anyone else who is working on this project is also clearly the MAN! WOOOOooooooo! WOo!
*gasp* Unless there are females working on this project too… In that case they are the … WOo-man! (Hehe I crack myself up…)
Like Fudgehat said, I think there are a lot more Japanese-speakers likely to get that “monkey” joke than there are English-speakers likely to get the equivalent “saru” joke. After all, I’m pretty sure that English is a required class at the elementary school level or something.
So, I think it should be left as it is. Besides, anyone who plays this will know it’s a translation, so they can probably excuse this one joke that didn’t quite make it across the translation border. It’s not like it’ll ruin the game or anything–in the “old days”, there were a lot of nonsense lines in even official games, and that didn’t stop anyone from enjoying them.
OK, after some intense re-writing, I’ve managed to improve things a little bit. A few more rare cases to take care of, like if a line’s width is exactly a multiple of 16, make the game not do certain things, etc. A real pain, but it’s working better than before. Also been thinking of ways to optimize it internally so it doesn’t do so many memory accesses, which I think is the main slowdown cause.
I’m starting to be able to hack/program things almost from a slightly higher level, almost kind of like C in a way, thanks to byuu’s xkas. If I was still using Goldroad for this, I’d be still be stuck back in last week.
@Mato: Aahhhhh… so *that’s* why the ‘g’ in ‘bug’ looks a little funny.
It’s still a brilliant improvement from only a week ago, though. I hope this problem doesn’t give you too much of a headache. Good luck, man.
I’m glad that byuu is still contributing to this project in his own special way. And I know you’ll use his tools for the main script routine wisely.
I just want to see this thing done. Why do you have to tempt me with all these delicious screenshots?
Mitch, next time draw a tomato hacking on a computer in front of a bunch of other jealous vegetables! just an idea…
I’ll be honest and say that this particular hack is really annoying, to the point where I *almost* want to just say screw it. But it’s gonna have to be done with the main script and the main menu non-sprite text too. Really wish we had a super hacker to help with this :/
Mato, something has really been confusing me lately. How much of the text is in normal VWF text and how much of it is in your frustrating sprite-welded vwf text? It seems that you’ve been using the same examples for both “normal” text (whatever that was) and the “sprite” text (which I understand a bit better). Are they evenly used? Are they mish-mashed? If they’re mish-mashed, are you having trouble integrating them?
I’m not sure how to answer that. The main menus use both normal and sprite text, but they all go through the same buffer and same buffer-filling routine, so in that way, they’re related. The main script text also goes through this same buffer and buffer-filling routine. I’m concentrating on sprite text right now since one task is better than 3 at once
——–
Anyway, even though this is getting seriously annoying now, it looks like I *have* managed to at least stomp some crazy bugs. Here’s a pic from a week and a half ago:
and here it is now:
(the item names only work there because I was tired of not seeing it there. that text still needs to be hacked too, after sprite text
)
I almost laughed when I read “Cup Of Pork Noodles”. It’s funny! Good Job!
This is for you: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2262/2412329023_bae995f9c3_o.png
I made it myself.
If I was a superhacker, I would defintetly help.. Check Tehskeen.com there are SOOOOOO many hackers and coders on there and many of them know how to code for the GBA, DS, Wii, NGC, Ps1, and Ps2. Maybe you can get someone there to help with this translation hack project thing.
A tiny bit better. I know what I need to do to get rare cases (like that g) to work, it’s just not easy to make it happen. I have some ideas but heh, my code is turning as crazy as the game’s
And with xkas, it’s really easy to be a lazy coder. Hopefully it won’t all come back to bite my butt.
But maaaan this hack really slows things down. There’s actually a half-second pause each time you switch a person’s inventory screen and the time the item names get printed, for example. Optimizing will be a bum.
Mato,
the cyrillic letters there transliterated say “LYadb Yuriodyeib kkao nb ki vyenb.” And sadly, no, that’s just jibberish in Russian. ‘Yuriodyeib’ kind of looks like a person’s name, though.
Battle Memory looking great, Mato.
Don’t worry. As you continue hacking away, I’m sure you’ll get it in the shape you want. After all, it’s already looking ten thousand percent better. The end can’t be that far out of sight.
MAN Im so happy You guys are doing this!! Thankyouthankyouthankyou! When it comes out how much money will it be?
Psi Erin: this is just a translation patch, so it’s free. You just need to find a japanese ROM of Mother 3. If you’ve already got one, great. If not… Go find one…
Mato: Too bad I’m no super-hacker… If I was, I’d gladly help…
Me? I’d be tempted to say to draw the whole damn screen to a buffer somewhere, then use sprites like cookie cutters to cut out only the parts I wanted (anything non-empty), if you can imagine that
But I have no idea how efficient that is, it just seems like it might be the least work. And I don’t have to deal with the ball of crazy that is M3’s code…
I find it funny how you always refer to your daily routine or your occupations as “real life”, like all the hard work put into this project isn’t real? Thanks for all this hard work, you are doing a wondeful thing for us all.
Well I equate real life work with stuff that benefits or helps me exist in real life. You know, earning money to live on, cleaning house so I don’t get the plague, etc. Projects like this are kind of outside of all that, even though they take up a ton of time.
Managed to get one rare case taken care of — when a part of one letter has spilled into the next tile but then the next letter is an [END] code. You can see it in the pic above because the “t” in “Flint” now shows up fully. Took some annoying work but got it to handle those cases good. Luckily there was a subroutine already in the game that made DMA-related stuff easy to handle. Now to compartmentalize this fix, and then also apply it to the case where part of a letter goes into the next tile but the next letter is a control code. That should fix most things, but there are weird side effects I’ve seen in some places.
I also see another rare case in the pic above, it makes an extra, blank, wasted sprite and tile right “Weapon”, shouldn’t be too hard to fix though. My brain is now a pie.
mato: get it to work and the optimizations will come. this I promise you. just try not to do it *too* messy the first time.
And for your most recent post, all I can say is I like pie but I like what your brain is doing better, so I’ll leave it alone.
Besides, I’m not quite sure what I think of tomato pie.
It took me like 5 seconds to fix that thing about the extra space after “Weapon”. Just changed a single if statement. It’s much easier to reprogram my own work
Anyway, I’ve been looking around at other parts of the game, and stuff that looked bad just 3 hours ago already works great. So that’s good. Still more to do though.
EDIT:
Even the naming screen text works right with my sprite hack now. Except there are still these weird oddities 
mato: well, you couldn’t call ‘em oddities if they weren’t wierd
Hopefully this is an easy fix…
For all your hard work, you earn this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/unown20043/2415037408/
Yes, I made it myself.
Tell me what you think!
Did someone say tomato pie?
http://nutsjesmoar.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/tomatopie.png
To Mato, a Japanese proverb for your tough times:
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
When you feel like giving up, remember why you held on for so long in the first place.
Hehe, Claus running on text… Beautiful oddities. :3
Yay! I think I got all the rare cases working now, but I gotta test a little more first. Then I’ll add in support so that it’ll handle those status icons correctly. Then I’ll clean up the code (god it’s bloated) and slimline stuff. And then I’ll get to optimizing stuff. Oh yeah, forgot I also need to make it do its max sprite # check correctly.
Weird stuff like that Claus thing up above I dunno about, but it’s possible it’s partly related to hard-coded stuff. Will get to that when the time comes.
sweet!
theres nothing you cant do, once you put time into it
ahh yes, the ol’e chomp-snake..
still looking for a name for it? i really like chomp-snake… but chomper-snake or chomping-snake are cool too,
and that’s my 2 cents for ya’.
I thought Tomato’s head imploded… O_o
go go tomato~
go go tomato~
Wow, great work Mato. It’s so cool to see things coalesce bit by bit in updates, in the mini-updates in the comments … it’s like watching a blooming flower, or a growing child.
I feel like a Mother …
Good to see so much progress in a single night
You keep wishing for super hackers to help out, but I think you’re *becoming* one at this rate…
Anyhow, keep up the good work!
Dear Tomato,
You are making very good progress.
I am very excited because I know that it won’t be too long until the patch is completed, I can wait a few months.
Here is your reward for all of your hard work.
http://flickr.com/photos/unown20043/2415680976/
PS: Am I able to post images here? If I can, then how?
Haha Unown, can’t post images, but that is awesome XD
i love you mato!!
Was ready to go to bed but then I felt like doing some code optimizing of what I thought was the bottleneck. Was pretty basic stuff, and I can tell I’ve sped things up a bit, but it’s still no good. It might actually be okay on real hardware, I gotta test it, but definitely not acceptable on an emulator, especially on the naming screens. The bottleneck could be elsewhere though, so I’ll mess with that once I’ve fixed a few more rare weird cases with the sprite text tomorrow.
Mato, I think you’re doing a great job.
I just want to know one thing, will you be rewriting the chapter names? I thought that the name of the first chapter gave away WAY too much information. The name pretty much spoiled the entire chapter for me the first time I played it.
I also have another question, how much of the game’s original programming is unchanged? 10%? 30%?
OK, this is my final question. How would you feel if you were to Accidentally delete all of your work and you had no backups left, forcing you to start all over from the very beginning of your hacking adventure?
Just remember:
Even when the translation is finished,
We will always remember our favorite Tomato-Man.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/unown20043/2414991909/
I bet he keeps hundreds of backup copies on individual DVDs and solid state disk drives in RAID 0. (The ones that aren’t as prone to failure as old style hard drives)
Okay, enough exaggeration, but I bet Mato is pretty secure with his work..
Looking good. Keeping on pushing forward!
About that stuff you had come up in the gibberish. The ð is a letter used in Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon. It’s called an “eth” when referring to Old English and it is a “th” sound in the languages I have encountered it in. That was the only letter I recognized. I’m not an expert on these languages, so don’t kill me if I made a mistake.
Never mind… the letter in the image is backwards from the ð. So, I’m wrong about it in that sense. I’m sure my information of the ð is correct though.
well saru is monkey in Japanese if I’m not mistaken
I didn’t know I’d be ostracized as a degenerate for using NESticle! Forgive me, forgive! I’ve only used it once before to play Kid Icarus and Metroid, and well, it worked fine for thsoe games. Rest assured, I’ve downloaded NEStopia, and not only got the EBZero ROM running, but Tomato’s EBZero IPS/”hack,” which while I didn’t expect any miracles for an NES game, doesn’t seem to do much to make the text, etc. look any less 8-bit.
So I’m debating whether I should play Mother 1 as I wait for Mother 3, Mother 2 having been played quite to death. Mother 1 does look so … aged …
@MaiXu:
Play Mother, it is a great game.
I haven’t played it myself, but I will before Mother 3 is released.
Just play it, but beware of the final area!
The enemies there can kill you in one hit!
———————————————————-
Mato, do you use the Debug Room in Mother 3 to test out your hacks or is the Room making the game crash?
Hiya. Long-time lurker, first-time poster, here. I’d just like to say that I appreciate all your hard work on this patch! You guys have done heroic work and I can’t wait to see the finished product! I’m rooting for you, Tomato, JeffMan, and everyone else involved in the project!
Your work is coming along beautifully. It overjoys me to see you fixing major issues, which would have taken weeks if tackled back in the early days of the project, within the same update you mention them in for the first time.
You are one highly skilled and talented individual, and this is a most noble thing of you do to for us all. Thank you.
Mato, is it possible that the bottleneck is being caused by the hard coded functions not operating efficiently with your code, like they get in each other’s way? Or is it just your code having been written with many redundant operations? Anyway, I bet optimizing will be a real pain…
Fernando Pando, that was hilarious.
PureRok: yes, your info. about “eth” is correct. but the letter i think you saw in the jibberish pic was a lower case letter “b” from the cyrillic alphabet (used in russian, ukrainian, mongolian, and other more obscure languages that most people here have prolly never even heard of.)
I just got my copy of Mother 3 from NCSX yesterday. I’d try to play it but I don’t want to spoil anything by trying to use my lousy Japanese to read it.
I think I’ll use my time instead trying to track down complete copies of Mother and Mother 2 so they can sit upon my shelf and look all nice.
Unown: The chapter titles are staying the same, just in English. Probably only 1% of code is being changed in the game. As for the third question, I dunno, but I doubt it’ll happen, I make many backups and the team has backups of stuff too. Also yes, I use the debug room a lot.
MaiXu: Yeah, it’s an 8-bit game, there’s no getting around it. But I still recommend it anyway, but you can’t play it like you would EB. You gotta take your time and not rush. Pretend like you’re back in the 80s and it’s not so bad. Also, it kind of helps if you put yourself in the mindset that you really are a kid going on an adventure. It’s a tough, sometimes annoying game, but it’s beloved for a reason.
Zeruel 21: No, it’s nothing like that. I still need to look more closely into it later, but it’s most likely because the game constantly writes, writes, and rewrites and recreates the sprites dozens of times every second, even when nothing is actually happening on-screen. And the main routine it uses to do the drawing is now also doing a bunch of extra bit-shifting and memory accesses. So what was once a very tight loop is now a little flabbier.
One fix would be to make it not redraw unless absolutely necessary, but that will be the devil to implement
So I’m hoping to do code optimizations if possible. Trying to shave down clock cycles reminds me of my assembly programming class in my college days. Just goes to show that stuff you learn in school DOES come in handy sometimes.
MaiXu:
I’m playing through Mother for the first time right now. It’s really great, you should play it. I was hesitant to play it for the same reasons. I find that as I get older it’s harder to sit through 8-bit RPGs than it was when I was 8 (God, 20 years ago!).
I highly recommend using Tomato’s difficulty patch as well. The game is not too hard there are just a lot more random battles than American gamers are used to and it helps to have your characters at a high level so you can blast through the weaker enemies.
Play Mother! Then play Mother 2! Repeat until the translation is complete!
Mato, Interesting. I’m sure there’s not enough free memory at the time to shadow the OAM memory…, but is there space to hash the OAM? If there is, you can just keep that value and everytime the loop happens rehash, if the hash has changed, proceed with the loop and refresh the display, otherwise, break out of the loop.
Again, I don’t know how the game works, but this way, we have a light poll instead of trying to make an interrupt which may break things. If I’m talking out of my butt, please feel free to ignore this, but still, anything I can do to help, even if its suggestions, I’m willing to…
If you ever plan to translate MOTHER3 into French after this, I’d like to help.
Not with hacking, but with translations and all. Puns and stuff, you see ?
Yeah, I think it could possible, right ?
… I could help right ?
BTW Is there anyway to edit the “NEW GAME, LOAD GAME, SOUND PLAYER” and stuff on the title screen ? That’d be something to translate too.
lol @ PizzaPasta:
“Play Mother! Then play Mother 2! Repeat until the translation is complete!”
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. And yeah, M1 can be aggravating even to someone who grew up playing nintendo games from the 80’s. But you can’t beat the endless twists and turns and layers of mystery that Itoi and his people managed to cram into that single chunky cartridge. Plus the song from Magicant ROCKS!
rofl, I see Gemini’s going through the same pains I am, with people overanalyzing everything and being nitpicky and annoying even though stuff is still in the first draft
see here
Heh…
I wonder how much nagging will come when the final draft is released…
Nutsjesmoar:
Yeah, the song from Magicant is the best. Mother is really growing on me except when Ninten has one of his asthma attacks (and they call Lloyd a wimp).
I think a lot of people are revisiting the first two games as a means to get hyped for Mother 3. I’m trying to find copies of the original carts before the hype causes them to become really expensive.
I’m still wishing that I hadn’t sold my copy of EB a few years ago but I was behind on rent and I had no idea that game would become as expensive as it is now.
PizzaPasta: Google “zSNES” sometime
No reason you can’t still play Earthbound.
Mato: Weren’t the sprites slow to begin with? You might really have to hack it to avoid redraw
But just think, this *should* be just about the most evil thing left. Because once you manage this, what’s left that you can’t rewrite? 
A Fan:
Oh don’t worry friend, I have Earthbound on my computer and I can play it on my DS with my R4. I just want the cartridge back so it can be imprisoned on my shelf with the rest of the inmates (video games, toys etc. you know, the stuff that makes my girlfriend wonder why she is with me)
ForteMP3: I removed your comment for reasons you should understand. Come on, I know you got better sense than that
Go visit the spoiler WIP thread if you want to talk about stuff like that or ask questions like that.
Mato:
I wish you could erase it from my brain as well. I usually don’t mind when things are spoiled but that was too much.
I guess that’s what I get for slacking off at work.
The menu patch is there if you want
Don’t tempt me!
Must work on spreadsheets!
My apologies Mato, I was hoping I was vague enough, but I guess not. Anyway, thanks for pointing me to that thread, all has been answered. ^_^;
Go Mato! So glad I have a lot of work to do and missed the spoiler
I feel a kinship to you recently, my current assignment is to reverse engineer an ASP.NET application a client had made in Russia and bend it to my will. I’ve had to connect some really crazy dots to figure out what’s going on/wrong. Bonus that I have never done asp or asp.net before and about 15 minutes of C#! Also bonus that Microsoft tools are… interesting and do weird stuff like randomly decide you don’t get to debug certain files. Grr.
But yeah I’m learning why I’ve always been more of a LAMP person, as is every other webdev with some semblance of sanity. Granted some of the Microsoft tools are neat, and I’ve never had a full debugger to play with while doing webdev before, but oh geez there is so much arbitrary cruft and hoops to jump through for “features” that aren’t even worth it. When it works and the errors make sense, it’s not so bad, but when it starts being vague? Kiss the next few hours goodbye D:
P.S. Maybe get your web guy to link that spoiler thread in the “Leave a Reply” box? I have seen other spoilers here that might have been avoided if there was a clear “go here if you have ANYTHING with spoilers” link…
I would highly recommend beating the game with the menu patch and mato’s spoiler free guide…. I am not afraid of spoilers at all anymore but my desire to play the game when the patch comes out has stayed exactly the same.. his guide pretty much makes it so you get to beat the game as fast as possible.. when the patch comes out I am for sure going to take my time.. and btw the ending was still very very good not understanding a word of it but names
Personally I’m replaying Earthbound right now, I fired it up again yesterday after a few days off; I’m at the Scarabia/Fourside part and Poo (”Sony”) joined my party.
The fun part is I had enough cash to buy all the best equipment in Summers with room to spare, ha. Then I read the guide and was like “oh, I can get it cheaper elsewhere…. D:”
Go after enough 1 in 128 items, and cash becomes no object in Earthbound.
I still hate that damn gutsy bat, though, because you have to reset the game
I think it’s the only one I’ve never gotten.
I still can see an end of hacking by the end of May (though I may be poisoned or delirious)!!!
By that I mean the initial stuff without testing.
Way to go Mato!!!
Wow…Translation’s coming along better than I thought. I’m actually dreaming about the day the translation comes out. ^_^
Mato,
We will pray for a super hacker to become interested in the project.
Mato:
As an addendum to my previous post (Hurray for nap time inspiration!), to save some clock cycles you could also check if the OAM is locked if the game is constantly redrawing. That should limit it to vblank if I’m not mistaken… Then again, I don’t truly know the gba or the engine being used… Still, good luck
The drawing is an independent process of the GPU, so it won’t have any effect on the speed in that sense. A VBlank halt command stops the CPU until the GPU is ready to draw the next line, that’s all. The issue is with the actual amount of code that the game is doing in between the VBlank commands; if it’s performing more than approximately 286,000 instructions per gap, then it’ll show signs of lag, because by that point the VBlank register has already been updated and the next halt command will have to wait until the FOLLOWING interrupt before it can execute more code.
It may be possible that the debugger simply can’t handle that much code and we’ll it could work alright on hardware like Mato suggested, but we’re still gonna try and optimize it as much as possible.
Jeffman:
Very informative, I knew the code new code segments were slowing it down, you only have so long to execute that code, I was more trying to approach Tomato’s suggestion of “One fix would be to make it not redraw unless absolutely necessary.” But now that I think more about it, its sounding like the game IS looking for a change to draw, and if it finds it, it draws the whole thing, not the delta. Is this correct?
It’s more like it draws and redraws and redraws whatever’s in the queue. If there’s nothing new added, it’ll still redraw. By having it constantly redraw/re-update, it makes it very easy to make the game know when new sprites are added/removed. In fact, the game doesn’t even need to know, it just adds whatever it runs into.
It’s hard to explain unless you’ve watched it in action. It’s smart and lazy at the same time.
@A Fan: You have to reset the game to get the Gutsy Bat? What are you talking about.
The players’ guide says that the Gutsy Bat is given out by the Kraken’s that live in the Sea of Eden in Magicant, and if that were true, then you would have to reset (there are a limited number of these Krakens, and once they’re gone, they’re gone).
However, the players’ guide was wrong. Dead wrong. You actually get the Gutsy Bat from the Bionic Krakens that live in the Cave of the Past (after you’ve been turned into robots). These ones keep reappearing, so you don’t need to reset the game ever, though you can really only use the Gutsy Bat against Giygas, in the end.
What!?! Thirteen years and I just now learn that I was fighting the wrong guy? Well, now I have a reason to crack out my old SNES and get to the *Bionic* Krakens.
I know you’ll be able to finish this translation.
Just look at all the work you’ve done!
You can do it!
Here’s something for all of your hard work:
http://flickr.com/photos/unown20043/2415761670/
http://flickr.com/photos/unown20043/2414939265/
Good luck Jeffman, Mato, And anyone else working on this translation who I do not know of.
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I have a question, what was the hardest thing in the game to hack?
I have another question, are there any items or enemies that you only have ONE chance to see, and if you miss them then you can never see them again?
Here is my final question, when did you learn of the existance of Mother 3? I found out about Mother 3 from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, although I may have stumbled upon it before when I was on the internet looking up information on Earthbound.
Hahaha! Damn Nintendo… Seriously, I never got the Gutsy Bat because I would just fight the Krakens in Sea of Eden over and over.
Also, awesome work Mato and Jeffman and crew. This is one of my most anticipated titles of the year!
Wow, I didn’t know that about the bionic krakens! Learn something new all the time
Mato: If there’s a queue, can you sort it? So you have all the drawn items followed by all the new stuff. If you can make sure that new or updated stuff is always on the bottom of the queue, you just need to keep your place and only redraw the new part of the queue. Or something like that.
But I guess the problem is knowing when things have been created or updated to begin with, huh? I don’t suppose that everything added to the queue or updated goes through just one or two functions somewhere?
Err, wait, one more thing about the krakens. Am I to understand that the krakens I fought all that time DON’T HAVE THE GUTSY BAT AT ALL?
#@$@#$@#$#@$@#$#@$#@$#@$#@$@#! You have no idea how long I’ve spent fighting those stupid things
Stupid player’s guide.
Any other mistakes in the player’s guide? I read that thing very, very thoroughly back in the day, not realizing that it was wrong. Heck, I would even buy the house in Onett, talk to the sesame seeds, trade the contacts for stinky socks, play with rock candy, and do all the other things it told me about…
I mean, you HAVE to raise Jeff’s IQ to 200 (or at _least_ over 120) before he can qualify as a genius to begin with, right?
A FAN: There’s this cool Earthbound site called starmen.net that can help you out with gameplay questions. It’s pretty good. However, this site is for Mother 3 translation discussion. Just so you know
Isn’t the Gutsy Bat the one with the high rate of Smash attacks, but otherwise doesn’t do much damage? Or has a high instance of missing? I remember relying on the next-most-powerful bat, I couldn’t stand whiffing against Gygas.
I am playing Mother 1, and using NEStopia, which is *such* a nice emulator compared to that hunky resource-heavy fossil NESticle. But EBZero really does feel like a huge fan of EarthBound made an 8-bit version of it; all the great elements of EarthBound are there, but they don’t seem to be as well thought out or as funny as they were in EB. Natural progression on Itoi’s part, I guess, which just makes me all the more psyched for Mother 3 in English; but EBZero is still failing to catch me with it’s charms. But I’ve only just begun to play, we’ll see.
I also have a copy of another classic I’ve never played, Fallout, sitting on my computer …
Gutsy Bat, if I remember, was an extremely strong weapon with an attack power of 255 or something - but it only hit 25% of the time. Thus making it near useless in most cases.
MaiXu:
I felt the same way until I got past the first town. Once you get to Magicant you’ll see where the charm is.
The dialogue is not quite on par with Mother 2 but there are some really funny parts. Hang in there, the game gets good.
I’ve been lurking on this site since I started playing Mother 3 earlier this month. I played it almost all of my freetime (to my grades’ dismay) and finished it in a little over a week. I am pretty much obsessed with thi