(Man, the hardest thing about updating anymore is coming up with a good title)
Pretty decent, steady progress this past week. Nothing too major to show for it, though I’ll show some stuff anyway 😛
First main thing is that after some annoying assembly tracing, Jeff figured out some important stuff. Remember how we’re doing those chapter titles? Turns out that our new titles took up more space than the original titles (the graphics for them are compressed in the ROM) so we had no choice but to relocate the graphics. Had to find the pointer to the graphics though, and that was bleh because the programming sort of invented the address out of thin air, but Jeff finally found it, along with some extra data that’s useful. So now the chapter titles are moved and nearly done. Hooray! Here’s a before and after of that Chapter 3 title.
Not much progress (yeah I say that every time 😛 ) but things have picked up a tiny bit, so that’s good.
First, a neat little organizational tool’s been made. It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but it should make things easier for us. Given that there are so many people involved, things can get disorganized pretty quick.
Anyway, first order of the day was to test out harmony’s old findings, using the above tool. It worked really well, thanks to his super smartness and his really detailed documentation, and I think rather than use our work as a base and combine his, it might be better to use his work as a base and build our stuff up around that. As you can see, one of the main benefits of this is that we have letter hooks working now 🙂 Hurray, people can stop complaining about that finally 😉
Finally, another real update 😉 Well, it’s not much, but it’s something.
Yay!
b0rk
There’s not much progress to show since last time. Probably the main thing that’s happened is some more work in the chapter title department. At some point along the line, long before this blog even started up, all the translated title graphics got broken, as you can see. We’re now in the process of redoing them with slightly-tweaked text, a different font (I think these early titles used the Arial font), and such. I think there’s also other non-chapter title text that’ll get the same treatment.
Been getting lots of comments, emails, private messages, etc. about this, so I guess I’ll answer them all here.
Yeah, we’ve heard about how Super Smash Bros. Brawl has been delayed to February 2008. Even though the game is delayed now, though, we’re not striving to have a complete MOTHER 3 translation patch before then. I mean, it theoretically could happen, but I really wouldn’t hold my breath 😛 There’s still tons of very difficult hacking to do (as shown here), and a couple more drafts of the main script to go through.
As always, if you want to play through MOTHER 3 before Brawl comes out, please see the Menu Patch page. I also updated the FAQ page with info about this.
One is a MOTHER 3 shirt and themed around a cool enemy from the second half of the game. It comes in two colors, red and black. The red version is a limited-time-only thing, while the black version will see re-prints down the line. So if you’re a limited-edition-freak like I am, snag a red shirt while you still can!
Also up for pre-order is a shirt themed around the Sharks gang from EarthBound. It looks pretty cool, so check that one out too. Also, for this first run of shirts, I think they’re going to ship them in boxes that look like the gift boxes in EarthBound and MOTHER 3, like the ones in the pic above. Sweet.
Yeah, it’s been a week since the last update. I was waiting for something for the next update, but decided to skip it and post this instead. Incidentally, I generally try for 2 updates a week, but don’t be surprised if it turns into one a week. After a while, there’s only so much you can say without repeating the same thing over and over. But I’ll try to post something once a week, even if it’s just “nothing much this week”. (But don’t freak out if it’s been 7.01 days please :P)
OK, anyway, I was gonna post this later in the week, but here it is now. People had asked for it a while back, and I thought now’d be a good time to show just why we decided to release a basic menu patch for now instead of what we currently got working. Check out the video and see how evil and ugly things can be!
As most of the regular visitors here already know, Lucas finally got announced at the Smash Bros. Dojo website. He’s looking pretty cool. Here’s to hoping there’ll be some equally as awesome music in his stages 😀
Again, for those interested in playing through MOTHER 3 before the new Smash Bros. comes out, go pick up the menu patch here. It only translates menus and names and whatnot, but it makes the game more navigable, and with a walkthrough, it will make it more enjoyable. Or you can wait for the final, full translation patch, though it probably won’t be out for a while.
Also, check out this video Starmen.Net staffer Libra made a while back. It has video from the game, but nothing mind-shatteringly-spoilery. Enjoy!
MOTHER 3 is the sequel to MOTHER 2 (also called EarthBound). It is a GBA RPG that was released in Japan in April 2006. Nintendo has made it clear that they do not intend to translate the game, so we, the fans, have begun our own translation.
As most of the regular visitors here already know, Lucas finally got announced at the 
