Return of the Attack of the Items
Didn’t have much time to hack the menus any more in the past couple days, but when I finally sat down to look at stuff tonight, things happened 😛
When we last left off, we managed to majorly hack how item names are handed by the game’s programming, specifically, in the outside menu. After way too much time, it looked like we succeeded, but we were wrong. The items on the right row were all shifted down one! Dagnabbit!
I really had no idea how this happened, or how to fix it. All I had done the entire time was mess with the text’s horizontal positioning; vertical coordinates never entered the picture at all. So it was a big mystery. I had the r0 and r3 registers outputting what they should be, so why the vertical craziness? Only one thing I could think of, but it didn’t seem likely, because it seemed TOO easy.
Eventually, I got the time to sit down and have a look. But looking at that code for hours straight wasn’t very appealing. So I crossed my fingers and went on a search for my hunch. As it turns out, that hunch was exactly right 😯 Impossible, the programming actually making sense?! Not only did my hunch turn out right, the code that needed fixing was only 4 bytes away 😯
So I changed that sucker to match the new correct value, and voila!
I also used the following screen as a test a lot, so it feels great to see it working correctly now 🙂
Aw, what the heck, here’s more. They look nice 🙂
What’s even nicer is that some of the other screens share this routine, so they print the item (and other names) correctly too.
(Equip screen) 
(Status screen)
Never mind the scary brokiness of those screens, they’re broken for the same reason the items menu was once broken, and their turns will come. They mostly just need some 8-bit hacks and possibly VWFs. We’ll get to them a later day 😉
However…
Not all is happy in menuland. After some more testing and checking stuff, it seems the hacks for these item menu names are still not complete.
Exhibit A: For some reason, the item menu here gets borked big time. Not sure what’s causing it, but it’s ugly and I don’t look forward to doing more tests on it. But no other choice 😛 But hopefully fixing this will fully fix everything. Pretty please, Mr. Evil Game?
Exhibit B: The key item menu. I don’t know about this yet. But it looks like this might use a completely separate routine that will also need to be hacked. I expect this is the case, since this menu is different from the others in that you can scroll up and down to different pages. Why do they gotta make things so hard though? Bah.
Exhibit C: For some reason, if you have a full item list, the last 3 items don’t get displayed, yet you can select them, use them, etc. just fine. I’m assuming this is related to the fact we rearranged memory. But I watched the game print stuff to memory, and all these names were copied over in full. Why these last 3 names don’t show up though is a mystery. I’m hoping it’s not because another routine overwrites their names with data of its own. If so, uh oh.
While we’re looking at other menus, the PSI menu seems to maybe share code with the item menu code.
But sadly, it’s showing problems of its own:
We’ll deal with that another time 😐
Also, the easily-overlooked outside skills menu also shows signs of unhappiness. I think I know why this one is caused though.
By this point, I wanna crawl up in a ball for a few years and hope Mega Buddha will do the hacking for me. But oh well. Just gotta take things one small step at a time. First order of business is to see why those item names are missing, or maybe to see why those certain item menus get torn apart.
On a semi-unrelated note, kind of surprised people actually read the last update, I threw it together late one night when I really should’ve been asleep, and hacking talk is boring and complicated. The moral of the story is that hacking games is not easy. Also, they should teach ROM hacking in college. Also, please Nintendo, please release an official translationnnnnnnnn
Once again, Mato, keep it up! Your work is much appreciated, and while I know nothing about hacking, I do know you’re doing a great job!
Good luck and thanks!
I read this and am posting a response shortly after you posted it
I hope it makes you feel loved 🙂
Great, always good to hear of new progress on the translation.
You wouldn’t be totally annoyed if after a year and some of work Nintendo released a translation? Then how would you feel about all this 🙂
All of this stuff about what goes on behind the scenes is really quite fascinating. Makes me partly glad that I decided not to pursue a career in computer science, too. Ha ha!
Keep up the good work!
Like the name says,yay!ive beaten this game three times before(all without your patch,third on the gba player with the real game)and i imagined(SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS I REALLY WANNA MAKE SURE NO ONE ACCIDENTLY READ CEPT THE HACKERS)the hardest part would chapter 7 cause you can cheat and go get duster then go do that ultimate creature thing then get salsa THEN have lucas,duster,boney,and salsa,so i can power level them to fourty(i really like this game).or you can not get duster and blah,blah,blah,hte point is that there alot of different ways you can do things and i thought that would be a extreme amount of hacking(SPOILERS ARE OVER REPEAT SPOILERS ARE OVER)but apperently the menu is the hardest thing it looks like good luck and i really apprecite all of this.(my dad,who never rarely plays games said to me”so when is the translation gonna be done?this game looks really cool”) (:
YOU ARE AMAZING!
I just got off work and its great to hear this news. Thanks, and keep up the good work! 🙂
Keep up the good work. I’m amazed at the patience this takes, and have def enjoyed reading you updates.
This and the Policenauts translations are the two games I’m most interested in. You hackers are incredible
No, Mato, you don’t really want that, at least not soon after you make some amazing breakthough, or worse, finish everything. It will really suck to finish this project seconds before Nintendo announces it’s coming state side.
Of course we’ll all still appreciate your effort, and maybe what I’ve said won’t happen. But I’m convinced that it’s too unstrategic a move to bait noisy fans with Lucas unless they’re going to follow through, and Nintendo knows it. If it took a big old-fashoned load off your chest, it’d be good. But if I were you, all the effort and sleepless nights so far would make me want them to hold it off longer.
But I’m not you. I can’t speak for you, and it was stupid to think I could. Never mind.
Im an IT student, so in no way is hacking anything boring to me. I can see why others might find it boring.
Keep up your damn fine work. ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE DEPEND ON YOU!
Yeah, Mato, narrating the hacking side of things is right up our alley: those who love programming, debugging, hacking, technical stuff, etc. eat it up for obvious reasons (including being reminded of the horrible-yet-gratifying pains you’re going through) — and from my quickie observations, those who aren’t much into it seem to enjoy your descriptions because you humanize all that $56A2C3EE40ness, and let them know just what horrible-yet-gratifying pains you’re going through!
And also, thank you Mato-and-co., for your consistent plea to have Nintendo stop this project BY WAY OF doing their own, announcing it, and making MONEY. That’s MONEY, Nintendo. So many fans really really do want you to make MONEY on your beautiful beautiful ART. Rally the cry! Please, Nintendo, and it’s likely at least one of you out there is reading this, please use all your official documentation and original programmers to modify, localize, and release this game. Please?
I’ve already bought a Japanese version in order to play this translation. I hereby swear I’ll buy at least one copy of an English version if you, Nintendo, released it! (Lord willing, of course. I mean, you know, if I die by then, it’s kinda hard, isn’t it. Comas are a bit debilitating, too. Maybe I’ll leave instructions to do so in my will. Hmm. (And I’m not joking.))
~sigh~ K, I’m done.
Perhaps I should just write them a letter that says the above practically verbatim…
Thanks for the update, sir. Fix one, break ten others. Gotcha.
Always highly appreciated for all updates.
I shiver with anticipation. Keep up the amazing job, guys!
As I said before, we (the non-tech guys) read these posts because it gives us a way to understand the hardships.
As I have never done any hacking, the concept of staring at those screens for 10 minutes (let alone 8 hours) makes me want to hide under my bed.
You guys are doing a task that most of us could never handle, and you have asked nothing in return.
For that, you all have my deepest gratitude!
GREAT WORK!
^_^ It’s getting there.
Thanks again for all the hard work, you people are gods among men. 😛
-Lucretius
Well, I bet you’re right that it’s the layout in memory. After all, it probably “knows” where it should stop [e.g. if (ptr > limit)] and you just have to fix that. But finding each and every one of the limits and correcting them, now that’s got to be a pain 🙂
BTW, I didn’t see you mention it before, but was I correct in that ECE 100 was the “processor design” class you were thinking of? For all I know, we took that one under the same guy, too.
Z. Mortimer: No! I’d be partying harder than anyone if Nintendo announced an official translation. Even after all the hard work that’d be for naught. 1. it’s not about the work, it’s about the game, 2. I want normalcy again, 3. it’d mean strategy guides and other official merchandise 😀
A Fan: I’m not sure, but ECE100 doesn’t sound right. It’s possible though. I think I have some unopened transcripts somewhere in my house, but not sure where. I remember that class fondly though (yeah it was the same as yours it sounds like), I was valedictorian in high school, then first semester of college I took that class and had a D- until the last week or so, ouch. I think my fondest memory though was making that final simple CPU one December weekend. Things were just really nice and time went slow somehow and I managed to actually make the stupid thing work 😯 Oh yeah, and I was unknowingly giving the answers to all the homeworks in advance for the whole semester. Oops. He didn’t like that. But that’s another story (and his own fault).
The 300-level class I was talking about is where they taught more advanced RISC vs. CISC stuff, and then eventually led into pipelines and cache and how they work and what’s good for what. That was the semester I started EB.Net/SM.Net, and I associate THAT class with EarthBound Zero.
Oh well, enough of my old man stories for today 😛
even if nintendo does realease an official translation, i would rather play yours because: A: they would undoubtedly censor a bunch of stuff (i’ve played through with the menu patch) and B: i was never a fan of handheld games, i hate small screens so a rom on a computer is fine by me. mato, you da man
a decencorship hack would be a lot simpler sence all you would have to do it change a few words, anyway we all know that is not going to happen because at this point they would have to port it over to the DS and traslate it. that would be one thing if they had full ownership over it but if I am correct bronie brown owns it in part witch would add additinal profit losses for Nintendo
It’s a shame there’s so much to do! Just take it one issue at a time until one menu is complete. Don’t worry about all of them at once or you’ll just stress yourself out.
Keep up the good work! Thanks again for making these blog posts! For me, they’re all fascinating reads.
As I recall, that class was offered under more than one name for some reason. It may have been something like EEE 100 / CSE 100 / ECE 100, or maybe only two of those. As an engineering student at the time, I’m pretty sure I took it as ECE 100. But yeah, it sounds like the exact same course material, so maybe our transcripts just don’t list the same name, even if we took the same class. It was a huge class with lots of majors.
As for the 300-level one, I never took that. Mine was all algorithms: DFS, BFS, red-black trees, efficient string comparisons, etc. Wish I had taken something like yours, but never had the time. I got my knowledge of things like RISC vs. CISC from elsewhere (i.e. it’s easy for me to see from the registers that the GBA uses a RISC processor).
With each of these blog entries, I am always amazed at the amount of work and dedication. I never realised how difficult it is to hack a game and have it be looking and running properly. Keep up the outstanding work. 😀
Oh, my goodness! D: Now I understand what you meant by “sharing routines.” That is freakin’ sweet! I may have barely found this and starmen.net a month ago, but checking up every day here, seeing pictures of what you go through, and listening to the music video by Lirba. . . Man, that is just plain awesome! This blog-progress site is totally cool.
I’ve heard of Earthbound, but never the prequel or sequel. Now that I DO know about Mother 3, I am reading every single piece of information I can find on the internet, literally.
The majority of us have no skills or knowledge when it comes to translating and invading a foreign game loved by many in a different country. Showing us your screen shots of work and that notebook full of random numbers and words. . . I’m seriously blown away by your intellectual mind. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to stick to hacking and translating Mother 3 for a few days straight.
Overall, as a newcoming fan of the Mother series, I may not have experienced the series themselves and therefore not know the feelings that ooze out, but I really appreciate what you guys are doing! I feel so psyched, knowing how far the group has come. Here we fans are, useless to help but quite supportive. Here you guys and gals are, translating, hacking, debugging, beta testing, and many other objectives to do to clean it all up.
Again, I’m sure everybody appreciates the effort you people put in, it really sparks my interest and make me whine to my brother to download the japanese version.
You have the patience of a saint! St. Tomato! ;__;
Well its nice to see that you fixed the problem with the menu item names out of place problem which its looking real good and its good that the programming actually is starting to make sense.I think that the problem in the key item menu will be only solved by hacking it,this might not be easy but take your time with it.Also for the full item list,what are the names of the last 3 items that don’t get displayed and are they special items,well atleast you can select them and use them for now. Now don’t worry too much about the outside skills menu,which I understand is very important,but you should solve that problem last because I think after the other menu issues are solved you will solved this problem in no time.Well keep up the great work and little by little you will solve all those annoying problems and release a great english patch for mother 3.Even if nintendo releases a mother 3 in america at the same time as you release the patch I would play the patch first and then I would buy it again but in english and play it second.
I was just wondering, did Brownie Brown only do the coding? Did HAL do the art and stuff or did they only handle the sound? I know Shogo Sakai is with Hal. I’m essentially asking what Hal did with this game, they’re probably my favorite developer.
They DO teach ROM hacking in University. I went to one near where I live for a presentation on their engineering department, and they showed us how they made an Atari 2600 emulator.
Cool times.
Zatech: NO WAY. What University is that?! I’m currently pursuing at Computer Science degree, but all I’m taking are core curriculum classes… I know I should be well-rounded and all but three years of general knowledge? X_x
butt: Actually, after seeing some of the things in M3, Nintendo would have to change more than just text to censor the game. Some images might be offensive to the all-time conservatist American. 🙁
its funny if you look at the last update and my last post i said sometimes its easy to just walk away and just think of something realy simple that could cause the problem. any way good work.
You really need more reverse engineering than CS to romhack, from the looks of it. Might be able to get classes in ARM assembly, which would help (at least for VBA, other systems use other processors, I’m sure). Reverse engineering would only be taught in a few computer security oriented degrees, I think. Mostly have to learn that on the net. What little I know is from reading Fravia’s pages (Google that, lots of info on the theory of finding the part of the code that’s interesting, then figuring out what it does).
At least as far as I know. I haven’t had much cause to reverse engineer anything 🙂
I check this website pretty much whenever I can. If you make any update at all chances are I’ll be reading it withing 24 hours of it being posted. I usually check this site more than once a day.
All this stuff is fascinating to me.
Tomato: It’s good that you can say that; it means that you are really devoted to the game, the genre, and the series. And I knew that, but its really easy to tell in that statement.
lol nut bread
I’ve been interested in this rom-hacking stuff forever (even though I’m completely useless at it myself), so reading about the process is interesting. 😀 I check this site every so often, and Mother 3 seems to have something evil waiting at every turn. Hope there’s no Ultimate Chimera-type coding. D:
Yea, I wouldn’t mind a hacking class in my program. It would be a helluva lot more interesting than ‘Pop Culture in the 18th Century’.
Oh, you don’t want Nintendo to go official, then all your work will be for naught? (At least, since I’m not working on this project, that’s how I think you’d feel.)
So out of curiosity if you had to guss about what percentage of the text in the game is all ready?
Thanks for working so hard Tomato and everyone!
Cheering you all on! Go team go!
Keep up the great work! Hopefully the fact that your intuition was correct on the horizontally shifting item text means that you are starting to intrinsically “get” the code. I’m sure it’s off the wall in other routines, but if you’re starting to understand and anticipate, I’m sure everything else will fall into place much easier.
Anyway, awesome work, and I’m cheering you all on from afar!
Looks like progress is steadily moving along. Though I really don’t know crap about codes and hacking, I still find it incredibly interesting. Just remember that it’s better to be working hard and getting somewhere than being at a complete halt. It seems like the keys to hacking are patience and trial and error.
Patience, in the manner of being able to have done this for so long. The hacking team doesn’t give up because you want to give so many of us an enjoyable game (as stated before in my last post.)
Trial and error seems like the biggest part of this. You basically explained this part yourself, Mato.
Go team Mother 3 Hackers! You can beat the Hacking Codes! They’ve had a good season, so this game will be a challenge! 😉
You guys are doing a great job, we’ll be here rooting you on every step of the way. Happy holidays and celebrations.
*Spoiler Alert* My favorite part in this game is when Godzilla kills the entire cast. What’s your favorite part Mato?
A Fan: For some reason, CSE 120 comes to mind. Or ECE 120. I took the algorithms class I believe though. Just before I ditched my major and ASU for a year to go to Japan. I think my algorithms class was taught by some guy grad student whose English was horrible, so I couldn’t stand the class.
Jeeves: I believe BB did everything but the sound/music programming, which was what HAL did.
Zatech: That’s cool. Though I’m talking more like the stuff you gotta do in ROM hacking: tile editors, hex editors, script dumping, data finding, and assembly hacking. Maybe this blog could be part of the curriculum 😛 j/k
Z. Mortimer: I’d have to say that the #1 reason is that I’m so very tired and would really like someone else to do all this stuff 😛 But since that’s not gonna happen, got no choice.
butt: Eleventeen percent. (in other words, see the FAQ page)
Jerry: When Hyper Elvis ate Godzilla’s face.
Hey mato, you have been so detailed in posting what YOU have done. Do you know what the other guys on the team are up to?
They’re all really busy with real life stuff, especially with it being the end of the year. You know how it is, school finals/final projects, crunch time at work, trying to have a life with everything else going on, etc. etc.
man, you really deserve a medal or something. if fanatical muslims get a bunch of virgins in the afterlife for blowing people up, you deserve 50,000 virgins in your afterlife.
And every one of them Yoshi-Koshi. *Chuckle*
So now that I’m not tired and depressing anymore, I must say it’s quite a treat to see the EarthBoundy dialogue in those preview videos. I didn’t get any whiff of it in the translation guides I got. Cowboy hats off to you, Mato. You’re capturing the EarthBound spirit quite nicely.
Now seriously, imagine 50,000 Yoshi-Koshis… But I have to go now because Kumatora’s about to beat me senseless for that. Still singing Pollyanna for y’all! Ow-ow-ow…
Mato: Hmm, now that you mention it, I *could* be wrong and it could’ve been ECE/CSE 120… Because I had a different ECE class at the 100 level where you formed 4-man cells… err, teams (too much anime, sorry) and did random engineering type projects (i.e. made an over-complicated Excel spreadsheet with a production line’s items moving through the cells as little 1s, come up with total-BS estimates for random things, and built some type of wind-up rubber-band car except that we didn’t have any actual tools and made something that was a total, utter piece of crap because we had to do something stupid like spend less than $10 so we ended up sawing wood with a butter knife or something nearly as bad…)
But err, yeah, I know that the 100-level class where you build a CPU out of individual logic gates was definitely a class we both had, whether I remember the right name or not 🙂
My worst “guy who can’t speak English” class was that 300-level algorithms class, sadly. It’s probably why I don’t understand red-black tree balancing very well even still. The guy kept talking about “pervert elements” in the tree for some reason and only later did I figure out that he meant PIVOT elements. Minor difference… 🙂
Props on working so hard to bring us fans what we’ve been dying for:) I don’t know anything about Hacking or Code, except HTML. Hex editors for forensic investigation. That’s just looking at the file headers, not the actual code. Anyways, Pokemon and many other games are development is compartmentalized.
As you are probably aware this means different menus and aspects of the game would be done by different teams. You seem to have found corelations that tied together certain menus and displays. Maybe their is some general code used by multiple teams and specific code used by less that makes things so crazy.
It’s really quite amazing what you guys are doing. I couldn’t do it. I’m just throwing out some thoughts. While playing Pokemon on DS I realized the Menus and Touch and button controls where weird and were not uniform. Figured it was different departments taking different routes to control and display.
Wow there are some bright mofo’s on here.
Oh about EarthBound Licensing. Nintendo owns it. Nes appearing in Smash Brothers Melee helped bring in a new generation of fans. Only Nintendo owned properties appeared in that game.
Also you probably have saw and maybe signed some of the various pettitions and letters to Nintendo. They have recently been releasing Japanese imports to the VC. So there’s a chance the first one could be released. It’s a cult classic and Nintendo knows it. They are showing more flexibility in bringing out VC games, due to the low cost of digital distribution vs traditional production and marketing.
Here’s hoping for a SNES EarthBound re-release on VC. Then when it sold well Nintendo might rethink the release of the GBA sequel in a DS or other version. Money is a good motivator:) Either way it would still be some time before that happened.
What a mess that this is. I’m glad you have the patience to work on this, as I don’t. I’d get bored and work on another project. (Probably one of my greatest faults, and why I never finish much of aything 🙂 ) Looking forward to the final release. Perhaps I should replay Mother 1 and 2.
Lol maybe the hacking is too hard for nintendo, maybe they tried and failed and covered it up lol, jk
Hey, Tomato, where’s the rest of the team? From the way you’re talking, you’re taking on the entire project yourself. If that’s the case, take it easy and trim that foot-long crazy man beard.
Ok I’m really sorry for this, and I think it’s just my inner typographer complaining, but in every single screenshot I’ve ever seen in this project, the lowercase y’s and g’s are getting cut off at the bottom… Is there any way to fix this? 😛
Also, another question:
What language was this game originally written in? Did they really sit down and just bang out pages and pages of assembly?
OROD: I talked about it in the last post, or the post before.
pauyasfyla: Like I mentioned above, everyone’s busy with real life. Only reason I can put as much time as I can into the project is that I work freelance, which means I can wake up/sleep/work anytime I want. As long as I make the deadlines and stuff on time, of course 😛 But it’ll only take another big sudden rush job to send this project to another grinding halt, so I’m hoping the other guys will be able to pick up *some* of the slack 😯
OROD: It was programmed in C, which makes the resulting code not very logical. Hand-done ASM would’ve *probably* been more logical for us to follow and thus easier to hack.
——–
On another topic, I think I’ve decided not to do another update until I finally fix these stupid items, or if I get really stressed from it and decide to set it aside for a while. So here’s a quick mini-update of stuff so far.
Managed to get it to display all the item names!
But it’s still broken other times.
Poo: i think he’s probably had enough of hanging out with 50000 virgins (us) in this life, much less the afterlife (just kidding)
Mato, don’t you think the list starts a little too low? There’s probably three pixels of empty space on top of the list…
Either way, you know what you’re doing and I’m the layman looking at your screenshots, drooling over them… so you do what you must.
Did you check to see if the game checks if there’s more than 8 items per column when its displaying the items? Or if the items are within a certain position? Bleh, I feel stupid giving you advice when I myself don’t know what’s going on. :/ Well, good luck and may God help you.
Good luck on this hack Mato! I recently got into this series a few months ago and would PK Love to see this get finished. I’ve hacked a ROM’s title screen before. It was a very ugly business. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard THIS hack is going to be. Well, just remember Ness’s Dad’s advice: If you feel you need to rest, go ahead. It’s not good to work too hard. Again, I like all the stuff you’ve done so far. Keep it up! 🙂
This all looks like one giant mess that I would hate to have to tackle head on. Looking good, however, if that makes sense. I can’t wait for this to be out whenever it comes. 🙂
How many of you guys are working on this? Do you collaborate in person or over email? Seems like a fun project even if it is a lot of work.
mam you guys just rock! i were mad wem i finished the earthbound for the snes and it looked to have an anoter chapter…
it was depressing to see it were just coming to the N64 but it was canceled and so…it came on a gba…welll better than nothing! but it was japanise it was sad BUT you guys ca in and are translating it just great! all i can sai is to keep upo the awesome work and good luck! (sorry if my english is bad I am tring to get better)
They see all the work you guys are doing, and they don’t even think about releasing an english (french would be nice too^^) translation? They’re just too cruel!
you know how they released all the Final Fantasy’s that have never been released here on GBA or DS?…I definately want a Mother 1+2+3 or an Earthbound 0+1+2 DS card!!!! That would pretty much be the best thing ever!!! I think that’s what Nintendo should do…
The hopes of playing Mother 3 is a tedious protracted battle. LOLS…. It is worth it!
Just wanted to add a comment to let you know how much your hard work AND updates are appreciated. Even if I understand nothing of what you’re saying, I like to know that there is continuous progress. That was my only real gripe with mother3.org… It’s hard to express emotion over the internet, but holy shit, everyone who has contributed is SO fucking awesome.
It may just be me, but the way you’re writing your blog posts recently sounds like the way Itoi would write. The last post more than this, when you said something about “the menus were programmed so unhappily” just reminded me of Itoi talking about that soup. I think reading his writing so closely is starting to invade your mind! 😮
Geez dude, mother 3 really IS an evil game!
And you are funny.
Rotten Eclair Powder? What kind of game is this?
Moulinoski: Yeah, like I’ve mentioned before a couple times, the text is pushed down three pixels because of how our new font routines work. This is how we managed to fix the missing-hook problem in the main dialog text. At a later point, we’ll pull all the text back up 3 pixels. It’s not priority right now though.
Brian: We have a project site where we communicate. I forget how many there are on the team, see the About page on this site for a list though.
Harry426: It’s always been my hope that once an English version is done, it’ll be easy for other translators to translate into whatever language of their choice. That’s yet another reason to make sure these hacks are top-notch quality. If everything is programmed well, then other languages should be a cinch.
Are the dates off on these posts? or am i seriously 1 month out of the loop. hmm
well either way its nice to see work is being done.
Now Onward, and into glory!
– dates on the posts off?*