The Number Eight

16 years ago by Mato

Not much done today, kinda made today an “off” day. Got a lot of real world stuff to do so there won’t be too much more progress for the rest of the week, though I’m sure I’ll sneak in a few hours of hacking here and there anyway πŸ˜›


Main thing today was that I was looking over some of harmony’s old documentation for some of his hacks he did in 2006 and noticed that he mentioned 8×8 stuff very briefly. Apparently, the main font width routine and some 8×8 font routines share the same code, just have different inputs. So, after messing with things and spending way more time than it should have taken, I managed to get a VWF working for some 8×8 fonts.

It doesn’t affect anything in the main menus, mostly just the gray name boxes and the character name boxes that pop up when you press Select while walking around. I think my hack might be slightly buggy still, so I gotta test it more (and test my hand-done widths too) before I let it leave my mind.

However, in testing this newly-gotten VWF, I came across the above problems. The first pic is caused by having 8 names in Kumatora’s name. So it looks like eight letters might NOT be a possibility. At least not without some extra assembly hacking, and right now I don’t feel like messing with it, so we’ll leave it as a maybe for now. It’s not an essential hack, but it’d be nice to have.

The second pic just shows that the game still needs to be hacked so that it will position the names correctly, so that they’re centered within their little boxes.

After this, I went around the game and just talked to all sorts of people to test out the name VWF and see how things looked. It’s really looking cool, when the main script isn’t barfing or crashing/freezing the game πŸ˜€

(disclaimer: these are still from the first draft translation, so overlook any weirdyness)


I don’t like having that limit in name length – I wish I could put a space between Mole and Cricket. This happens with a few other names in the game. Just one or two more letters would be so nice.

Also, the game needs to be hacked to make the gray boxes fit the names correctly. It’s still assuming 8 pixels per letter, which is why there’s so much extra space after each name. More work πŸ˜•

Other than that, not too much done today.

In other news, for those who’ve already played through MOTHER 3, or for those who don’t care about spoilers, you’ll probably like this. It has tons of pics from the last few months that I never put on this site for various reasons. Cool and funny stuff everywhere. There are spoilers of course, so beware, lest ye be spoilt.

Posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 11:56 pm by Mato, filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are currently closed.

46 Responses to “The Number Eight”

  1. IcePiΒ’k said 16 years ago:

    First Post!
    Keep up the good work.

  2. Steve said 16 years ago:

    Maybe I missed the update, but did you finally fix it so the text does not automatically go to the next line once a set character length is met? The text in the lower six images looks outstanding.

  3. duva said 16 years ago:

    we all owe you an honor

  4. fael said 16 years ago:

    i’m loving these daily updates. thank you mato!

  5. Black Death said 16 years ago:

    Looking great. Don’t overwork yourself, Mato. πŸ™‚

  6. light_kun said 16 years ago:

    Can’t wait until this comes out!

  7. Okama said 16 years ago:

    You’re doing god’s work, Mato.

  8. Bat Fax said 16 years ago:

    You know, if it was a 9×9 font instead, you could’ve made an awesome Beatles reference.

    The past few days have been absolutely great. Lots of neat things to see! =D

  9. Magish said 16 years ago:

    Wh00t for daily updates! Although it’s gonna stink when you go back to the normal schedule. πŸ˜›

  10. Steve said 16 years ago:

    Anyone remember when Play-Asia briefly sold Mother 3 for $15? Well, I picked up a second copy just because I love buying good games at really cheap prices. I figured I could gift it to a friend sometime. Well, I’ve been mentioning Mother 3 to my gaming friends for quite some time and they don’t seem to care. Fortunately for you, their apathy is possibly your gain! I am sending this extra copy to the first person who emails me their mailing address. My email address is ssrobins at gmail dot com. Please only do this if you don’t already have it or plan to give it to someone who doesn’t already have it.

    Happy Holidays!

  11. Yes said 16 years ago:

    I just sent you an e-mail
    That would totally make my year

    BTW Mato, Keep up the good work, the game looks incredible

  12. Steve said 16 years ago:

    The copy of Mother 3 is now spoken for. Sorry to everyone else…

  13. Regulus, from starmen.net said 16 years ago:

    Just wanted to say I’m glad you guys exist. I know it may be exhasperating sometimes to work against the gnomes of hacking, but I’m pretty sure you will make it through the end.

    I have a question, though. Why is it that in the preview trailer (the one with Mr. Great’s Theme) Kumatora’s name is displayed fully and centered?

  14. yabbadabbadoo said 16 years ago:

    14th POST AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

  15. bumblebuzzin said 16 years ago:

    Oh how I love the daily updates.

    Good luck with your real life stuff.

  16. Nutsjesmoar said 16 years ago:

    Things are looking better every day. Keep up the good work, this is a such a great game that has gotten so little justice, and none of us doubt that this is a mammoth undertaking that should have been done a long time ago by Nintendo themselves. The world will thank you when this is over!
    Basically I love you guys.

  17. Santa Claus said 16 years ago:

    Hey, are you going to release the patch with the first draft after all the bugs are fixed and then do the second draft in the game and release that? I think that woiuld make many people happy, and they’d probably play both drafts because it would be neat to play the game twice but have it be slightly different the second time. Lots of people were going to play both the Mother3.org tranlslation and the translation by people from Starmen.net because it would be slightly different.

  18. Mato said 16 years ago:

    Steve: Nope, hasn’t been fixed. That’s one of THE biggest bugs of all, and I don’t think it’ll be fixed for a long time. It’s an ugly mess of ugly.

    BTW, Play Asia does sell it at $15 every so often now, not just that one time.

    Regulus: I looked at the video, but I didn’t see her name in full and fully centered. I saw “KUma”, and it only seemed centered because the letters in her name are close to the original width of 8.

    Santa Claus: No, we’re only going to release the final version when it’s done.

  19. A Fan said 16 years ago:

    Heh, they have mole crickets in this game? Interesting, I didn’t realize that very many people knew what those were πŸ™‚ I’ve only ever seen one of them. Someone found one on the tennis court after it rained (normally, they’re deep underground), shoved it into a tennis ball can, and brought it to me for identification (lovely thing about living in a small town most of your life–I was probably one of the only two people in the town who could’ve identified it, the other being the high school biology teacher).

    So I now have that insect on my wall, in a riker mount, surrounded by other interesting specimens, like buckeye butterflies, monarchs, cecropia & polyphemus moths, mourning cloaks, commas, viceroys, etc. πŸ™‚

    But you’re doing pretty well, Mato, if you can translate a strange word like that from Japanese. I haven’t seen many people who knew what the hell they were in English. Usually, they just look at my wall and as what the hell is THAT thing!?

    For those who haven’t seen one:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_cricket

  20. danc said 16 years ago:

    Mato,
    getting the gray box to fit the names perfectly would be nice….

    but i dont think you should make it such a priority …
    if its gonna be sooo much work, then why dont you just forget about it? And work on more important stuff with your time..

    I know you’re going for a perfectly professional translation here… but still…

    that’s just my insignificant opinion though..

  21. cant wait to play-_- said 16 years ago:

    this rocks i love reading this stuff well -peace out

  22. skyrunner14 said 16 years ago:

    I’m posting this at school. How bad am I? >:D
    Great job, Mato! 2 THUMBS UP!

  23. Ixis said 16 years ago:

    I have a question, will you be releasing your hack tools so people can make Mother3 edits themselves?

  24. Mato said 16 years ago:

    A Fan: it’s a farely common word in Japanese, actually. The weird thing is, I learned the Japanese word before the English word. It’s been like that a LOT with stuff, particularly fish. I have no idea what a sanma or aji or tai or anything is in English. I’m Englishly deficient 😯 That’s cool that you found one, I dunno if I’ve ever seen one in real life. BTW, check that blue screenshot on the sidebar, that’s the mole cricket you fight πŸ˜€

    danc: that’s really just a very minor thing to hack compared to everything else, just will take time to find the code for it.

    Ixis: maybe, but they’re not really meant for user friendliness, and most of the stuff is done via commandline now anyway, rather than fancy Windows apps. But that’s a long way off so we’ll see.

  25. Moulinoski said 16 years ago:

    MOLE CRICKETS EXIST?! O_o HOLY SNAP! *gets eaten by a mole cricket* Goes to show you, video games CAN teach! >_> (Actually, I learned what a shoal was by playing Dragon Quest III… First game that made me open a dictionary…)

    Anyhow… Mato! *thumbs up* I think you’re going kinda fast, but if you can handle it, cool! Now, I was thinking about the previous update (Sidequests Abound) and I was thinking that maybe if you play around with the font in Tile Layer Pro or whatever, maybe you could get the font to show up all nice when the font routine drawing five pixels instead of ten? πŸ˜› But, well, you know: You know what you’re doing, I’m just here looking at the stuff you’re doing. πŸ˜›

  26. Jeffrey said 16 years ago:

    So you do this all on your own? If you wanted I could help out. Just give me the URL to the tools.

  27. Coconut of Enlightenment said 16 years ago:

    Nice work!! I can’t wait to play. Maybe I’ll try my hand at hacking a few old roms just to feel what it’s like to be you.

    I hope by now that Nintendo realizes they have to release a localized version in the US. C’mon, people, if you’re going to have to do it anyway, why not now?

  28. A Fan said 16 years ago:

    Just so I know, what IS the Japanese word for mole cricket, anyhow? (And how DO you translate stuff like that?)

    Oh… and any idea why it’s so common? Is there some myth about them? I know there are actually many species of mole crickets, so I assume one must live in Japan, but yeah.

    Heh, I wonder if other people thought they were like the Cattlesnake or other fictional two-animal combinations? Then again, for all I know, mole cricket is written as [mole][cricket] in Japanese and gave them the idea for all those wacky animal-animals… πŸ™‚

    But yes, I’ve not only seen one, but I have it mounted on my wall. I’ve only ever seen _ONE_ of them, though, and that was brought to me for identification back when I was a kid, but this was before Google, so things were different. Sad thing is, that was NOT unusual for me to get odd queries like this as a kid, even from random adults. I had the video rental place give someone my phone number (“Is this the Nintendo nut?” is an odd phone call to get, BTW) to help them answer a renter’s question about a game I had never actually played. I answered it correctly for a free rental. Memorizing Nintendo Power issues did have advantages: I still know that you press up to go through a _window_, not the door in Golgo 13 and I’ve never actually seen the damn game. It helped that the NP staff even answered my crazy letters back then, asking things like why screenshots of Poo sometimes spelled it Pu in the original EB coverage (you thought you were the only one who suffered that, didn’t you Mato?) πŸ™‚ or what the hell all the spells did in Wizardry, which the rental place had lost the instruction book for…

    Oh, right, I’m rambling incoherently again. Sorry πŸ™‚

  29. TheReaper said 16 years ago:

    Mato progress has been great the last couple of months,its good to hear that you decided to have a off day which you really must get with all the work you have done by yourself on a very hard and confusing game to hack and translate,I hope that after or before the holidays end the rest of the team is ready to help you out with all the hacking that must be done.I also hope that the problem with Kumatora’s eight letter name in the first pic can be fixed later on without causing more problems in other areas of the game and if it cant be fixed just put the name Kuma instead.

  30. ejgeorge said 16 years ago:

    Im new here so i want to know if someone coulde tell me whatΒ΄s VWF?

  31. Ness said 16 years ago:

    VWF = Variable Width Font

  32. ejgeorge said 16 years ago:

    thanks Ness youΒ΄re still my favorite earthbound hero (though Lucas seems pretty good too)

  33. Hemlock said 16 years ago:

    Well, going through lines and lines of hex and I’ve realized something; I have no idea what I’m looking for. I know that you have a lot of additions to your current rom, Mato, but is there something that you can suggest? I just need to get my footing, and I should be able to start getting the hang of it. I don’t mean to be whiny, I’m just curious as to if you have any tips.

    I’ve also noticed something else. While looking at all that hex, I’ve gained a great respect for what you do, and how painstakingly you work on this, and I thank you.

    -Hemlock

  34. Chris said 16 years ago:

    Mato: One of the beauties of assembly is the use of self modifying code. I recall in your past entry, the magic font routine that stores the width to draw each character is hard coded at 10, it should be easy in your vwf to calculate how large of a space you need, then load the address of that 10 into the MAR, write the new value, rinse and repeat.

    Of course, I still have not looked at any of the coding, so you may have tried this already, but this same approach should also work for the name box length as well, but it might make that box grow or shrink progressively (depending on implementation) as it prints out each character.

    I’m always willing to help (though I am not sure if I can do much, this is my first venture into GBA) and if you want to get a hold of me privately, the site has my email.

  35. Mato said 16 years ago:

    Chris: I already tried that, but by the time the character gets loaded, modifying the 10 stored in memory doesn’t change things πŸ™

    Hemlock: What is it you’re trying to do exactly? If you want to mess with a game’s coding, you’ll need to use an emulator that lets you step through code line by line. If you’re just editing data, then a lot of it is trial and error and hunches.

    A Fan: It’s “okera” in Japanese. I think the Japanese are just a lot more in touch with nature and stuff than us in general. They *love* their bugs and their fish and all that.

    Jeffrey: I’ve answered the question a lot this week, so check previous entries’ comments. Also, I’m not exactly going to give out the tools and files to a complete (and bossy-sounding) stranger 😯

    ————-

    On an unrelated note, I’m breaking my streak of daily updates today. Didn’t do any hacking really, been way too sleepy all day for some reason. Won’t have much time until next week either, but we’ll see. When I think about just how much work still needs to be done, my brain stops πŸ™

  36. A Fan said 16 years ago:

    I’ll save Mato the trouble of answering that, then πŸ™‚

    Here are the info & tools you need to hack GBA games:

    VBA http://vba.ngemu.com/downloads.shtml
    VBA-SDLH http://www.romhacking.net/utils/297/
    GBA tech doc http://www.work.de/nocash/gbatek.htm
    GoldRoad ARM/THUMB assembler http://www.gbadev.org/tools.php?showinfo=192
    THUMB reference http://www.gbadev.org/docs.php?showinfo=19
    ARM/THUMB tech reference (very good) http://www.gbadev.org/docs.php?showinfo=16

  37. A Fan said 16 years ago:

    Mato: Interesting about how they’ve named all those animals, Mato. I guess I had noticed that a number of things had Japanese names because I don’t ever remember hearing anyone use the Latin name of a Japanese animal (though poor translators have…). Are there good dictionaries for that sort of thing? I swear, the dictionaries I have are all but completely useless once you find a word that’s the tiniest bit unusual (e.g. from biology, dealing with religion or the supernatural, etc.) even though words like higurashi (a type of cicada) and youkai (magical creatures/spirits) aren’t even uncommon. God help me if I ever want to look up the names of old fashioned weapons or armor. I tried playing one of the Japanese games in the Wizardry series a little bit and about the only things I could puzzle out at all were English written in katakana ([ro][n][gu] [su][wa][do] -> long sword), even though I have some idea of what should be what from having played other games in the series in English…

  38. Chris said 16 years ago:

    Hmm do you think it possible you can post the assembly to that piece then or the address of the routine (and a recommendation on a good gba disassembler)? I’d like to try my hand at it if your OK with that.

  39. tibbs said 16 years ago:

    It was possible catch Mole Crickets in Animal Crossing as well… You had to listen to their sound and dig at the correct spot. That’s how I learned of them. Sorry, off topic… ^^;

  40. Steve said 16 years ago:

    When I did some hacking (not on Mother 3), I used WindHex (http://www.romhacking.net/utils/291/), which is a nice hex editor that lets you create tables for Japanese characters. Lots of other hex editors only let you make tables for alphanumeric characters. This can be especially helpful for finding the script.

    I used romjuice (http://www.romhacking.net/utils/234/) to extract the script once I found it and I used Atlas (http://www.romhacking.net/utils/224/) to reinsert the changes. I also used VBA and VBA-SDLH, which were mentioned above.

    I would say that it wouldn’t be too hard for others to try to tackle the bugs in this project with a fresh ROM and if you find something out, just tell Mato what you changed at what addresses to fix something and I bet he could try it out with little difficulty.

  41. Mato said 16 years ago:

    Chris: The byte at 49CB4 (0x0A) is where the width comes from.

    A Fan: What dictionaries are you using? There comes a point when it’s best to use things like the ζ–°ε’Œθ‹±ε€§θΎžε…Έ, εΊƒθΎžθ‹‘, and online references like dictionary.goo.ne.jp and alc.co.jp. If you’re using dictionaries meant for LEARNING the language, then of course you’re not gonna find anything beyond basic stuff πŸ˜›

  42. A Fan said 16 years ago:

    Mato: I don’t know enough Japanese to read Japanese dictionaries, so maybe that’s my problem. If you were to go to Borders and buy practically everything on their shelf that wasn’t total crap, that would more or less describe my current bookshelf πŸ™‚ Oh, and a Firefox extension called Rikai-chan, which helps when I’m trying to puzzle things out.

    I wonder, where’s the best place to pick up ζ–°ε’Œθ‹±ε€§θΎžε…Έ, εΊƒθΎžθ‹‘ (that’s, ummm, Shinwaei Oojiten, Koujien … right?)

    Or will that be like my dictionary of Japanese particles? So many options, now all I have to figure out is *which* of them is the one used in that sentence? πŸ™‚ Yeah, I made the mistake of looking up the particle “na[a]” in that. It’s male speech… sometimes. Or female speech. So I watched more anime, and figured out that uses like “na no” at the end of a sentence (e.g. “na no” must be a female thing and may not carry much meaning beyond “hey! I’m a girl so I talk like one!”, while “na” with nothing after it is almost like “ne” but used by men when “soliciting agreement” or when they sound “wistful” … or something πŸ™‚ Saaaaaa~

    I guess there’s just something funny about accomplishments like finally reading all the kana, only to think, “Let’s see… that puts me on the same level as a preschooler in terms of reading, right? Except for the ones that go to cram school. And somehow, even though I’ve never actually seen one, I’m sure there’s a preschool version of cram school somewhere. Hell, knowing Japan, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had invented infant-sized VR goggles that play educational programs…” Not to mention tidbits like the “You thought you learned the kana? Figured out some of the weird chisai vowels mostly because they were being used to write English words? Fine, so what does a chisai ‘ke’ do? What about the archaic kana that people don’t use but still know? You know they had a different, old ordering too, right?” that pop up every time I think I finally understand something πŸ™‚

    Sorry, think I went on another tangent. I have a tendency to do that πŸ™‚

  43. butt said 16 years ago:

    if energy is a problem I would advise the simulant free but very efective Powerade. I think it was something to do with the sugar and vitamin B6 and B12, it will get you going and keep you going

  44. Jackalope said 16 years ago:

    Well, from what I’m seeing, it looks as if things are coming along quite nicely.

    Just one thing that’s bugging me, though. Kumatora attacks by punching, right? Not slapping, like another Nintendo princess?

    So why isn’t her strongest weapon boxing gloves, or the Iron Fist thingies, or cooler yet, striped orange gloves with claws (tiger paws)? Instead she gets those hopelessly girly Angel Mitts.

    To try to make this a question about the translation, are there other instances where they try to inject proper ladyness into her, or is this some isolated slp of the mind?

    Enjoy your sort-of week-off, by the way.

  45. cant wait to play-_- said 16 years ago:

    cool

  46. Mato said 16 years ago:

    Jackalope: I never considered it, but I think the mere fact that she punches with her fists is pretty in-character with her. The fact her best gloves are Angel Mitts might be a funny poke at the fact she’s supposed to NOT girly, but it might just be a coincidence. I suppose that’s one of those things people could write articles about πŸ˜›