The
MOTHER 3 Fan Translation

Puny Update

17 years ago by Mato

Just a very quick update for now. Between all my work last week + real life stuff, I’m pretty exhausted, and I only got time to do a little hacking last night. So I focused on some of the tinier, easier things.

I went through the list I posted last week to find some easy things to do. First one was how item menus in battle are weird, in that non-equipped items are scooted all the way to the left. They’re not supposed to be that way, if you check the Japanese version.

This problem’s been around since probably before the translation group merge, and I always wondered what caused it, it seemed strange. My hunch (or at least this is how I would do it) was that the game would put the (E) sign there if an item is equipped, otherwise it’d put a blank character, most likely character 0, there to nudge the item names over one column. I tested this by changing the width for character 0 in our custom width table. I gave it a big number and went into a battle. Yup, it moved the names over a lot.

So I just changed the width of character 0 from 0 to 10 and now that works. Very easy. It’s awesome when hunches work out 😀

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Next up, I decided to see if I could tackle the seemingly-simple task of moving the main script menu cursor down 3 pixels. harmony had easily moved around and repositioned the main script text to allow for full 16-pixel high fonts, but this didn’t fix the cursors in Yes/No, etc. menus.

The cursor is a sprite though, and that leads into specific hardware stuff, and I don’t know much about the GBA. Looked at tons of documents to get up to speed. For some reason, we were never able to catch writes/reads to OAM (sprite related) memory. It dawned on me that it was probably because the game wasn’t doing normal read/writes to memory, it was probably using DMA. So I looked up more about DMA and turns out I was right. I bet most accomplished ROM hackers are snickering that I didn’t realize the DMA stuff before, it’s probably like an absolute obvious given that that’s how stuff like that is done 😛

Anyway, after debugging stuff for a while, managed to track down the routine that creates the Y coordinate for the cursor. It does some really crazy math, and I didn’t feel like trying to make sense of it. It eventually winds up equaling 144, though. Luckily, there was a line of code in there that adds 14 to the number, so I just changed it to add 17 (I tried 16 too, but it looked odd). And that pushes it down correctly. Talk about a lot of work just to move a simple sprite 😯

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Also been using no$gba way more for debugging lately. Even though I sent the guy money for a debug version of no$gba a month ago, and after sending him 3 different emails to 3 different addresses, the guy never sent me my stuff 🙁 So I “borrowed” a copy from team members 😛 The program does indeed kick ass and makes things much nicer to work on. Only problem is, it makes me feel stupid, since there’s so, so much stuff 😯

Anyway, here’s a quick pic of it in action. It’s indeed awesome for debugging/development. Just wish his customer service was a bit better 😛

Next, I thought I might try my hand at finally moving all the menu, etc. text up three pixels. It does not look easy 🙁 So I’ll save it for another day. Hopefully one of the more skilled hackers will help out with that at some point. I think maybe next I’ll try to get that last menu VWF working. Now that I’m using no$gba it might be a little easier. We’ll see.

Speaking of other skilled hackers though, I still look at these pictures from harmony’s old project and I’m always in awe. This is what I’ve been slowly trying to build up to. It probably took him just a few days, while it’s taken me weeks to get only halfway there. I bow before his mighty powers. He’s a really busy guy, though, way more than me, even 😛 But we’ll get to where he once was eventually.

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These pictures taunt me so.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Now for napland. Might update tonight or tomorrow too, depending on what else I get done. Just gotta tackle that list one thing at a time.

Posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 1:40 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.