Getting Ever Closer
Like I mentioned earlier in the comments of the previous update, I’m pretty busy at the moment, so nothing too big here. But while I’m busy, Jeffman’s been working really hard on trying to tackle some of the other remaining things on the To-Do List. He rocks big-time 🙂
It sounds like he’s nearly finished with Gray Name Box #6, “Hack it so the name box can print 8-letter player names correctly. It currently barfs and prints crazy stuff in such cases.” And we’ve already started discussing and investigating many of the other stuff that’s left. Hopefully later in the week I’ll get time to get back on the hacking wagon.
Another thing Mr. Jeffman got done was Main Script Hacking #5, “Make scrolly text display fully.” When we were messing with this stuff back last August or September, this was very closely related to the main script problems, but for some reason there are no problems with the “scrolly” text anymore, so we simply upped the total # of letters per line from 22 to 50 and it works just fine, as far as we can tell. So that’s another thing off the list, woohoo!
It lives! It needs rewriting, but it lives! 
From “Deep Thoughts”.
I just *had* to do this for a test 😛
However, Main Script Hacking #6, “Try to make scrolly text not make sprites blink. Not essential, but would be very nice to have.” is still there. What happens is that while the scrolly text is going up, any sprites that are in the background flicker seemingly-randomly and annoyingly. We looked into the problem further, but it’s not sprite priority-related or anything. It looks like it might be our hacks slowing things down ever slightly and getting things out of synch. Maybe reducing the # of letters per line will help fix this, who knows. Or maybe we can try to optimize our VWF stuff. But this really isn’t a very big deal at all, so I’d be okay with leaving it as-is for the final version. But I just wanna look into it a little more first.
Haven’t had time to work on battle text hacking in the past few days, but I’ve been constantly thinking about it and how to improve/fix it. Hopefully it’ll lead to good results. I think the biggest problem is with newlines and especially newlines that scroll existing text up one row. I also need to check out the battle text in all text speeds. Knowing the programmers, they probably coded 3 or 4 different routines, one for each text speed.
Oh yeah, a bug introduced by one of our recent hacks that broke the [CENTER] control code in flyover text was also fixed. So flyover text actually prints on the screen now again 🙂
Well, that’s all for now. Not much of an update, but it looks like we’ll have a lot to cross off the to-do list pretty soon. I know it’s been a long, sucky wait, but just hang in there a little while more. Once most of this remaining hacking is done, we’ll probably be able to give a good ballpark estimate for the patch 🙂
Hello!
Omg Flint is a fish? Why would you tell us such a spoiler!!
Woohoo! You still rule.
Woohoo!
Im not surprised at how much progress is being made… since you guys seem to work so diligently.
This is so awesome… I hope you realize how much you uplift everyone’s spirits when you post an update
That being said, we still understand that the team members have their own lives, so updates that come even once a week is still great 🙂
Good luck with everything,
Jeffman, Mato…. **tips my cap*
nice update =D *cant wait for the translation ^^
I wanna ask a question about the scrolling text (I hope, I don’t give away any spoilers with this).
Is this routine also shared with the text in the last battle?
Just wanted to know because quoth Obi-Wan: “I have a bad feeling about this”. Don’t ask me why.
WOOLOOLOOLOOLOO! Thanks guys! Just 28 things to go!
VKing: No, that’s battle text. My battle text hack isn’t complete yet, so it’s probably still buggy (haven’t tested it yet), but scrolling text is completely separate from battle text and special battle text.
Oh simply delightful. I feel as if I should suplex a morbidly obese cat. Bravo.
I’m willing to offer my services for script editing. Huge Earthbound fan, much experienced at the enterprise with some free time.
Script Edit: I appreciate the offer, but we already have the script editing stuff covered. Maybe overly covered, actually 😛
Ha! Just had a feeling there’d be a new post… This is getting pretty exciting!
You guys rock so much…. This has to be the biggest GBA fan translation project of all time. Technially its the first Earthbound trans. as well so you guys are pioneers in the EB code which sounds like a pain. Im prepping my emulators and checking the game to see which one it looks and runs best on for the big day, been waiting for this since I beat the original when I was a little kid and you guys are pulling out all the stops so all us fans can get their thanks.
If you guys have time you really should fix the thing with scrolly text and flashing sprites, like you said its not a big deal, but it would annoy me greatly.
While reading some posts here I thought of a possible way to fix it actually. But I don’t have the time to test out my idea for a while.
If any of you have ever played original NES games (or even the ROMs) like Dragon Warrior III, you’ll see the sprites constantly flash even when just walking. I wonder if it’s the same type of bug in how it was caused.
UnkownVariable, as Mato already wrote it has nothing to do with too many sprites on screen (that’s what caused the flickering on maybe every NES game ever made).
Hi everyone, glad to see you are coming on so well! I looked at the list of things to do, and remembered reading on your forum before people could not save on an actual DS/GBA, well I couldnt on my M3 lite, but someone on GBATemp said to use GBATA and use the SRAM save patch (Presume it changes the save type) and now it saves fine!!!!
It did acutally save ok before I applied the menu translation patch, if that helps you with anything!
Carry on the great work guys (and girls??)!
…..beautiful….beautiful….
This is totally random but how many music tracks are in the game?
250 in the sound player, but there are many more total. Probably 300-400 total that you hear in the game.
Wez: Are you 100.1% sure it didn’t save on the original Japanese version? You’re absolutely certain? Because the only thing I changed was text data, not how the game loads/saves data. Is it possible the Japanese version didn’t save data but you didn’t realize it because it gave the error message in Japanese?
“Once most of this remaining hacking is done, we’ll probably be able to give a good ballpark estimate for the patch”
*cardiac arrest*
One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him out to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh no,” I said, “Disneyland burned down.”
He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke.
I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.
“not much of an update”!?! your last update was 4 days ago!
oh well, it looks like its coming along great. even though you keep saying it won’t be released before super smash bros brawl, it looks like it’ll be released maybe a couple of weeks afterwards, which isn’t too bad
anyway great job. hopefully this won’t be like the earlier estimates that ended up being horribly off 😛
I dont know if you’ll read this Mato but if you do id love an answer. How many people are working on this project right now?
btw keep up the great work.
Definitely not going to be released weeks after Brawl. There’s still a couple more months at the very least. We’ve never had estimated release dates before. We did have a goal a few months back, but after deciding we weren’t going to make it, we reorganized the project and started the hacks from scratch, this time based around harmony’s work.
Drew: Very actively, me and Jeffman. Which makes sense, since we’re probably the most motivated ones on the team, given that we’re both starmen.net staffers 😉 Kevin’s been messing with some stuff and writing some crazy tools, sblur shows up to answer questions Jeff and I have about things, Chewy recently finished re-translating a bunch of files, and other people pop in from time to time. Once editing gets going, a few more people will be around.
months… hm.. that can be even up to a year, nice. Well the project seems to be going smoothly for you guys, good work =D .
I don’t think it’ll take a year, to be honest 😉
wow… i have been following this translation since welllllll before the team united together. back when the message boards on mother3.org were filled with tons of annoying WHENS IT GOING TO BE DONE!?!?!?!? comments. but i almost cant believe that this is as close as it is to being done. i am a hugeeeeeeeeeeee mother/earthbound fan, i remember playing earthbound on snes back when i was just a wee lad, but playing mother 3 is going to be… AWESOME! I always seem to randomly play an earthbound tune in my head at some point in any day.
btw mato, do you do any of the translating on Shin-Chan. Me and my gf absolutely love that show (she can do a great Shin impression) and i have been telling her that i think you do some of the translating on that show, and i think its cool that if you do do any of the translating (and by god the translators make that show so funny!) that i have been following your work here for a longggggg time.
GREAT JOB GUYS PLEASE KEEP UP THE UNBELIEVABLE WORK, I CANNOT WAIT TO PLAY MOTHER 3 AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
As usual, great job guys! I just beat Mother 3 over the weekend. I knew it would be great, but I wasn’t prepared for how great it was!!! Now I know fully understand why you guys are working so hard! Usually I play an RPG and I’m done with it forever (because it was a diluted experience that lasted 80 fricken hours!), but when I finished Mother 3, I was ready to experience it again. I will no doubt be ready to play it in its full glory whenever you guys are done!
Here’s a completely random question for you:
Are the saves from the menu patched ROM compatible with the ROM that has the latest patch applied? If so, do you think that compatibility will remain with the final patch?
tippity: Actually yeah, I did a bunch of translating for Shin-chan, but keep in mind that I didn’t do the re-writing. I only translated the Japanese into English. Then they hired writers to make it crazier 😉
I was actually involved with the show even more than that, I had to watch like 200 eps/segments of it in a really short time and write up reports on each one, then recommend which ones would best fit Adult Swim. So most of the ones that you see on AS now are the ones I hand-picked a couple years ago.
If you’re interested, there are some more details on it all here and here here and here. Whew.
I don’t work on Shin-chan stuff anymore though, someone else was put in charge of translating it because I’m too busy with One Piece and stuff and uhhhh… this project
Steve: Saves made using the menu patch will technically be compatible with the final patch, but the names of your characters and fav. food and fav. thing will be all screwed up and unreadable garbage. So when the time comes to add that to the FAQ, I’ll answer with “no” or “not really”.
Technically, the menu patch save files are no different from the original game’s save files (they use the same character encoding), so that’d be the same as asking if Japanese save files will work with the final English patch.
Hey Mato, just want to drop by and congratulate you on the work you have done so far! Also I can’t seem to save my game data on Mother 3 even after following the suggestions for Macs. I don’t know what to do and my save states will not load at all after reaching chapter 7. ;(
Deep Thoughts!
Plus Mother 3!
OMGZORZ.
Estimate for the patch= Massive ammounts of heart attacks in the EB community!
Flints not a fish!
I know its sounds pretty lame… but what date are you shooting for release?
Mother Day seems pretty far away?
Are we going to get it before Brawl?
( I know I broke so many rules 😉 )
Hey Mato. How many people are working on this translation?
Mato is pretty much my hero.
Mato……you there?
it’s been so long I think I am now more excited to hear the patch release date over the actual patch now.
“The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw”
^_^ cool!
YAY!
Scrolly text is looking nice 🙂 Is it hard to move it a tiny bit left to even the margins? In a normal program, that’d be a 1-byte change, but this IS Mother 3…
Also, err, just why did they feel they had to make Shin-chan crazier, Mato? I only watched a couple, but I thought it was plenty crazy enough… 🙂
Oh well, I mostly only watch things in Japanese any more, because I can pretend that I’m ‘studying’ that way. Though the vocabulary I pick up probably isn’t that useful in day-to-day living. Unless you know a lot of people that frequently use words like ‘youkai’, ‘miko’, ‘tsundere’, ‘yandere’ … let alone all the Go-specific words I’ve been seeing lately (‘tsumego’, ‘tengen’, … guess I can’t count ‘kifu’ or ‘hoshi’ because they have normal meanings, too).
HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE WORKING ON THE TRANSLATION?
Wow, at this rate not only will you get it done soon, you’ll probably be on to making a new PK Hack for amateurs to play with this.
xD
Aw, I can dream, can’t I?
Also, that’s awesome that you worked on Shin-Chan, Mato!
Are you planning on adding all the unlisted music tracks into the music player?
Uhh, MICHAEL, you might want to chill out. If you’d spend less time yelling and treating this as some kind of chat room, you would’ve seen I already answered your question just a few comments above yours. Here. Reading is good.
Jeff: No, there aren’t any plans to do that. While it probably wouldn’t take more than a day’s worth of work, I like to think Itoi and Shogo Sakai specifically chose those particular songs to be listenable. They also gave names to those 250 songs, but if we add the ability to play the other songs in, the new songs would need names, which would wind up being unofficial and probably lame 😉 So I don’t expect we’ll be doing that. But who knows. It’s too early to say anything for sure.
I actually played EarthBound Zero for NES and am currently replaying EarthBound for the SNES in prep for your guys’ magnificent translation :D!!!! I LERV ME SOME EB!
I have one question though, Since the series is known as EarthBound in america and the last two games have only been playable in english with the titles EarthBound in them, will the translation remain with the title Mother 3 and not EarthBound 2? Sorry if this has been covered already.
A Fan: They probably changed it because as it was, it wouldn’t have appealed to an Adult Swim audience very well. It’s known as being a raunchy, unwholesome show for kids in Japan (parent groups even tried to get it taken off the air I think), so that’s probably why FUNimation was interested in it, but by our standards, it’s nothing at all. It’s like how everyone in the early 90s made a huge fuss over how bad Bart Simpson was for kids to watch, but looking at those old eps now, it’s like, “Oh god, this is so lame, how could people be so uptight back then?” So I guess to appeal to Adult Swim viewers, they turned everything up a notch.
She had kids with a Salmon named Flint. 😮 Now I’ve heard everything. I just hope you’re not preparing for some kind of April Fool’s joke. 😉 The community can’t handle that, haha!
Granfalloon: Yeah, it’s been brought up a number of times. What’s most likely going to happen is it’ll stay MOTHER 3 but maybe have a subtitle of EarthBound 2. That’s what I’m guessing. That or it’ll just stay MOTHER 3. Probably one of those two 😉
There are a number of reasons, some technical, some having to do with story elements, people playing Brawl will look for MOTHER 3 since that’s what’s listed in the game, people looking for the ROM will need to look for the MOTHER 3 Japanese ROM and not the EarthBound 2 Japanese ROM, etc. But most of all, in this case, the title of MOTHER really does have significance.
Heh, people keep replying while I’m replying to other people 😛
Unsavory Maggot: I don’t wanna pull any pranks with this project, so I don’t think there’ll be any April Fools stuff here. The “oh my god such-and-such has been shut down/taken over” April Fools prank is so old and tired out by now, too. I don’t know why people keep doing it.
No kidding. Mother3.org and Zophar’s Domain, along with VGMusic… I’ve seen it everywhere, and let me tell you, it sucks. XD
so mato, wow. you’ve come a long way. you’ve really done so much work recently that you could have an estimate about the patch release? or maybe i read the update wrong…?
this update made my day.
rock on, gentlemen.
damn it, I’m anticipating this as much as I am for Brawl. I swear it makes the days seem 4 times as long as normal. Though, admittedly, when Brawl comes out, i’ll have a lot more to do. KEEPING ON KICKING THIS GAME’S BUTT!
Ok, a question regarding flash cartridge and saving issues: If the save functions work with a flash cartridge and the menu-translation patch, does that guarantee that the game will save with the full and complete translation patch? Or is there some reason that the save function wouldn’t work?
I think you misread that a bit mate!! I put it did save before I applied the patch, it even loaded the original save after I patched it with the SRAM patch, it also worked creating a new save.
Just to make this a bit clearer, before putting the menu translation patch on, it saved, after putting the menu translation patch on it didnt save, then I used GBATA’s SRAM patcher and it saved/loaded ok again!!
TP: If you have problems like I did after running the menu translation patch (I am using a M3 lite) then use GBATA’s SRAM save patch feature and it works fine! I dont know if we will need to do this when the finished patch is out, this may help somehow???
Oh also if you need it Mato I have a link to some stuff that explains in detail what the SRAM save patch does or I could get you a link for GBATA if you havent heard of it?
I will stop taking up so much room on here now!!!!
Woot! Scrolly text doesn’t have the Reconstructed Caribou married to Hinawa anymore! (Divorce?)
I tried looking around the Mother 3 rom for the titlescreen, but as I guessed (but hoping that it wasn’t), it was viewable by the tile viewer program so it must be compressed and… I dunno how to de-compress anything (much less hack, but I can do graphic-edit work).
Meh, whatever; I hope you have enough time to do whatever, Tomato! ::THE WORLD IS COUNTING ON YOU AND JEFFMAN::
The name “Mother” also was very significant to the first game, but that didn’t stop them from calling it Earth Bound (Zero). Not that I’m advocating “Earth Bound 2” because by now a majority of people know that it’s called “Mother 3” anyway.
I heard the name ” Mother ” came from John Lennon’s song ” Mother”
You guys(girls too maybe?) give me hope. You totally made my day. Sorry to be a bother but do you think the full patch will be done by August? Thanks in advance.
Keep up the great work!!!!
Yay! I love hearing these updates. My patience remains strong.
This is kinda unrelated, but around last week, I downloaded “Bahamut Lagoon”, and was surprised to find a smiling tomato staring back at me from the starting screen! Even though that has nothing to do with this site, i’d just like to thank Mato for aiding in the translation of a great game!
This update is sorta like Mato just stickied the translation…just a matter of time now.
brandnizzlebaby: I already have a general idea, but just like how Itoi kept quiet until he was REALLY sure about it, I don’t wanna say anything too soon.
TP: I’m not sure, this flash cart saving thing is really weird, and now made 100x weirder by what Wez said, if that was indeed the case. We’ll find out when the time comes I suppose 😉
Wez: Yeah, can you give me the details and the details of how you fixed it? I’m gonna need to know more about this, lest this become one of the main questions we get bugged about when the time comes.
Moulinoski: I fixed that a couple months ago. I thought I did an update on it. Or maybe not. The weird thing is, it wasn’t caused by any of our assembly hacks. So why it was messing up is still a mystery, but I at least fixed it 😉
Beadly Dastard: It’s cool to hear that people are still downloading and playing Bahamut Lagoon. It’s really scary when I think about that it’s almost been 6 years since that translation was release. I feel so oldddddd 😯
huzzah for progress. Though be careful; with programming you can very easily do something that while moves you step forward for one thing will move you two steps back in another.
ha! you just gave us a (REALLY BIG) estimate on when it will be done: before Feb 18, 2009.
MAN! i’ll probably be dead when all the good video games come out. -_-;
Are you saying you’re gonna die within the next year? 😯 Yikes
> They probably changed it because as it was, it wouldn’t have appealed to an Adult Swim audience very well. It’s known as being a raunchy, unwholesome show for kids in Japan (parent groups even tried to get it taken off the air I think), so that’s probably why FUNimation was interested in it, but by our standards, it’s nothing at all. It’s like how everyone in the early 90s made a huge fuss over how bad Bart Simpson was for kids to watch, but looking at those old eps now, it’s like, “Oh god, this is so lame, how could people be so uptight back then?” So I guess to appeal to Adult Swim viewers, they turned everything up a notch.
Sad thing is, I would be a lot more interested if they turned it DOWN a notch. “Action Bastard” was good for a laugh once. But only once. I much prefer things like Death Note, Naruto (the non-filler), REC, and Dennou Coil. If they want to push boundaries, they could at least show Onegai Teacher.
As for Bahamut Lagoon, I still play that, Mato 🙂 Should we bug you to delve back into what rarely causes screen corruption? 😉 Fortunately, it’s not a playability problem when you have sufficient save states.
Thanks for the reply Mato you’re like my new jesus 🙂 all that stuff makes plenty o’ sense to me, just wanted to hear it from you guys. ROCK ON!
> Are you saying you’re gonna die within the next year? 😯 Yikes
He has terminal Mother 3 deficiency! Get him 20 cc of Mother 2, stat and try to take him to starmen.net to stabilize him before the cravings kick in! 😉
Already, for those who speak english it’s getting closer and closer! WOohoo! Well, take your time, don’t feel like you have to have a guestimate up until you can, but, it sounds like a really exciting time to be in the project! As always, we’re rooting for you 105% and you are making hundreds of thousands of people happy, maybe even more. Thank you so much, guys! keep on rocking!
Greetings from Vladivostok
I have a quick question, but it’s been nagging me for a while.
Is this game’s safeguards as evil as Mother 2’s was? Like how a hacked copy would cause more enemies to appear, and even go as far as to freeze up and delete your saves during the end boss?
A Fan: I couldn’t get that map glitch to happen reliably enough for Dark Force to debug it. I definitely don’t know how to debug/hack SNES games though.
Communitarian!: Whoa? Is that really your nickname you go by? That’s… neat 😛
Optical: People’ve played through the menu patch fine, so I don’t know if there are any such safeguards or not. I also played through the entire game translated a few months ago and didn’t encounter anything. But if something evil IS hiding in there, our testing phase should probably turn it up.
Hey Mato you are the friggin MAN!!! Well like a good amount of other people on here, when you plan on finally releasing the holy grail of a patch I plan on converting it to a flash cart. Problem is, I don’t know how to use one/ don’t know which one to get to play this game on. Anyone able to help me out with this one? If you don’t want to reply here you can shoot me an email at metroidman1118@hotmail.com!
Keep up the good work Jeff and Mato!! You’re estimate of a patch date makes me more excited than EVER!!
Mato: It’s okay. I can’t make it happen with any regularity, either 🙂 You’ll be playing along for hours, then *wham* gibberish screen. Then you load your save state, do the exact same things and… nothing. Probably is a heisenbug, too, that vanishes the minute you look for it 🙂
wow wa wee wa…the suspense is sending me crazy…plus i just finished EB…so….yeah…i wanna play Mother 3 badly so i can see what happens next
yeah i just started playing bahamut lagoon with the patch you made. good work, it’s a fun game.
mato, i just wanted to say how thankful i am that you and the others are doing this project. I don’t play video games anymore, but i remember being an 8 year old boy when earthbound was released. I also remember exploring this website when it was known as earthbound.net, if memory serves, even before the news of earthbound 64 was announced. Maybe this will sound cheesy, or totally insane, but earthbound seriously shaped my personality. It opened my mind up to a world of perverse culture and unique storytelling that I had never experienced before. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the next chapter ever since and i’m perfectly happy to keep waiting until you shape the translation into something exceptional. keep up the good work.
I’m on pins & needles waiting for this. Every other game translation I’ve played was already finished by the time I found out about them.
A question for Mato(though not Mother 3 related): Was the Sexy Beam attack in Dragon Quest VIII a nod to you or the Japanese song that inspired your Sexy Beam page?
Or was it the secret weapon, “Sexy Beam” in Silent Hill 3?
Nice work guys 😀
I hereby and humbly tip my Mr. Baseball Cap to you, O Mighty Unified Translation Team!
First of all, Mato, Jeff, you all rocks XD
Next, I have similar experience to Wez. I haven’t tried the menu patch yet, because I dont really want to spoil the fun until the full release 😉 I once played Mother 3 on my Supercard until some point, though, and yes, I did patched it with GBATA 0.7 so it can save regularly. I’m so blind about hacking ROMs and stuff, so I’m sorry that I cant tell you much about it.
Last but not least… I really think this translation team is WAAAAAAY over COOL! XD
You guys ROCK!
Wow… just wow! I don’t know what I’m looking forward to more: Playing Mother 3 in English or Mato, Jeffman and crew getting some much needed rest when this is over.
Of course it’s the former :D, but imagining the M3 team taking a much-deserved long holiday afterward seems additionally rewarding!
Keep up the good work, guys!
Mato: Basically the game worked fine when I first copied it to my M3, without running the menu translation patch, saved and loaded fine.
Then after installing the menu patch, I could not save (Or load my original save).
Then after running the SRAM save patch in GBATA I could create a new save file and load the original save file (Saved before running the SRAM save patch).
Here is a link to GBATA07a:
http://rapidshare.com/files/93200469/gbata7a-en.zip.html
And here is a link to GBATemp explaining what it actually does in more detail, you may need to register to view it though, if you dont want to let me know and I will copy and paste it to here or a text file on rapidshare, but I would reccomend registering as its a great site with lots of info about flash cards and stuff!
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?act=ST&f=11&t=71392
Hmmmm… I’m thinking of playing EB0.. but honestly, not being able to see the enemies is kind of making me avoid it…
I wonder if it would really be worth it… hmmmmm…..
i sure feel like it…:(