Battle Text Progress
I’m dead tired, but I want to get this update up so I can forget about it 😛
Been working on the battle text system hacking some more. A lot more. Unlike previous hacks, which were small hacks usually meant to replace short snippets of code only, this hack (and a few of the remaining ones) is of a MUCH bigger scale and infinitely more complicated. If you want just an inkling of how complicated, here’s a trace I started to do earlier today but gave up after about 4 hours on it. I’m not trying to brag here or anything — that’s seriously like only one TINY bit of the whole battle text system, I’d say maybe just 1/50th of it. Hacking this thing SUCKS. Even Exophase politely declined my request for him to take a stab at this, citing something like, “No way am I touching that code.” He’s definitely a smart man 😛
Anyway, all that whining out of the way, I did make decent progress with the battle text stuff.
(more possibly boring blah-blah technical talk in here, beware)
First, I finally managed to squash a few display bugs and glitches here and there, which I’m glad are finally gone. Also, because we’re not using the game’s original grid junk anymore, we had to disable the code that implemented newlines and newline scrolling when text is on the bottom line. Getting this to work was pretty easy in theory, just copy the graphic data from row 2 to row 1, clear out row 2, and then print the new stuff in row 2. Then repeat if necessary. Having to implement this was another thing altogether, but it was more of an interesting task than a hard one. I got it working without much trouble, except now I’m getting to the point of complexity that different emulators now emulate my bugs differently, and sometimes these bugs were caused by the code assembler and not me. Is that a rite of passage, I wonder?
Anyways, all this adds up to a buttload of work done, though it may not be all that evident, since it works how you’d expect it to 😛
Of course, the [WAIT] control code issues from last time are still present, and hours upon hours of work later, it’s still kind of unclear why text doesn’t print after [WAIT] codes, except for the final letter. Everything is being processed correctly, the letters just aren’t printing for some reason. Yet, when I make the game ignore the “wait for user to press a button” routine (or a routine that eventually calls that routine) then the text works exactly as it should. It’s crazy. And before you say, “Then go check the routine you disabled!”, I’ll refer you to that trace file above 😉 The dumb thing is that this routine even gets called elsewhere even when there’s NOT a control code being parsed currently. It gets called in many places, and man that routine goes pretty deep, I only went a few levels in. I’m not sure if any of this makes any sense to people, but oh well.
I threw together a video real quick showing the latest battle text work, and how [WAIT] codes make following text not print, while disabling the wait loop thingy makes things work fine. I put the text speed on slow so it’d be more readable.
I’ve tried following various status flags in the structs that seem to relate to whether a glyph should print or not, but these get written/read/modified 20+ times per pass, and get written/read/modified depending on other status flags, which seem to maybe be related to yet other flags. WTF. But there’s no choice but to keep working at it, so I’ll keep tracing and testing and stuff. Just need to get this control code stuff working and then I can move on to the “do you want to drop an item” battle messages, and then we can finally cross out this vile entry on the to-do list… only to have to redo this all for the main script text, and two other, different types of battle text windows. But man I wish someone would swoop in from out of nowhere and hack all this stuff like it was nothing…
I think what you guys are doing is great even though it may be a pain… Unfortunately, you’re not going to get the fuzzy pickle camera guy to come hack for you.
First coment?
Mato, we love ya and it’s good to hear of this progress (from what I understand), but..
Get some rest, man!
Always enjoy reading your progress updates. Keep up the good work, we really appreciate your dedication.
Mato dug around in the trash can.
Let’s see here, there’s an Awesomeness Capsule inside!
Mato took it.
Mato took out the Awesomeness Capsule and ate it.
Mato’s awesomeness went up by 9,000 points!
Keep up the good work! I can smell the end of the tunnel! (It smells like sunlight and Duster)
This code sounds like it SUCKS. I’m dating a programmer so I understand first hand how annoying and hard this must be. 😛
This is quite the adventure. Has anyone jumped from the sky to say “FUZZY PICKLES” and take pictures of your accomplishments?? If not, someone should. 🙂
I can’t imagine how frustrating all that ASM must be! I took an assembly language class last semester and it was tough enough to read when you started out know what was going on. You’re all doing a great job =D Keep at it!
Oh god! I see now how complicated it is!
I dont even understand these numbers! O_O
Thanks for showing us how complicated it is! :O
Keep it up Mato 😀
You have my sympathy, my encouragement, my donuts, and my Dirty Socks.
The sympathy is for the headaches caused by the Code. I had the option of taking C++ in college, but passed for A+ and other things.
The encouragement is to keep going. I’ve been running a game system I made myself for eight years. It’s pen-and-paper-type stuff, but even THAT has its share of pain – I can only begin to imagine what you’re going through, but I know how hearing a few kinds words can make a difference. You have so many people behind you, all of us confident in your victory, and with the patience to wait for it, no matter how long it takes.
The donuts are for energy. Little circles of sweetened dough, excellent with coffee. Sorry, I ran out of Apples.
The Dirty Socks are for lashing at the BT Code and make it stop moving! I’m sure even one turn will help out somehow.. besides.. I gotta get rid of my dirty laundry some way.. who knew they made great battle items? Heh.
Best Regards,
K. Kyle & the CYStH Staff
Eeesh! Thats nervous breakdown material right there mushy. Keep fighting the good fight mate and thanks.
Amazing stuff Tomato. Loved the video, even though the whole [wait] business is so weird. Keep up the good work.
I’m just guessing here but could the mistake be in the code for “press button to print next text”?
Or maybe in the [WAIT] command code itself?
I’m no hacker or coder myself (if so I would have gladly tried to help) but I just wanted to…well, point things out that may eventually useful even to the tiniest bit.
…or something like this.
Woohooo!! xD
This update is pretty awesome, to say the least. I’ve always wanted to check out the code that’s been being hacked, cause the technical side of things always interests me.
Jesus christ, though, that code looks ridiculous. I have to applaud you guys for making it this far as it is without properly defenestrating your computers out a window.
Man, Mato. Seems like a total pain in the ass.
This is just wild speculation, so feel free to ignore. I tried to look at the trace log, but it’s pretty meaningless to me since I don’t know what I’m looking at. 🙂
It seems odd that the last character is being printed, even with the VWF in play. There’s not even a remnant of the 2nd to last character being printed in its tile? Is the last character being spaced out with this phantom spacing in mind?
When the new 3rd line of text is being printed in memory, is it possible that the game is blanking out that space right before you call for the line to be printed? Maybe you can try forcing it to print what it has before it reaches that WAIT command. Like the old programmer technique of adding in print statements every other line to see where a program is breaking.
Or if not being blanked out, maybe the last tile is overwriting each letter you’re trying to print, while still moving out to the right because of the VWF’s spacing routine. So you just end up with whatever the last character is. This is probably unlikely though, since the line still shows up just by removing the WAIT command.
Maybe by going through the WAIT routine, it passes by some code that’s different from the built-in newline routine. This code ends up wiping out the new text you want to print, with the exception of the last character. Maybe when you’re detecting the last character in a line, you’re forcing it to print on screen?
Anyway, just hang in there, Tomato. We’re rooting for all you guys. 🙂
(From the code dump) “goto the address in r1 and destroy brain cells in massive quantities”
That has to be the greatest comment I have ever seen in my whole life. I couldn’t stop laughing for 2 minutes !
Mato, I have been following your progress by going 5-6 times each day on the website and scrolling through the comments to see if you published a mini-update, and I must say, although you have heard it many times : Thank you so much. Thank you for giving us so much information on the hacking process, to kindly reply to almost every inquiry in the comments section, even to harsh comments.
Your devotion (and Jeffman, and others…) to bring us this game in English represents a massive amount of time in which you could have done stuff for yourself, and I have to admire your altruism, since you can play the japanese game with no problem and you will not profit from your hard work.
I only put 2 comments so far in these threads, and I would say to you that for every nice comment you read, there are probably a hundred more people who think the same thing. I, for one, am amazed to see all this enthusiasm regarding this project, and I wish you the best of luck with this code which is obviously the work of a Demon Godess.
Thank you, Mato ! And please forgive my somewhat bad english, as it is not my native language. But let me tell you that you have a cult of followers here in Quebec, Canada 🙂
Anon: No, it’s not blanking out the space (that was my initial guess last week, too), it’s simply not going to the “print the tile” function in those cases. The spacing all works right because my VWF code still works correctly, just at some point after a [WAIT] code the game thinks it’s not supposed to be printing glyph struct #0. And the check to see if it should print or not is based on a flag in the struct, but it gets shuffled around and changed so much that it makes no sense. I tried manually changing it, but still no luck. I might just try to manually change it later on in the code, but I have only 0.1% confidence that’ll make a difference. The design of this whole text routine is so crazy.
I bought a copy of Mother 3 for love of the series. I bought a flash card for GBA games so I can play translated Mother 3 on actual hardware. Just waiting on you now :D.
Really though, keep up the good work! I have been excited for the projects release for a long time and still check this blog most everyday!
Your update makes me explode with gunpowder, Tomato.
Well for the wait thing… leave it like it is… if people can’t read fast enough that’s their problem!!! 😀
(of course i’m kidding)
It’s good to know that you’re all doing a real intentionate work. Grats.
Hmm, so it only prints the LAST letter, right?
Why not change your hack so that, instead of using box 0, it uses the box for the LAST letter on the line to print everything?
It *might* be just crazy enough to work… right? 🙂
That last letter is still box #0 though 😯
I hated hitting the A button 10 times through the whole level up routine anyways– just make the text fly by. 8)
no, wait, does it screw up normal battle, too? Meaning I’ll have to like, read at high speed? D:
Well, damn, dude. You’re going to make trace statements until the cows come home… why not work in reverse, from opposite ends of the routines? Maybe you’re already doing that– I should make that suggestion to myself, anyways 8)
I’m shocked that some other coders are intimidated by the code on this rpoject. I’m honored that you’d step forth and do it when “No other coder would” (Excluding possibly JeffMan).
Wow. That’s just… odd.
I wonder if anyone from nintendo reads this blog and knows how to fix this problem. Probably not i guess.
Try this.
I think the [WAIT] routine uses the last letter box as a flag, maybe he puts there some non-printable character. So the “wait-for-button-press” routine, that is called everywhere, verifies this last box, then if this last has some flag he re-enables the printing on the remaining boxes.
According to the “quality” of the programming that you have said , maybe they’re doing something this lame…I did this myself when I started programming, put a flag on a textbox(shame on me)
This last box must be used for something else.
Sorry my bad english.
Just start showering and don’t stop until you figure it out. Easy!
Eat gunpowder.
Astounding progress!
I dislike the warning note at the leave a reply thing. It looks like an FBI warning, and I am sick of seeing those things on movies all the time. Thanks for the update though. Can you update us on what other people have been doing rather than just what you’re doing (that is if you know what they’ve been doing).
Wow, those routines look monstrous. The already-great respect I had for the hacking god Tomato just doubled, or more.
Now, I’m not a hacker and I don’t claim to be one. I was reading through the posts and in the last one you detailed that you added a function to replace the grid system. You said that inputted the characters in the x,y plane before displaying the next character. However, the reason that the last letter is displayed and not the others could be that your function isn’t being used for the last letter.
Or maybe not? Who knows.
And that, as they say, is that.
is this blog made with wordpress
…yes, it’s made with wordpress. now… my suggestion? try to find a way to get the game to automatically enable and disable the wait codes depending on where it is in the game. probably impossible, but just my two cents. but then, I’m not a coder, and I understand that you have space limits. Ness might have it right though with the flags in text boxes using unprintable characters. That sounds plausible. But then, as I said, I’m not a coder and have no idea what I’m saying. At all.
Thanks alot for your work.. I’ve been following your’ translation for atleast a year and am proud to’ve witnessed the undertaking take place.. it means alot
I LOVE YOU :>
When frustration kicks in, just remind yourself what the battles USED to look like, and how far you’ve come. You got everyone’s moral support! WOOT AND YAY!
Keep at it, man! There may be a lot of problems still, but from the outside vantage point, it’s really starting to look good!
What interests me is how it suddenly prints the ” !” line. It appears that the game attempts to write the 3rd following line too fast with the [wait] code. Maybe the [wait] code is conflicting with the “print faster” function; holding a button down to speed up the print. Have you attempted to hold the A, L or R buttons without the [wait] code? This is all just a hunch, of course. Another possibility is that the [wait] code calls for a late function which may skip the “print timer”; if the “print timer” is set to a value, presumably 0, any references to print will automatically be skipped until the final letter. Whereas it could go “3, print, 2, print, 1, print, 0, print, [wait]” and so on and so forth; in other words, the “print timer” isn’t being reset by the [wait] code. There could be a typo, or maybe you accidentally had the game refer to the wrong code after [wait]. It’s just an idea… afterall, my project is just as ugly on the inside. That’s why I’m rebuilding it from scratch, documenting the meaning of every code. Modifying old scripts you don’t even recognize anymore, which tend to resemble dog barf is like trying to have a conversation with a rock. As Smokey used to say: only you can teach dog barf new tricks.
You guys have the patience of saints. That grease fire they call a battle routine makes as much sense as…a thing that doesn’t make much sense.
Thanks ^_^
Lol
Good night… that’s alotta ASM.
Gah! I want to help you so much, Tomato! But I’m not even a script kiddy…
In any case, press on!
Maybe a certain number of text boxes need to be filled before the game will allow the WAIT code to execute correctly. That would be the stupidest thing in the world to put into the code, but it would not surprise me if that were the case. And since you’re only using one text box (number 0), that would explain it.
Hey Mato:
Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I gathered from above, it seems that the battle text works correctly if the ‘wait for user to press a button’ subroutine is not called, and you cannot fix this because you cannot possibly find all the instances where the subroutine gets called.
If what I assume is correct, then why not just modify the subroutine so that it does nothing, just make a return statement as soon as you enter the subroutine.
Also it seems that ARM syntax is very similar to MIPS-32 which I am quite familiar with. Maybe I could possibly help you with the hacking?
Anyways let me know.
Vagn
@Vagn:
The issue isn’t that it works when its disabled, its that it DOSN’T when it is. The waiting makes reading much easier in places.
Um, maybe you could design a flag to go at the beginning of the battles specific routine that branches the code to the finish. It wouldn’t hurt the wait routine itself, just redirect it out of the part you want untouched.
Or maybe I’m not the greatest assembly/C programmer.
Hmm… Maybe Exophase is smart but at least you’re brave, Tomato! That trace… there were 8-bit stuff there in Hexadecimal or what? @_@ I really hope I don’t need to learn to “read” in hexadecimal for programming…
Hey Mato,
I know everyone’s giving their 2 cents… I hope its not getting annoying.. I hope you’re just sitting back and trying to get what you can from it, as opposed to being like “jeeze im working so hard at this for hours and hours, and these people think that they can just glance at it and have a winning suggestion”
in any case, here’s my 2 cents:
I downloaded the video in .flv format and opened it up with flash and looked at how it prints stuff, frame by frame…
in the case where it prints only the “!”, it treats all the text before it as if it were just 1 letter, and then it prints the “!” as if it were the second letter
Also, with the caribou battle.. when you ignore the [WAIT] command.. when it goes to print the new line.. it prints a blank line first, and Then the first letter is printed….as if to say “insert the blank line and then put this letter on that line”….. whereas with everything else (in the level-up new line prints), the first letter is printed AS the new line’s space appear.. so instead of starting with just a blank line, it starts with the first letter included in that blank line.. as if to say “when the new line appears, have this letter already printed in it”
Also, when flint levels-up, with the [WAIT] command, it erases (moves it up?) the line “Flint went up to Level 8!” as it tries to print the new line.. but without the [WAIT] command, it leaves that line there, then prints the new line below it
oh, and as it erases “Flint went up to Level 8!” and tries to print the new line, there is evidence that the new line’s first letter is trying to be printed AS that new line’s space appear
I hope by reading all of this, your memory is refreshed as to what you programed the game to do.. and hopefully that may stimulate a different thought which may lead to the solution
if not.. then i just hope that i haven’t pissed you off
and one last thing.. there’s also this thing that appears at the end: http://img178.imageshack.us/my.php?image=thingqq9.jpg
hey Mato you always say (technical crap ahead) but with the way you explain it…i can understand it quite wellso no worries..also as far as that battle goes just thin of it as a boss in a video game use PSI crazy mato hacks or maybe one of jeffmans inventions and you’ll be ok…also is the crazy camera man in M3 (is this count as a spoiler)
Yo Mato, maybe you should ask the guys at Absolute Zero. They just hacked and translated the PS1 edition of Tales of Phantasia. The whole project took like 6 months. The Tales-Cless translation has been going on for 8 years and it’s still not finished. Maybe they could shed some light on this problem or help out? They seem like pretty experienced hackers. http://zettaizero.wordpress.com/
well..great work man
you are the bravest hacker ever (good hacker btw)
well as talk dont make me die….it seems like that wait stuff just put something over the text…as if the text was backgrounded and then only parts of the letter come up….like a 2nd text box in same collor as its bottom…
anything just ignore that man…Keep the good work
GL
@Rod.:
I watched the movie and noticed that too. I had to boot up the game to check something, and it seems that whenever the game is printing a blank space, it just skips it.
So in that example of Flint leveling up, it gets pushed off so fast because the game is actually printing a blank line (which goes by super-fast), followed by an almost blank line (with the mysterious last character and the [WAIT] arrow).
The game is basically rushing ahead until it finds something it can print.
I wonder why the first line is always completely blank though, but the 2nd line at least gets to keep its last character?
Tomato, does it show the last character on any line that has a [WAIT] command? So far, it looks like [WAIT] just scraps everything between it and the next [WAIT], save for whatever character precedes it.
“answer: eat gunpowder”
yes.
Haha, expohase makes me laugh. Regardless of which, awesome job guys. Thanks for everything so much…
Because I think you guys will need it, especially during this part of hacking–
I like how you explain the hacking process a bit. It’s pretty interesting to read, even if I don’t know a single thing about it. Good luck with the project.
awesome work, every update the game is looking better and better. On behalf of myself and the people I keep informed about the project cause they’re to lazy, thank you!
Hey Mato,
.
.
.
.
Take a breather 😉
I know I don’t know anything about this coding process but would it be possible to re-write the battle text script so that it alone calls a new, let’s say, [BATTLEWAIT] script that you write yourself. Maybe if you attempt to make your own wait script and just leave all other wait script calls that do work in place while only replacing the ones that don’t will be a suitable work-around.
You are soooooo close! It looks awesome and i check every day for an update. Good luck combing threw code that looks to me like a calculator barfed into a .txt file.
keep up the great work!!!!!
Hiya! First of all, I have to join everyone here in saying thanks for all your hard work. You’ve given hope to what would otherwise be the most vain of longings.
Who am I to offer advice? I must also hope it doesn’t irritate you, given how little I know about this kind of thing. But I’m interested in your description of how text is supposed to scroll down–copy line two to line one, delete line two and print new text there. It seems like the copying or deleting of the second line interferes with whatever’s supposed to signal the wait command. Could it be that when line two is deleted, it causes a problem in the way the game reads the command?
Also, I’m looking really closely and I see something interesting. When your text scrolls and the line “Smells weak against lightning” is copied to the above line, there’s a split second in which the text can still be read on the line below. The text is very, very faint, but it’s still present in a kind of grayed-out state. Then, your next line (the incompletely printed one) appears, the exclamation point is visible, and the shadow text disappears in the instant the exclamation point is there. Don’t know if this is how it is supposed to work, but it seemed kinda strange to me.
I don’t imagine I’ll be really helpful, so please forgive me for wanting to be. Keep up the good work! I have nothing but admiration for you. 🙂
EDIT: I looked closer, and I see that the “shadow text” does not fully display the line which was there before. Instead, it prints something completely different and somewhat jumbled. I can definitely see an exclamation point in a place where it never printed. I almost wonder if this line of shadow text is what you actually want to print there, though it seems shortened or jumbled, or something. On a side note, the shadow text also appears in the version without the wait commands, at the end when the text is deleted after scrolling successfully. I don’t know if this is important or not, but it’s an observation. Anyone else following these updates care to take a look?
Wow. How do we go from crazed fans of the series who don’t have half of a clue what you guys are doing (including myself :-/) to a bunch of people who know hacking and can actually help? That rocks. I wish I knew more.
So, I finally lost my patience with you and downloaded the menu patch. I can say that the menu patch plus the constant updates of the progress you have made have gotten me even MORE excited for the final translation. I was afraid of playing the patch, because I thought it would spoil the final translation, but it didn’t! 😯
You rock and keep it up!
Once you guys are done with this, please do not bother with Mother 1+2. I went and downloaded it, and was severely disappointed with it compared to Earthbound. The sound is completely off from the original. You’d think it would’ve improved, but no. :-/
Anyway, you have our full support! If you’d like a Mac tester, I’m here. 😉
Just kidding. I’m not a rule-breaker… all the time. Ha.
First, whoa, didn’t expect people to try to offer help this way 😯 It’s awesome that you guys wanna help, sadly the problem’s a lot more complicated and different than it looks on the outside. I’ve already spent hours and hours following this dumb battle system, and it’s really not set up like you might expect 🙁 Also, trying to completely ignore the game’s original control code stuff and redoing it all myself isn’t an option — there are lots of other control codes that get parsed here besides [BREAK], [WAIT], and [END]. Bleh, it’s all complicated. Too bad this game can’t hack itself, that’d be cool. Maybe I’ll invent such a game someday.
I did get an hour or so today to trace some more, and I found some good key points to try to do stuff with.
———–
Fultos: I thought the same thing myself many a time, but on Fast text speed it really does speed by really fast.
SoreThumb: As you can see, when I had [WAIT]s disabled, that also disabled the cursor pauses at [END] codes too. So text pretty much flies by non-stop and then disappears.
Dr. Meat: Heh, tis a good idea. I’ll probably create a drought before figuring out the solution though 😉
Hamtaroman: Like I’ve mentioned before, the project is pretty much just me and Jeffman now, until the editing phase. Jeffman’s been busy with stuff these past few days, but when he gets the chance he helps out with little things we’ve overlooked/just now noticed. Dumb little things like fixing alignment of text we never saw before, etc. Stuff that takes only a few minutes each.
Negi: Check some updates from back in December. Gemini had actually offered to help out, but he got pretty busy with his own stuff and I actually haven’t seen him around much on RHDN much at all lately. So it’s just me and Jeffman, sadly. The level of complexity of the remaining hacks is pretty high too, so it’d be hard to find anyone with time + with the right skills + enough motivation at this point 😐
I would like to repeat what kalbtrombone just said: any plans for translating mother1+2 should be forgotten… that game was pretty unfaithful to the originals, and disappointing. Not that there were any plans of translating it, but even so, I’m just saying that Mother 3 translation is probably enough stress on you guys as it is…
..although…. I secretly can’t WAIT for your MOTHER special edition hack of earthbound… that is going to be awesome. There really, really needs to be more QUALITY hacks of EB! I mean, you guys didn’t make pkhack for no reason, right?
I’m rambling. Go Mother 3 translation, GO!
Keep it up guys!!! You rule!!!! I can’t wait for this to come out, you guys are my heroes!!!
Why is the code for this game just as ridiculous as the game itself
Hey, this game is awesome, not ridiculous
The programmers must have thought: “Hey, let’s make it all whacky Itoi-style, it’ll rock!”
Wait codes aren’t necessary if everyone can learn how to just read really, really fast.
There. Problem solved! *Superhero pose!* Are there any other problems that I can help solve?
^__^ Just kidding of course (or am I?). Best of luck to you, Mato. We’re all cheering you on.
Once again Mato, you are amazing. I appreciate your hard work greatly!
So, taking out the WAIT command fixes everything? Why the hell…?
Aren’t most WAIT commands just there to force user input? I don’t get why it’d be different in your version than in the original japanese version, unless it counts to decide when to wait and the text editting has shifted some values…
Irregardless, it shouldn’t be cutting that stuff off no matter how you slice it. Good luck… I have no idea what you’re doing.
It smells like this hack is driving Mato insane!
The complexity of this hack/translation continues to blow me away!
I’m just marking my place so I will be able to see how much I haven’t read the next time I come here.
Great work! It’s looking part-way decent. Great progress!
Hmmm… even so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the code even attempted anything the least bit simialar to what we’ve thought. I do have one last idea. The [wait] code fails to disable “okay, next line” and “okay, next letter” sequences when activated, and simply disables the print function, save for the last letter; so it’s already at the last letter of the next line and is just waiting for user to press A/L/R to print it. That’s just about the most logical idea I can think of in layman’s terms. If nothing else, I’ll try looking (*really* looking, as opposed to glancing) at the dump you linked above. Perhaps I may offer a more educated guess after studying this lady’s anatomy. (No promises. I’m just a novice, not a know-it-all and I don’t claim to know everything, so don’t go getting excited on me.) Of course, I see alot of us thinking we have great ideas, and they are great ideas, but we should all keep in mind that Tomato is the one who has any kind of grasp on the project. What we see on the outside is not as easy as the inside. It’s like a newborn’s guess at the human anatomy; sure, there may be a whole lot of “pockets” and “bags” for air, food and fluid, but what makes them work? Well, that’s why we have scientists like Tomato; to dissect and analyze Mother 3’s “brain”, which truly is a complicated organ. Struggle as Mother 3 may, I know it won’t shake him. You know what you doing! Take off every ‘M8O’! For great justice! 😀
I {heart} the efforts of Mato and crew. I will be sure to buy a copy of Mother 3 before taking advantage of their lovely translation.
You can do it! Keep up the great work! Also, look around NessStar3000’s youtube profile. He’s working on a Mother fangame, He might help.
Someone is eating there garlic and getting lots of exercise! Keep up the great work! We are behind you 100%!
Dissect Mother 3’s brain? I wonder if it works the same way as Mother Brain: shoot lots of missiles at it until it does what you want…
Then again, we don’t really WANT the game to blow up, so…
Hey, I wanted to put a link to your site on my webpage, I have a lot of passion for what you guys are doing and I wish Nintendo would pull their heads out of their….
Well…
At least you are here!
Like i said, please email me a link for your banner or something I can put up to help you get some traffic!
My deepest fear is that this project will be deserted, its based on nothing but irrational fears…
So please lemme do my part in keeping this alive!
This will never die…
I think I got it 😯 Not sure if it causes any other bugs though, but it looks nice and acts nice 😀 The change was a mere simple byte, changing a 2 to a 0. Gotta love hacking, huh?
I’ll do some more testing to make sure everything else works good. But woo!
Hell yes. Nice work. Good job, old boy. Smashing. Absolutely corking.
Heh, right now it gets stuck in an infinite loop at You Won. Looks like I’ll have to write some more code for this, bleh.
OK, the You Won problem was something else that we don’t need, so I took that out. Everything looks and acts really nice. The only problem now is a cosmetic thing (as seen here, after all the Level Up text) that I already fixed but it showed up again. So bleh at annoying little stuff. This won’t be hard, it’s just annoying 😐
AWESOME!
You are a genius my friend!
Hello. I have just recently gotten my hands on the roms of earthbound (both regular and zero) and after playing them, I was HOOKED. So naturally, when I heard that a 3rd earthbound (or mother) was made and saw some clips of the story (nothing super spoilerly, of course) I could easily tell It was going to be my favorite… if it had only been released in U.S.A. Then I found out about you guys. You are my gaming GODS. THANK YOU. I downloaded a GBA emulator and hunted down a mother 3 rom just for this. I don’t care if you can’t release this before brawl, the sheer fact that it’s being done is awesomeness enough. If I had any experince in reprogramming I’d help you in a heartbeat. god bless you people.
Does that mean the whole battle routine is almost done?
The game is stupid and it also erases text stupidly, hence the problem above. So I did things the manly way and made my hack wipe everything in the text area clean with 0s. Works like a charm 😉
This thing still turns up very rarely, though. Not sure what the deal is, looks like it’s trying to print extra crap but dunno why. Bleh.
And I still gotta write that auto word wrap thing, which should be pretty easy, but by this point I’m pretty worn down. Maybe I’ll get it done tonight anyway though, not sure.
In all, this is a pretty huge step forward now 😀
Way to go Mato; one step closer
Alright Tomato!
… I’ll admit it though. I broke down and played the game with a couple translation guides and the menu patch. I just didn’t want to be spoiled by Brawl. Beat it yesterday, but I’m still really eager to experience it again. This time in full, in a language I can understand. Thanks for all the work you and the team are doing for us complete strangers! The menu patch was a great help.
YOU WON !
Tomato = da man! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
Man I’ve been waiting so long to play MOTHER3 in English that it’s kind of weird how close it seems now.
This is ridiculous but true: I have a weird paranoid fear that I’ll get hit by a bus and die or something and 12 years of waiting for the game will be wasted, haha. Normally I wouldn’t be so concerned about a game, but after such a long time it’s like, “I AM going to play this game, damn it.”
Changing a 2 to a 0… geez, that’s crazy! XD I guess you saved me the trouble of digging through that script dump like crazy. Awesome work man, I knew you could do it! 😀
I was wondering if you were going to change anything else akin to Nintendo of America circa the era of EarthBound, just as you mentioned in your Mother 2 vs. EarthBound blog/faq/thingy. Alot of that stuff is quite interesting, I must admit. 😮 I wonder, if Nintendo did localize Mother 3, if they would’ve changed “that band” like they changed the Blues Broth… er, I mean the Runaway Five. The game does come across alot stronger than its predecessor. I mean, I was glad they kept the “Don’t go to heaven!” line intact in EarthBound, because that’s good stuff right there!
Unsavory Maggot: Actually, my mistake, it was a 3, not a 2.
Anyway, not sure what you mean with your question. We’re not gonna censor things out or try to avoid copyright things if that’s what you mean. My goal is to keep it faithful to the original, so there won’t be all kinds of random humor added in from out of nowhere, and translation-wise I’m obviously going to try to keep the text from not saying less than the original but not more than the original, too. If you’ve been following my M2 and EB comparison site lately, you’ll see places where they screwed up and forgot to mention stuff or said stuff that wasn’t in the original (whether accidentally or not).
I’ll probably make another short video of a full battle with an enemy to show the latest improvements (get a level up + an item at the end), but should I use the smelly old mole again as usual or do you guys got a preference?
Something from Chap. 1 would be best since I’ve purposely been trying not to show off too many enemies, aside from what Itoi showed in his Welcome to MOTHER 3 World site and some very early ones. Or should I just fight a Cattlesnake and get my butt kicked? 😛
Anyway, that silly question aside, I looked again at some of the special text windows that appear later in the game. Sadly, they’re still completely untouched by any of my hacks. But I did get to see how the normal battle routine handles control codes like [PAUSE]s, which I hadn’t dared look at before. I think they might still be working fine. I say “think” because they took a whole lot longer than I thought they would, but it’s looking like that’s just because battle.txt needs to be updated to be formatted better, so whew.
It’s stressy when there’s 80 problems waiting right behind the one you just fixed 😉 I might put off those extra battle routines until later since they seem to be completely separated anyway.
Mato…from someone just learning some basic C++ in college right now, seeing this makes me…unbelievably respectful of you.
Keep at it, man. You have my support.
~The Third Strongest BlogCommenter
Someone mentioned something about Mother1 Remake- I’m also holding my breath out for that one. 😛
Actually… Maybe I’ll come out and make a Super Robot Earthbound hack… 😛 Maybe not, hacking is not fun (to me)- even with utilities and stuff.
Okay, got the problem below fixed.
It was pretty easy, I just had to comment out a line that was basically the initial crux of the whole hack and prayed for the best. And it all works still, thanks to a bunch of other things I did elsewhere. Very cool how now the hack is simplifying itself now that stuff is figured out 🙂
Now I’ll test a little more and then do the auto word wrap.
Mato you are a one man machine and its really remarkable that you are doing so much work all by yourself in a huge project like this without much rest.I saw that crazy hacking code you posted and it looks very scary that even Exophase declined to work on it but Mato dont worry too much I know you can do all that by yourself with time.Hopefully some experience hacker can come in and help you out with all this hard hacking work soon.
You are the coolness.
I’m dying to play Mother 3. To help fill the void, I’ve been playing Earthbound 0. Fun game, but Ninten ain’t nearly as cute as Lucas.
Even though I’ve only commented once before, I’ve been following this with almost religious devotion. It’s awesome to hear it’s coming together for you now. Thanks yet again for all your hard work.
I’ve been watching this blog religiously for months now, but I have to stop lurking just to say that you don’t give yourself enough credit as a hacker Mato. You are doing one hell of an amazing job!
Thanks for all your hard work.
I don’t know too much about ASM programming, but is it possible that the problem with the [WAIT] command could somehow be related to it writing spaces over the last line to clear it or something?
The wait problem was fixed, Ikari. On to bigger, better things. 🙂
Mato gained 3750 Exp.
Level Up! 😀
By the end of this hacking, Tomato and Jeffman are going to be as respected in the romhacking community as any of the other hacking gurus. Good job god, word up!
I remember when you said you weren’t a hacker (rom-wise that is). But look at you now! You have truly gone beyond your previous self to get this far in the project! I am so proud of you Mato. Wish I could call you my own son. You are a very wise man, and I know wherever you go after this project, you will only find happiness. I’m sure I can say that the entire EB community will love you forever. I salute you Mato and JeffMan. Best of luck on the project and everything beyond. Now get back to work!!! 😀
You don’t need another person telling you how awesome you are and informing you how much they read and follow this translation, but here it is anyways.
Thank you so much.
You are so awesome Mato. D: Looking at all that gibberish made me head ‘asplode. @__@
Take a break, you’ve more than deserved it.
Mato, you really leveled up man. 🙂
i knew you’d figure it out.. but i had expected that to be some time in the next 4 days or so…
Man.. I bet you’d be sleeping sooo peacefully for the next couple days huh?
Wow, I just gotta say that code is intimidating. I’ve worked with assembly quite a bit in the past (Mostly SPARC) but I dont think I would have the patience to sit through and figure all that out, I gave up trying to follow it after a while as some of the things done in the made no sense whatsoever. Also, I bet this would be a lot easier if you could see the labels instead of the address where to branch to.
Good luck with the rest of the hacking.