Menu Text Mania
Been a few days since the last update, but I often post mini-updates in the comments. The last few days have seen a LOT of stuff getting done, but most of it is stuff that can’t be seen in screenshots or the like.
Probably the biggest stuff that’s happened is that I’ve been reorganizing stuff in the ROM and simplifying things a lot more. This not only fixes stuff on the to-do list, but will also make hacking the rest of the stuff a little easier and probably mean slightly less time fixing bugs down the road. Also gave a few of our tools some good upgrades.
I still have some more organizing stuff to do, but one of the main benefits of all this is that menu message text now works fully 😀
The game uses completely different routines for text that’s side-by-side in the same exact block, it’s really bizarre. So for a while, some menu text messages worked, while others didn’t. Also, control codes that inserted names of stuff worked in some cases but not others. But our latest work has fixed all that in one fell swoop. So we can cross another thing (“Write an 8-bit hack for some control codes used in menu text. Or revert various things back to 16-bit, which would be easier.”) off the to-do list 😀
Some other quick pics:
There are still a couple technical things that need to be fixed, though, like how the limit for these text messages appears to be a measly 16 or so letters. That’s lame, especially given that eventually we’re planning for item names to be 18 letters long max.
Aside from that, some of the broad changes I made require some slight tweaking of other currently-existing hacks too, but it’s nothing major. Overall, this is pretty exciting stuff IMO. Meanwhile, I think Jeff’s started looking into another thing on the to-do list, having to do with some battle text string stuff. Tastes progressy.
Anyway, merry Brawl Day, and to all a good night.
You’re always making more and more progress. This is really starting to look amazing.
Thank you for all of your hard work.
Rock On!!!!!!!!!!!!
The mini updates in the previous post were kind of scary. It was starting to sound like you were going to have to start all over with many of the hacks you had already completed. I take it that’s not the case? Or you’ve been working so hard so fast that you caught back up with what you had to undo?
I’m confused!
Hey, I noticed on the to-do list that “Making sure all this works with all text speeds” wasn’t crossed off and I seem to remember a post awhile back where someone said( not sure who) that it wasn’t really an issue any more. Just a heads up.
Alot of stuff has been crossed up since you guys put the list up, keep up the great work.
I wish I knew how to hack roms, or I’d be helping out!
TP: Yeah, many of the hacks I did in the last 5 or 6 days I tossed out the window because I decided to do things in a radically different way. So I got the menu text working like I was trying, now I just gotta get everything else working in tip-top shape. Shouldn’t take but maybe an afternoon, but gonna be busy with real work for the next few days.
ALX: You’re thinking about the battle text text speed stuff. The main text text speed stuff can’t be crossed out yet because we haven’t fixed the main script printing routine stuff yet.
It seems like the hack has really been coming together over the past few weeks. You guys are amazing.
Kay-O cool. Wow man I don’t know where you are but it’s like 3:30 here. and you answered me in like 4 minutes haha. By the by how is the second draft of the translation coming? We haven’t heard much in the way of that for awhile. Don’t mean to pry, everything just seems to be getting more interesting.
just showing my support, thanks for another interesting update!
Happy Brawl day everybody!
(c’mon, amazon.com, hurry the f*ck up!)
Brawl=AMAZING!!!!! Got it at midnight. Crazy good.
You are the best!
Also, mato, your showing of all those ARM assembly hacks has motivated me to learn assembly hacking. You’re doing pretty much the kind of stuff I’d love to do. I think I know my way around x86 assembly now. How different is ARM assembly from x86 stuff?
Cool!
I just checked the to-do list and there are 13 crossed off and
5 over 50% done
Awesome!Keep up the good work!
Not to sound rude or anything, but with your “cheating” way that didn’t make you any better than the original crazy programmers 😉
I’m very glad that you’ve changed it so that it’ll be even easier to put in other languages.
What makes me even more impressed is how you guys managed to do this all in the space allotted. As far as I know 32 MB is the maximum and can’t be expanded further on the GBA. You guys rock by doing this and making it work to it’s fullest.
Hopefully we can see a patch out before next Christmas. You guys are getting crazy progress.
Bozo out.
Well, I’m a first time commenter here, but I just wanted to show my appreciation for your hard work. I can’t wait (obviously) to see the final product! Anyways, thanks for all your hard work.
I just enjoy how Flint, according to the screen shots, has one nut.
I recremend playing brawl if you have a tough time. OR during another “Boss Battle” I love that joke.
I *wish* it was Brawl day. 🙁 We don’t even have a release date yet.
But anyway, hooray for progress! 😀
> How different is ARM assembly from x86 stuff?
From what I know, more registers, fewer opcodes 🙂
ALX: It’s barely started. I’ll get back on it when most/all of this hacking stuff is finally finished. Script stuff is easy and just takes time. This hacking stuff is hard and crazy, so I’ve been focusing on it the last few months. Man I can’t wait until I can get back to the translation stuff though. That’s my hometown.
Kelly: I don’t know x86 assembly, but this hacking is all done in THUMB, not ARM, thankfully. There *is* ARM code, but it’s executed in RAM, and luckily none of the stuff we gotta hack is related to it. THUMB is pretty nice and simple though, you should check it out. You got 15 registers including the stack pointer, link register, program counter, blah blah. It’s nice having so many registers, but it also sucks trying to keep track of them when hacking too 😛
Captain Bozo: The “cheating” way wasn’t too bad. What I’m doing instead now is just leaving everything in the game’s native 16-bit format except stuff that absolutely needs it, like the main script, which wouldn’t fit in the ROM in 16-bit format because there’s a whole lot of it. Luckily, since we don’t need the thousands of useless kanji font characters, that freed up like 155+ KB for us to use for stuff, so that’s how we can move stuff around/increase storage limits.
Anders: If it’s any consolation, I probably won’t be playing it for a good while either 😛
You guys are amazing!
Awesome work. I WANT BRAWL!!!
Working through the night, Mato fixed the Japanese 8-Bit menu, and it turned into The Super Awesome English Menu!!!!
Mato nice update and happy brawl day to you too,but I have decided to wait for the full mother 3 english patch and play mother 3 in english before playing brawl,to avoid any mother 3 spoilers.
I’m curious, are the Mother 3 spoilers in Brawl pretty major spoilers or are they very minor? (Please don’t actually say what the spoilers are).
You know I think waiting for the game and following along with the progress is half the fun
@Enclave: While looking at brawl+Lucas gameplays on youtube I saw a major spoiler, I think, because have not played Mother 3 yet (out of obvious reasons 😛 )
Just ask someone you know who doesn’t want Mother 3 but has Brawl to tell you if it’s major or not, cuz really, i’d like to know too, but no one around here has Brawl yet. (Though I’m not in Europe)
I camped for Brawl. Just to warn you, story mode == MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS; avoid it if you can. Everything can be unlocked without Subspace anyway. Also Lucas’s trophy, 3 sentences and they spoil every major plot point. They also can’t decide if it’s “Earthbound” or “MOTHER”; all the MOTHER stages have the Earthbound logo but there’s plenty of songs labeled MOTHER in My Music.
I guess this means the patch won’t be out before Brawl then.
Don’t forget that the codec conversation about Lucas spoils a few big unexpected things too 😛
“I guess this means the patch won’t be out before Brawl then.”
If you have a time machine, then maybe 😉
confirmed. ness is in brawl.
Brawl is totally awesome. The Mother 3 fan-translation will be totally awesomer.
Blah, don’t even know how to use Snake’s codec yet. Don’t even have Snake yet! Still chugging through Subspace. (I already knew the MOTHER3 spoilers in Subspace before I got Brawl due to certain annoying “friends”.)
Also, stick is equipment.
I’ll say WHERE the spoilers are IN BRAWL and the MOTHER3 Chapter they relate to, so if you don’t want to know, just skip this wall of text right here.
—
I’d say SSE has a Chapter 8 spoiler, in “The Zoo” stage if you want to play SSE until that stage.
And for that, there are trophies of the things in SSE (according to Brawlcentral.com, I don’t have the trophies so I can’t prove how accurate they are), which are obtained through the Coin Launcher/Picked up through gameplay.
Lucas’s normal trophy description has a subtle Chapter 8 spoiler in the description. I think stickers seem okay? I’ve only ever seen one sticker list, and that particular list seemed very friendly.
—
KMeist Hax:
>They also can’t decide if it’s “Earthbound” or “MOTHER”; all the MOTHER stages have the Earthbound logo but there’s plenty of songs labeled MOTHER in My Music.
They did the same thing in Melee.
Onett’s main song was called “Mother,”
and either Pollyanna or Fourside was “Mother2,” and the other was Earthbound.
about the Mother 3 spoilers in brawl… in this zoo level, if i was to skip over the cutscenes and just play the level would i bypass the spoilers?
Thanks for the works guys!!! Looks great.
I dont really know JohnnyG, maybe. Unless just seeing who the last boss is might trigger a memory because someone looks like someone, I dont really know I just saw the cutscenes from Youtube in Japanese.
Great work! Things look like they’re really coming together!
Thanks for all your hard work.
Brawl is awesome, Lucas rocks! I can’t wait to play Mother 3!
Shoot, seriously? The spoilers in SSE are that bad? I was really enjoying it too 🙁
According to gamespot.com it says that Brawl for us in Europe will be released 6th June(which is swedens national day(since I live in Sweden)and its also is my birthday!:D)
I wonder if the patch comes before Brawl Europe release.
Still busy with real work, so not much has gotten done in the last day and a half, though I’m always thinking about the project anyway 😉 I also envy you people who have time to play SSBB. Give me your free tiimmeeeeeeee It sucks that EarthBound isn’t one of those Masterpiece games included with SSBB though 🙁
Ouch. I was hoping it would be. I’ve been playing like crazy. So many neat things. Well, I suppose now you don’t have to worry about that last note “The patch will NOT be done before SSBB is out”. I think given the date and all, that’s already confirmed. 😉 Still, pretty cool stuff. Too bad about the spoilers, but it does give us who’ve enjoyed Mother 3 in Japanese something more to have fun with. 😀 The music is amazing!!
Man, I wish there was a way to link up and dedicate hacking power to you, Mato :D. Just like the way that folding@home works…
Big strides over the weekend. And word from Jeff!? That’s awesome!
Yeah, there ARE major spoilers, I found out. (Luckily, I had already known them) BUt I think you’ll be okay if you skip cutscenes with Lucas in it and don’t read his trophy ( or Kumatora’s, Duster’s, etc) And just sorta… close your eyes? during the Codec conversation
Folding@Home? Good idea, let’s all think about SSB so that Mato can concentrate on hacking Mother3 for us…
…
What? It’s not like there’s a more realistic way we could use that idea to help… 🙂
I don’t know what else to say except that you guys are my heroes, I’ve been checking this site everyday for months now and I appreciate what you guys are doing so much. Earthbound is my favorite RPG of all-time and the service you guys are doing to the community will never be forgotten.
It’s not like you have to watch the codec scene with Lucas, and I don’t think the SSE spoilers aren’t so vast that they’re going to ruin Mother 3 for you. Quite honestly, if you finished EarthBound I doubt you have anything to worry about.
Although, you may want to avoid reading his trophy bio.
Regardless of where you close your eyes, you should still avoid the SSE to avoid Mother 3 spoilers. Even skipping cutscenes won’t let you avoid one particular oops. It’s still pretty cool though.
Really, you may as well not play the game at all if you’re that worried about spoilers. There are stages, trophies, stickers, music and more that all could be defined as “spoilers” for M3.
BUT!!!
I personally don’t think anything they show you in Brawl is something that’s going to diminish your enjoyment of M3. There’s nothing in the game that’s going to tell you the whole plotline or anything, unless you go out of your way to access it (Snake’s codec conversation about Lucas which you can’t access unless you’re trying to, and the Lucas trophy, MAYBE some stickers).
That’s my opinion, of course. You may indeed feel that the SSE “spoilers” are game-ruining.
Stick is Equipment!
Yes, Stick pwns~~~ Nice work, the menu stuff looks very confusing with the whole “hacking” process. Keep on truckin guys!!!
Looks complete enough for me, I’ll take it! I’m tired of waiting.
No prob, here you go.
🙁
Yet it be known that from now until forever, the word “Caleb” is a synonym for “failure”. lolsauce.
LOL nice link Mato.
So when do you plan to translate this “Super Earthbound”, Mato? And why does it remind me of The Legend of the Mystical Ninja with Ness’ sprite inserted? 🙂
…
What?
I agree with Meat. It won’t diminish or ruin your experience with Mother 3. 🙂 If anything I think it adds to the enjoyment. Of course, maybe I just enjoyed it more because I completed Mother 3 first. It’s really up to whoever’s playing though. 🙂
That link is classic, Tomato! 😀 It must’ve been a very long time ago you started that one. Roughly over 5 years, at least.
I’m sure there’s a Kanji that explains the humor of Mato’s response to Celeb. I’m sure…
Mato said 4 hours ago:
No prob, here you go.
😀
Lots of hackers would have thrown the towel by now, but not you…
Gideon, Demiforce and you, Mato, are my gods! I’ve never been so busy playing lately!!! ^_^
So there’s no “help” option in the menu in Mother3, right?
It looks like things cna only be used, given, or thrown away…
Dang I really liked
“hamburger, eating this recovers ~80-130 hp. 100% beef.”
I wish I were Ness or Lucas… Or Jeff…
I have a Calculus exam today… =_=
*insert motivational sentence here for Tomato and Jeffman* Keep up the good work! :D:D:D
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I have one question. Is the game’s text fully translated? I’m not asking if the translations are in the text, but have you Mato, or anyone else translated everything and have it written down somewhere?
Crazy pimp: Yes. Read the FAQ page, that question and more are answered there.
Random story time!
Yesterday I was at Walmart with the lady friend because that’s the best place to shop ever, yep! It doesn’t suck your soul out at all, nope! Anyway, I was like, hey let’s get Brawl while we’re here. So we ask the electronics dept guy to get it. On the way to the register, he yelled, “WTF Why isn’t Ness on the cover?! This game sucks!!” I was like, “Um, yeah.” He said, “Sorry, just I’m a huge EarthBound fan.” Wanting to get the f out of the store, I just answered with, “Yeah.” If only he’d known the truth about me 😛 That’s the first time I’ve met a random person who’s such a big fan, and not because of Smash Bros. games. Why there of all places 🙁 But I wonder if that guy hangs out here 😉 But most of all, I was surprised that a Walmart clerk was more knowledgable about that kind of stuff than most EB Games/Gamestop people I’ve met 😯
Anyway, any of you guys run into EB fans randomly like that? Did they scare you? 😉
I would have said:
“We have found thee again, Starman brother. Come and join us!”
^ Whenever I wear my “Smaaaash” Ness baseball tee (from Starmen :D) people think it’s a Smash Bros. shirt :/
That’s about the only experience I’ve ever had with EB-related fans…
You should have told him you were the one translating Mother 3. You might have gotten a discount. 😛
I have no idea, but some part of me bets that you’ll get a response if you post that story on SM 🙂
If he’d kept quiet and actually played the game, haha. Oh well. 😉 We can let him think that SSBB stinks. The only thing I didn’t like was the new announcer. He pronounces all the names different from the previous one, oddly enough. Plus he’s strongly exaggerated. That was strangely the only time I’d ever wished the announcer was optional.
…also, ever find it funny how Walmart actually had it in stock on time? I went to K Mart and they were sold out, they had a line at midnight. Sadly, I don’t think anyone there bothered with Walmart, because they’re “the backorder of the backorder”. I was lucky enough to get one of the remaining two copies.
Yeah, to be honest, I didn’t expect them to have it either. I probably shouldn’t have bought it though, it’s gonna be a pretty big distraction from real work and this stuff, so maybe I’ll hide the disc somewhere far away from the Wii so I won’t get tempted 😛
Meh, I think you should give it a spin :D. You mentioned how you don’t get to play games anymore because you’re working for your job and working on your hobby time.
Just imagine how good it would feel to take a load off, forget about the M3 translation for a bit and kick back for some good, quality gaming…
…Are you gaming yet!? 😀
I’ve played about an hour or two of it. It’s not overwhelming me though. Maybe it’s because I’m old and tired. There’s certainly a lot to do though 😯 I bet if I didn’t have work or life or anything I could sit there and play that for months and still have plenty left to do. That’s the same feeling I got from the Disgaea games, too. Maybe one day when I’m super rich and famous I’ll have time to play games again. How I miss being a kid.
LOL about the walmart story and Mato you got lucky they actually had the game and its good to hear that there are lots of things to do in brawl because I really havent even dare to look up info on the game.I also have played Disgaea 1 and 2 and those games are nearly impossible to get every item and beat every boss without much time to play it could take months of playing non stop to get everything and if you liked Disgaea games I recommend in the future when you have completed the mother 3 translation and want to try a new game out you should play makai kingdom for the ps2.
Has anyone ever noticed that this time of year is always the busiest? I had a trojan almost crash my computer last week so I couldn’t check to see how things were going with the project.
Btw, my teacher has a necklace with a boy and a girl on it meant to represent her kids. What’s funny about this is that the boy and girl designs on the necklace look like they’re EarthBound characters, lol :p
Can anyone tell me which of Kumatora’s PSI moves is Defense Down?
Mato, if your favorite Brawl character isn’t Lucas that seems incredibly ironic to me.
I don’t think brawl is going to spoil too much of mother 3. Nintendo’s preety considerate when it comes to this kind of stuff.
keep up the good work u guys! also i cant decide who i like better ness or lucas in brawl, i think ness but i like lucas’s pk thunder more
“Maybe one day when I’m super rich and famous I’ll have time to play games again. How I miss being a kid.”
Aw, this is so true yet depressing if you dwell on it. I know that feeling. Best numb the pain by working on Mother 3 some more 😉
On the subject of random EB encounters, I don’t have any myself, but my brother, who’s also a huge EB fan (we shared the same cartridge naturally) once wrote an essay about EB’s influence on him for a high school writing class – shows you how geeky we are – and he got the paper back with a note – “Oh Earthbound, I loved that game!” Weird.
just this past semester in speech class, i wrote and delivered a five minute speech about why earthbound fans are amazing. i mentioned this project. unfortunately, no one had any idea what i was talking about with any of it.
oh, and mato, this whole thing is looking incredible now. not just, ‘wow, this is a lot of progress!’ but also, ‘whoa! this is looking really professional!’
so um, yeah, thanks.
Very busy with real work today and will be tomorrow 🙁 I still work on hacking in my head though.
Anyway, I’ve been watching the download stats lately, and today it finally happened — the number of menu patch 1.5 downloads surpassed the number of ppf patcher program downloads. Well, that last # is really only for PPFOmatic, but there’ve only been like 200 downloads for the Mac patcher, and we’ll have caught up to that in 2 or 3 days.
So, I know you gotta figure in the fact people who got 1.0 also got 1.5 but the patcher only once, but it’s still pretty puzzling. I wonder what these people do when they get the patch but not the patcher.
if you already know mother 3 exists I don’t see what brawl could spoil….doesn’t everyone already know who the good guys and bad guys are?
and as fun as brawl is, it doesn’t get me anywhere near as excited as mother3 in english does. hell you can play the japanese brawl and not miss a single thing! grrrrrr
Just letting everyone know, Lucas’ trophy in Melee spoils a LOT of Mother 3. Don’t look at it if you don’t want major spoilers.
oh and Mato, I completely agree about walmart….. Ive gotten comics when actual comic stores under-order, a cheap-ass freeks&geeks boxset, and an 80s Ruggero Deodato action/cannibal flick(“Cut and Run” for 6$=shopping bliss)……………….take that commies! learn to hate it for the right reasons
Dr. Meat: I’ve barely played Brawl, but of course I’ve been playing as Lucas mostly 😉 I also played mostly as Ness when Melee came out. It’s obligation 😉 I don’t like the MOTHER 3 stage though, everything’s too tiny.
Anyway, very very mini-update — sblur had some stuff in his really old notes that will help out with one of the things on the to-do list, so that’s cool. But I still have to look more into it and implement the hacks. It’ll probably push the naming screen completion up 10% or more I’d say. Wish I could stop time and just hack and hack this game. This week’s going very slow due to lack of time.
sblur comes through retroactively!
On another note, is anyone else feeling like they’re jet-lagged from the daylight savings change? Mato?
[…] sito è stato aggiornato, potete leggere le novità qui. Il progetto ormai sembra vicino alla conclusione, dopo il testo delle battaglie è stato sistemato […]
Wow, Lucas’ trophy was in Melee? I must’ve missed it! 😉
I’m a first time commentor here and just wanna say I’m really happy there is a translation going on and glad it is going well.Keep it up!^^
And err…if theres any of those law enforcement copyright thingies going against you,just sneak around;p
I think he means that Lucas’s trophy in Brawl has uber spoilers.
yah i played it with the menu hack…and for some reason it didnt save…and now im mad. But good work…Ill probably w8 until the final hack to play it again. GOOD LUCK!
o and replying to mato’s concern about the downloads of the hack…many people already have a patching program. I already had pfft or w/e it is b4 u released the hack (srry patch)
o n will this be done b4 brawl comes out? JKJK!
Thanks for all your work.
If anyone ever tries to stop you from completing this project.. kick their ass!
hey mato, get your butt over to the forums, I got your source and i found good news and bad.
retro hippie
So.. I’m not really a regular here, but what do you think the overall progress percentage of this translation is? Ever since I got brawl I’ve been itching to see what is going on in Earthbound 3.
Reinkhen: see the FAQ page, and also the note that’s right under where it says “Leave a Reply”.
——-
Anyway, another mini-update. Did find a few hours to do some more hacking work today. Nothing that’s really screenshotty. Happy with how things are progressing, though 🙂
hi there and greetings from austria
this is definitely one of the most promising and interesting translation projects and i am happy to see you updating it so frequently. i keep my fingers crossed for you and hope that you won’t lose the drive to finish this project.
You guys are rockin’ it!, keep up the fantastic work!
On another note, I for one vote you guys to finish up what was done for Mother 1+2. It would be absolutely amazing to have all 3 Mother games on the GBA in English!
Heh, I found that funny for some reason. Flint has 1 Nut, and now this. Anyway, how the font widths are getting mixed up there makes no sense to me, bleh. Anyway, some interesting findings since the recent changes I made, maybe, just maybe, it’ll make item/PSI/skill name expanding slightly easier.
Mato, you saw a EB Fan at Wal*Mart and didn’t say anything? Oh yeah, I forgot. You’ve seen what EB Fans do to you (Tomato), Starmen.net, and Nintendo of America. They’re crazy. No wonder you iddn’t mention, “Have you been to Starmen.net ?” 8)
I’m sure you’ve already had 4392 volunteers to work on drafts of the script, but if you need 4393 please send me an email at montgomerytech (at) gmail.com. I just got out of college with my degree in creative writing, and would love to help any way I can. My talents include writing, review writing, format writing, writing, and writing.