Sprite Text Done
This sprite text stuff has been hell. But it’s now pretty much done, after several weeks. Oof, I feel like I just ran 8 marathons.
All the sprite text stuff displays correctly now, and after a few days of insanity and bug-fixing and hair-ripping, I finally got the optimization code up and running, so the game no longer stutters like a drunk old man whenever there’s some sprite text on the screen. See the video in the last update to see what I mean. Here’s a new video showing the current, faster, fixed version. This is pretty much the speed things will go at now, though some code-cleanup and other stuff might make it a little faster before the final patch.
The only real issue now is a cosmetic one — in some menus, when text changes (or, more precisely, when the tile arrangements in memory change), sometimes text will appear to “blink”, for lack of a better term. It only happens in three places really — the naming screen, the file load screen, and the main menu when you go to give another character a non-equippable item. The fix for this would be very, very easy if we had the source code, which was probably C or C++. It’d almost be a copy-paste type of thing. But it’s a little more complicated for us, since we have to work with already-assembled code. and I spent a few hours working at it, but I think my energy (what little there is now 😛 ) would be better used trying to finish some of the other more pressing hacking issues. Polishing things like this can be left toward the end, I think. The concept for fixing it is easy, at least.
I also added a real quick hack so that screen fadeouts won’t get slowed down as much when there’s sprite text being displayed; we can assume text on menu screens won’t be changing as the screen is fading out. So this sped up a few things, including the name summary screen, though it’s still not as fast as the original. If we had the source code, we’d probably rewrite this sprite text crap from scratch, but instead, we gotta work with the ASM code we got.
So, unless any weird bugs turn up, I’ll cross the sprite text stuff off the to-do list now. I’ll also add a “polish stuff up if necessary” thing to the “misc hacking” part, for stuff like this.
The bad news is, Jeff and I thought this hack had affected the end credits, but it hadn’t. The sprite text there is separate from all this sprite text. There are actually a few other types of sprite text separate from this sprite text. And it also needs hacking. I absolutely do not want to do this again, so I’m hoping we can find another way around it. I have an idea for it, but we’ll get to that much later. The torture never ends 🙁
I’m not sure what I’ll move on to next, but I’m thinking either the long item names stuff, which involves some of the code I’m pretty familiar with now, or the main script stuff so I can finally get that thing working. I really really need to catch up with real life work though, so I probably won’t get too much done this week. I could use some clones right about now.
I should also mention that if we didn’t have byuu’s xkas assembler, this sprite text hacking would probably still be a month or two from being where it is today. That thing kicks so much ass. It’s already helping this thing get done quicker, so if you ever see him sometime, tell him he’s awesome and give him your life savings 😛
I think I’m gonna go chill out and listen to some soothing EB tunes/remixes. The frustration is at an all-time high. This game is evil on the inside. It’s ouchy.
you’ve earned a break my friend
Still going strong I see, keep up the good work! 😀
Video is down at the moment because Youtube is being smelly and I can’t get in to turn the video on. Should be up soon hopefully.
Great work, Mato!
Ah, I see, I was wondering. Hope it’s up soon, I love watching any kind of progress video, it’s always exciting 🙂
Totally awesome, dude! 😀
Wow, 5 comments in 7 minutes. Great job as always, Mato.
Nice.
Hopefully everything else will be a bit smoother.
I was afraid you were going to end up with PTSD if you kept this up.
Mother 3 will be in the hands of all the fans when it’s finished, and Mato will never want to hear about the game ever again. D:
The…the ending sprite text is different?
What…did Satan and Gigyas conspire together to create this game’s code? With a side dose of Windows 95?
EpicOdysseus: I see your question in the moderation queue. For stuff like that, please see the spoiler board at starmen.net.
Looking really good, that is definitely good enough to where I wouldn’t complain; hack some other stuff and do the spit-shine after other stuff works–the clear head and experience from the other hacks will have you polishing this up in no time if something else doesn’t randomly fix it for you. Or the other hacks will break something making the polish a waste of time anyway. 😀
Can’t wait to hear about Long Item Names or Script Text or Credits or whatever you chose next!
Out of curiosity, what’s going on in the Skills menu? Is that going to be a simple fix or another fabulous adventure into ARM assemblyland? D:
keep up the good work!
looking foreward to the translation’s end!
Anna: What about the skills menu? If you mean the weird connected names, that’s the same problem as the long item names thing.
Excellent progress as always, Mato & JeffMan.
Awesome, love seeing these updates. Need to stop checking back 5 times/day though….
Take a break so you can come back refreshed and destroy the evil bugs infesting this code!
Mato, friend, congrats on getting through this beast. Every day, things get a little bit better. You really do deserve this brea, i hope you enjoy it. It’s great to hear that this is out of the way, mostly, now. Thank you, thank you, thank you X 42.
PS: I also wanted to note – for pure dork/geek factor – that i read this post, watched the video, and typed this reply…all on my Wii. Unnecessary? Perhaps…but why not?
Mato = Winner
When I win the lottery, I will buy myself a country.
After this country is purchased, I will pronounce myself King.
Once I have become King, I will invite Mato to my keep.
Inside the keep, I will dub him:
Mato the Welder.
And all will be well.
Doing that on the wii is pretty Geeky.
Doing it on a DS would be geekier (…could you even watch the youtube vid on the DS?)
I’m sure this has been explained, but my memory’s drawing a blank. How exactly did the translator end up having to do most of the hacking? I know you have a history of fudging with code (PK Hack, ect), but this blog makes it seem as though you pretty much have to self-teach your way through this thing. Or is Mother 3’s code just so screwy that anyone would be in the same situation without the source code?
Keep up the good work.
This game seems intreting i’m new to Mother 3 I hope its a great game ( I got a feeling I’m the youngest one here 0_0)
sauceome!
New fan of the Mother series, here. Been lurking for a while, but I just wanted to say that you guys rock. Keep up the good work! 😀
*goes back to looking for a Mother 3 cartridge*
I’m jealous of your coolness factor.
I just wanted to let you all know that the project is in my Facebook interests. In CAPS!!!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1307910349
Anyway, I read every update.
My childhood was based on Earthbound (I think of food in terms of HP), and I’m only eighteen, but thank you for helping me preserve that. This is probably one of the most considerate things anyone (or group of people) has done for me. The rest of your readers and I are patient enough to allow (not in a mean way!) you all a very pleasant rest. I wish that there were a way, besides purchasing the actual Mother 3, that I could directly express my gratitude to you because I feel like my words are failing me. ‘Thanks’ seems so inadequate, but it’s the best I can do for now, so thank you.
I just finished reading through the archive of blog posts. It’s rather impressive how far the project has come in such a short time. It’s already starting to look finished in places. I’d like to express my appreciation to the translation team, but it’s all been said a thousand times before, so I’ll content myself with a simple “good job”.
And…
*throws a bad comedian at Tomato*
Take a break, man. The workload you operate under would kill anyone else. Or stress them out to the point they have permanent insomnia… either way. Quit stretching yourself so thin on our behalf. We’re patient, for the most part…
here’s another quick one for finals week.
http://i30.tinypic.com/ild746.png
Also, if you guys will let me shamelessly self-promote real quick, I just finished doing my very first comic book! It’s about a boy genius named Oliver and what it means to be a hero. I know it’s not that good, but, if you’ve got a couple minutes, won’t you read it? It’d mean a lot to me – this is what I love to do 🙂
http://www.mitchapalooza.org/projects/oliver/
You poor guy! Go to bed for a week man you deserve it!
I have only recently began to visit this blog, and by far, it is my favorite timesink. I remember playing Earthbound when I was ~13 years old. One of my favorite games ever. Thanks for not only the hard work in translating, but your constant updates. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had your own wikipedia page soon (if you don’t have one already). ~Robert
p.s. at the very least, you ought to be included amongst the Mother 3 page.
Way to go Mato! The biggest obstacle finally tackled. The rest will be a piece of cake now compared to this monster
awesome. ill notify loco. i just wish i didnt play subspace in smash bros so i could actually be surprised at the end of the game.
=(
Here I present you my first reply
You are the best(Clap-clap),You are the best(Clap-clap-clap),
You are the best(Clap-clap),You are the best(Clap-clap-clap),
one more time here we go,YOU ARE THE BEST!!!
YOU WON!
Mato and friends gained 3.14^10000 EXP.
Mato levelled up!
Awesomeness up by 10!
That Rocks! Hacking up by 9001!
Mato realized the power of PK Hackin’ Omega.
In all seriousness though Mato…Congrats. I didn’t think we’d see this post so soon. My sympathies however on the Credits issue. Here’s hoping for a workaround, eh?
Good work Mato. The beast has been tamed… For now…
Well, for the ending credits, you can just take out the names of all those evil programmers who wrote this crap to make them shorter. >=P Just kidding, but great job, Mato. Take a break… You deserve it. =)
You da man, Mato!
That video is really fantastic Mato. You have done wonderful work. Some of that polishing stuff might be nice if you have time, but you’ve already got it working so wonderfully in English that its truly amazing. It’s very much playable, beyond that it’s very professional, and while the perfectionist in you probably screams at those little text-blink-thingies, I will personally hunt down and fatally wound anyway that gripes about it. We can’t thank you enough for all you’re doing, and I hope the end credits are as easy a fix as you deserve.
If Nintendo ever did release a translation, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to the quality of this translation. In translating this, you changed a lot more than just the language; you added ingenuity and your blood, sweat and tears. You are creating an experience for so many people that otherwise wouldn’t get to enjoy. Mato, Jeff, Byuu, all of you guys: We thank you, and don’t forget to take care of yourselves; We’re not goin’ anywhere.
“If Nintendo ever did release a translation, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to the quality of this translation.”
Actually, it would. It would also be done alot faster and efficiently than this. However, there would be things censored and removed from the game and their team would consist of much more than just 2 people, so yeah. These guys are doing something great for us, but don’t overly blow it out of proportion.
Personally, I would view it as being a better quality translation. Why? Well, for two reasons.
Firstly, as you said – things would be censored or just removed all-together (although, they have the luxury of adding stuff, which would potentially give them the edge). While, in this translation everything is as the creator intended.
Secondly, a two person team makes me feel as if more work was put into it. I want to play it not only to experience the game, but to see what two men did that a full team simply refused to do.
😀 Yes! now it always looks Professional on every update! Keep it up Mato, Jeffman, and… Team. xD srry dont know who else is helping xD.
Just finished mother 3! And now I don’t know what to do with myself…
While I guess I can relax a bit now, rest assured I’ll come running when you’re done. Now let’s see:
-still not sure if it’s the best one yet. I think it probably is but I can’t really help but look at them all as parts of a big picture
-God don’t you wish the graphics on the first 2 were that kick-assingly detailed?????
-I THINK Wes was my fav character, have to play again
-BTW, unfortunately all my posts are wii-typed(my wrist hurts)
ANYWAYS, it’s 3:15am and I needed to get that out of me. Seems you guys are getting damn close to finishing this translation. Luckily I’ll have gta4 to keep me from destroying NOA until then(awww I love em anyways, the big corporate jerks). Keep fighting the good fight! I know you guys can do it!
Where’s Michael Keaton when you need him?
Great!!! Its awesome Mato, youre my hero
Sprite text done!? Getting closer to being finished!?
Looks like my mother has got competition. Times three.
The work that you are all doing is amazing. The fact that you’re telling us what you’re doing is amazing. Your devotion to this game and its fans is amazing. I say that every week.
If I happen to make friends with anyone at Brownie Brown, I’ll make sure to hold them at knifepoint until they fork over the source/documentation.
Of course, you WOULD have to pay the proper price… How does four jellybeans sound? Don’t bother haggling, because I’d only come down to three.
The instant you finish it, Nintendo hits you with law suits. XD
When I saw the title of the post in the RSS feed, my heart screamed out in joy. You’re doing awesome Mato, keep it up~! 😀
Ha ha….ha?
the fact that you can re-program a game using the assembled code instead of the source makes you awesome beyond anything i have ever imagined
you rock, dude
Man completion is so close I can almost taste it…..in fact, just leave those silly old credits alone and in Japanese! Include a translation of them in the patch’s zip/rar archive! Well a guy can hope right? (Anything to get this faster!)
Well. That was easier than falling off a bike (and then down a bumpy gorge scattered with sharp rocks, pointy glass). Beautiful work man!
reaction to title: WOOOOOOOOOOOOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
reaction to post: poor mato. Take a break. There. I said it. If you burn out, it’s over.
It still kind of amazes me how complex it is to do this. I GUESS IT’S AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE.
Glad to see a big hurdle’s been jumped…and good luck with those credits. Ouch.
yeah, take a break man, you deserve it. You got this thing halfway (or slightly larger, idk) done with and that = awsome
I can really expect this thing to be done in December or January of 2009
and yes, if I do see the man, I’ll give him every penny I have…unfortunately I only have 3 dollars and 48 cents T-T
anyways, keep up the great work Mato and Jeff
Great news! Thanks!!
Congrats on defeating the evil sprite text boss.
I got Mario Kart Wii at the video game store yesterday, it’s pretty fun, but you know what I really wish I had bought at the video game store yesterday?
Mother 3.
Awesome Possum! Now onto the next boss! 😀 But take a break first, play some Smash Bros. You can’t hack if you’re dying.
Mato: What does “Life is an inner circle gap” mean? Is that some kind of Japanese idiom?
I’m so excited with every update, fantastic job Mato and team!
Psychomax: It’s a car-related term. It’s kind of nonsensical in Japanese too, but it also fits with where the song is played and the type of song it is. I don’t know what the English term is, but it’s a common term in Japanese for some reason. “Inner circle gap” might be better written as “Inner tire gap”, but I haven’t gone back and polished all the song names yet.
An “inner circle/tire gap” is best explained with this pic. When you turn a car or truck or whatever in a direction, there angle of the two inner tires draw out different circles, and the “inner tire gap” is the gap or distance between those two circles. When you learn to drive in Japan, they teach you about this so that you’ll know to be careful when making turns (especially with long vehicles) so you don’t hit your car on stuff, since roads there are pretty narrow.
For those wondering what the hey this is all about, it has to do with one of the song titles in M3.
The Credits? I thought those were already in English. Or even if they’re not in English, I see no reason to translate/hack them. You already showed us from Jeffman’s pics that the player’s name gets displayed correctly at the end of the credits. So why bother working on the rest of them?
Yes, it’s not the credits credits, it’s the stuff before that.
This is completely off topic, but seeing only the mid to bottom left hand side of the Mother symbol up there at the top of the page makes it look like some evil grinning monster.
Inner tire gap? That sounds like one of Dave Barry’s band names…
Anyhow, glad to see that things are going so well! 🙂
I think the real reason nintendo didn’t translate this game is because they looked at it and thought “This is going to be a pain to localize, lets not do it”
Besides, I’d rather have your version of it anyway. We might have ended up with 8 letter item names
Good job Mato and Jeffman
“I think the real reason nintendo didn’t translate this game is because they looked at it and thought “This is going to be a pain to localize, lets not do it””
No. See: Earthbound’s sales.
EB’s sales weren’t even that bad, and Nintendo aren’t going to base a release now on the sales of a game 13 years ago. They’re not that stupid – they realise that markets change over time (especially 13 years!)
Earthbound sold fine. The reason Nintendo flipped about it was because they groomed the freaking thing to be the next Final Fantasy 6 and ended up marketing it completely wrong.
You guys are doing a great job, but don’t kill your selves trying to finish it, I want to beat EB before this is done!
Keep up the great work!
Hey, Tomato… have you guys ever considered releasing technical notes when you’re done with the project? As you can see, there are quite a few of us who find it very interesting to see how you’ve done what you’ve done… Although I suppose you’ll be thoroughly sick of this game’s programming at that point, won’t you. Eh well.
I just have to say, it’s a pity that you can only hack this game, instead of giving it the complete reprogram job it obviously needs. (I’m not trying to deprecate your skills or anything, I know it would take something superhuman to be able to deal with binary as one would with source code. What would really be nice is if someone leaked the source, but I guess if that were going to happen they’d have done it already.)
Arsenis: Pretty close to that point actually. Maybe after this there’ll be a “Donate to the team’s therapy funds” campaign heh.
joeymartin64: The game’s coding is hell (as should be evident by now) and requires a ton more time and work than anyone expected. The hacking was about to stall, and we had already asked help from all these skilled hackers, so I picked up the ball to keep the project going. Then the ball turned into a giant snowball. But that’s what “do it yourself devotion” is all about after all. I (unfortunately for my sanity?) am a little too devoted to the series. Jeff’s really devoted too, so he’s learned a ton and improved a ton in these past few months too. Even so, I really really really hope for an official release or for a magical hacker from heaven to show up and lend an expert hand.
mitch: Is that NOA, or are those Nintendo fanboys? I can’t tell, but maybe it’s better that I don’t know 😛
sKaNkPiT!!!: Give the menu patch a try, it’s not that bad, plus when the final patch comes out, it’ll still feel like a new game in lots of ways.
somedood: I think what NatrapsX is saying is that Nintendo wouldn’t have put as much detailed work into the project. We’re already doing things they didn’t bother with in EarthBound’s localization, for example. And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t know all the tiny references and quotes from the other games the way we do. Expanded item names, longer descriptions, etc. etc. Stuff of that nature is what we’re probably doing that they might not have. Also, we don’t have a legal department who’d force us to change things or remove things. Or a group telling us to censor things. Stuff like that.
GoldyK: I think before they even do analysis of stuff like that, they look at the business side of things. From what I hear, localization teams always need to do a bunch of annoying reprogramming for stuff like this, it’s just that very few people outside the industry (until blogs like this) realized how much work goes into game translations. So I think this isn’t anything particularly out of the ordinary, and that Nintendo’s probably had much worse stuff they’ve had to reprogram in the past.
Effluvium: I don’t know what you mean by technical notes. This blog is technical at times.
Mato: Thanks for the answer. I didn’t think the latter half of my comment was that spoilery. But oh well…
Magus: You are absolutely right–it does look creepy.
Well then, I guess it really will be necessary to fix the sprite text in the credits. Isn’t there some way you can just link the credits to the sprite text hack you just made? I certainly hope you don’t have to do that all over again.
Would Mother 3 really have been censored if it came here? I mean we have games Grand Theft Auto. I don’t see what’s so wrong about Earthbound.
I don’t know, but they do still change things, like that ghost character in Paper Mario (for gamecube) who was a crossdresser was changed to be a girl in English. There’s blood and violence and other bad things in M3 too. I think it would be a decent possibility that stuff in M3 would’ve been altered.
(note: if people want to discuss this in detail, please use the starmen.net forums, not this blog)
Okay, 2 things:
1.) WHHHOOOOOOOO!!!!! SPRITE TEXT FINISHED!!!!!
2.) The above information on Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door kinda creeped me out, taking into acount the behavior of the aforementioned ghost character. o_0
Long time reader, first time commenter.
Congratulations! I’m seriously excited! So I can’t imagine how you guys must feel about it. See this is the only reason I HAVEN’T asked to be emailed when it’s finished. It’s so much more rewarding to check this site every day, even when there aren’t updates, because I get giddy when there are. I tried playing the game with an English walkthrough, but it doesn’t cut it for me.
Y’know, I love that everyday this project gets closer and closer to completion. And all the hard work that Mato and Jeff and everyone else puts in will definitely go appreciated.
But one thing I worry about is the updates we’ll get towards the final days of the project. I mean, they’ve always been interesting and fun since the beginning…but can you imaging it?
Mato doing hacking – I have managed to create a hack that makes the sprite text BOW DOWN TO ME and take it like the bitch it is! I AM ALL THAT IS MAN…here are videos, screen shots, and in-depth answers to your questions! And candy!
Mato finalizing the script – Uhm, I found that demi had made a small typo. I changed “thr” to “the”.
Haha, just kidding. I’m sure that you’ll still keep us well informed and entertained with new posts, Mato. ^^b
Yeah, when we get to the script stuff, it won’t be that exciting. I’m thinking of moving to the script editing phase soon here; the hacking is really unfun and burn-outy. But I’m not sure yet. Would definitely need to get all the main display routines fixed before that, and that itself is evil mcevil.
Mato, it’s looking very good. Also, about the Mother3–>Earthbound2 logo argument. I made a Earthbound2 logo that is metallic and nature-like, as the Mother3 logo is, If you would like to see it I can post it here.
I’ve said it sooooo many times, but you guys rock. I played Earthbound, and then found out there was a sequel, and then my trip into MOTHER began. This game is definately THE BEST GBA game, borderline best game ever. Even if NOA did release M3, I’d still play this version, because chances are that a lot of content would be changed (the whole reason we can’t GET M3 anymore is because of that crappy introduction of E 10+ rating, which is now used for about every other Nintendo game 0_o). Yeah, we do have screwed up games like Manhunt and GTA, but neither of those are rated E (or the equivalent in Japanese), or even T. Anyway, MOTHER 3 will always make me think of you guys, no matter what. If the game ever does make it to USA, I’m making a petition that you guys are put on the credits. YOU GUYS DESERVE MONEY ‘N STUFF. You should sue NOA for pain and suffering, maybe it’ll pay the psychologist bills Watch youselves, guys, or you’ll end up saying: “I HAVE THIS NIGHTMARE WHERE I GO TO PLAY MOTHER 3 WITH THE FINAL PATCH AND I SEE KumatoraD AND uster!” Happy codings!
the E10+ has nothing to do with it M3FTW.
all I have to say is, SWEET! 😀 It looks so close to done!
Magus: Now that you point that out, it realy starting to vreep me out lol
One more thing, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT CHANGING THE LOGO TO “EARTHBOUND 2”!!! sorry, but having such a dark and ironic game as this be called “Mother” is just badass beyond words!
So, my artist friend and I decided to provide a bit of art of our own to hopefully make Tomato smile for a moment and relieve the painful burden of the horrible hacking.
http://ebminon.cc/RPGComic/2003/latest.htm
Good luck, Tomato! We hold you in our thoughts.
Majora:
I agree, however, i believe “Earthbound 2” should be added as a subtitle, for those who are new to the Mother series. The same way “Zero” was added to Mother 1.
WOO! Sprite text DONE! One off the to-do list! One step closer to Mother 3 in English! Way to go, Mato!
Hello 😛
Majora: When i was stating the Earthbound2 logo i meant it by having two versions of the same have, the only difference being the logo. 9_9
my last post made no sense… i meant to say:
“When I was mentioning an Earthbound2 logo, i was meaning that there could be two versions of the hack released. One could change the logo to “Earthbound2″ and the other would not affect the logo.”
Hooray, you’re nearly there.
Edracon: Well then shame on whoever downloads the “earthbound 2” version! 😛
Mato,Jeffman, and Byuu, Thank you with the deepest part of my heart. I appreciate your integrity and drive to complete this project for us fans. I really do wish I could be your miracle hacker and save your sanity, but unfortunately I wasted my brain away with putting a helmet on and bashing my head against other helmets. lol. I really do hope that a experienced hacker will end up helping you guys. Your 6 hour energy hacking package will be coming I promise!! haha. But all jokes aside I am proud of you and what you are doing for us.
As much as possible, I think that Mato & Co are aiming for one single patch, especially after the fiasco with the 3 different EB0 ROMs.
Hey Mato grood work (great and good!) About the To-Do-List. I thought the item names were done in Sprite Text, so doesn’t the Text Welding extend the length of the Item names? Also could you make a link to the To-Do-List on the main page of this blog, I like checking that and doing my own estimates of time. Thanks Mato you are changing my life!
Oh, and just so mitch doesn’t feel unloved, I did read your comic yesterday. I enjoyed it, although I didn’t understand the bit about the meteor being his fault.
On-topic: I’ve ordered my flash card, see if you can finish Mother 3 before it arrives! Kidding.
Jeez, I can’t even go to a friend’s house without you guys finishing something. I mean, I sometimes think to myself “man, this is gonna take a looong time”, but if I look back, you finish something roughly every week and a half. I mean, damn, can’t really get faster, can you?
Awesome, amazing work Mato!!!!! This sprite welding hack sounded so hard to me from the start… maybe because I assumed you had to draw every possibility… but I can’t even begin to imagine how you put actual programming like this into what looks like a wall of garbage in notepad.
Don’t get discouraged — remember Exophase said that if things got really bad he’d swoop down from the heavens and help out.
Either way, though, at least you know exactly what you need to do now to make the same sprite welding hack for the credits… so it’s (a bit) more of a mechanical process (but what do i know???)
As soon as you have a donate link up, you will be a very rich man. Just think… if one in three (not higher because so many are youngins without credit cards) of your 800000 unique visitors donate on average $7.50, you have TWO MILLION DOLLARS (Dr. evil face) to hide in an offshore Swiss account, to sleep on at night, to stuff down g strings, or to fund an out-of-control coke (or methamphetamine) habit. This is a very conservative estimate, too.
They say extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivation…so try not to think about the money 🙂
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! NO MORE HELLISH SPRITE TEXT! CONGRATULATIONSx…A BIG NUMBER!!!!!
~YAY~
I wish there was an estimated finishing date or something, it seems like it’s so close, but I have no idea if it actually is or not!
Woa, awesome job, Mato!
*High-fives*
How old are you guys?
Dave: the project can’t take donations for legal reasons.
It should though…Not a bad idea.
I’m 34
Kinky
Personally, I’d argue against using Earthbound 2. Main reason being that this is a translation, not a localization. Earthbound is not the same as Mother 2, and is therefore, a slightly different game.
Mato, on the other hand, has tried to preserve the game as is, and merely translated it. Ergo, its still Mother 2.
Just a thought.
Oops, to the above, that last Mother should, of course, be Mother 3
I take donations.
I think I speak for all of us when I say that the blinking is rather insignificant, considering the MOTHER 3 IN ENGLISH thing lying on top of it. If you end up not being able to fix it for whatever reason, don’t sweat it.
Anyway, Keep up the amazing work, you gods among men.
*super mario victory music plays*
Score: you rock!
what’s next to take down?
What about sending gifts AFTER the project is done?
Great work, Mato. Don’t push yourself too hard. You’re doing enough as it is. Take a long-deserved break.
LordNecros, I think there’s quite a strong argument for this project being more than just a translation. I personally see this project as being well on the course of localizing Mother 3 rather than merely slapping on a simple text and character set swap. The level of work being done is certainly indicative of that status in my eyes.
I have to hand it to Mato and friends, I’ve been trying to figure out where to even begin messing around with GBA ROM hacking, and I’m currently stuck at “oh hey you can’t even buy the debugger version of NO$GBA right now (anymore?) also the guy who makes it seems like he is insane/has been driven insane” D: Byuu’s thing looked interesting but I have no idea how one is supposed to even use it!
I’ll slodge around gbadev some more, I guess. I’d like to try my hand at assembly and handheld programming again it’s been so long…
So basically I’m going to give you $30 instead of nintendo.
Nintendo would charge more than that for Mother 3, I think.
Also if you ever want to see this translation I’d highly suggest everyone shut up about donating money because when money changes hands, Nintendo starts to shit bricks.
On Mato’s head.
Also on this web server.
Also on translation patch code.
Get it?
Yeah guys (and gals). NO money. If you want to give so bad, donate to the Siege or Starmen.Net
Or, do like Mato and Jeff suggested and purchase MOTHER or the OST.
I plan on buying both of those when this translation is done. BUT, regardless, I’m sending Jeff, Mato, and byuu a 12-pack of beer of their choice (or a bottle liquor).
The real way to donate would be to actually buy a copy of mother 3 in japanese and Ana I think if mother 3 ever got a release in the USA it would cost like $40 or $50 dollars but it really depends on what system the game would end up being release.
Great update and I heard a rumor about a mother 1+2+3 all in one package being release for the nintendo ds in the future,is that true and if it is how much would that amazing game cost ?
Lots of comments since I last checked. I’ll look more closely later on when I get a chance, but donations would be bad, and it’s all covered in the FAQs page. It’s not about money, money won’t make this go any faster, and most of all, money makes people crazy and companies smashy. So let’s just keep everything simple and keep me (and the other guys) out of lawyer offices 😉
CLOWN: That rumor is like 2+ years old, pretty sure we’d have heard at least *something* by now. Really need to get info on that rumor and analyze it somewhere, people’ve been re-spreading that info lately for some reason, I’m assuming Brawl.
LOL Iam a little late on the rumor,but I hope if its true its way after you finish the patch.So that many people play your translation of the game that you and others have been working soo hard on finishing.
Mato you might have read this before but here’s the link of the rumor,http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/14/rumor-mother-compilation-coming-to-us/ it shows a nice screen shot of earthbound on the ds and it says that the games would have touch screen capabilities on the ds if it were to be release.
It’s from 2006, Clown 🙂 That alone should be enough.
Anyhow, as to the person who said that this blog will get boring once the progress updates are on the level of “changed teh to the in person xyz’s lines”, well, I have to believe that people would STILL read those entries. And I bet they’d still get hundreds of comments 🙂
Mind you, those comments might well be about people who don’t know that trout is a fish (maybe they ordered that trout yogurt machine originally…), but they’d be comments none the less!
thank you so much for doing this for all of us non-japanese speaking folks.
Hahah yeah that’s a screenshot of Earthbound on the DS all right. If it’s on joystiq it must be true. Looks great, can’t wait to play it.
“One more thing, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT CHANGING THE LOGO TO “EARTHBOUND 2″!!! sorry, but having such a dark and ironic game as this be called “Mother” is just badass beyond words!”
…
The game was named “Mother” in short form for Mother Earth.
Mother Earth = Earthbound.
I’d say it’s a pretty good translation, adding to the fact that Earthbound sounds alot better.
Anyway, I’d like to see that Earthbound 2 title screen, and I’d probably use that version if this translation gets released.
Just wanted to chip in that I am a big fan of localization and disagree with the sentiment that this should be TRANSLATION ONLY FINAL DESTINATION FOX ONLY NO ITEMS and that Mato should bring the closest feeling to the original game, not the closest technical English version of the Japanese text 😉 As such I’d be totally in support of a well-done Earthbound 2 title screen (seen some really nice ones kicking around) or changes like the Octopus Thing to the Pencil Eraser in Earthbound. (Change the save frog to a damsel in distress that you have to “save”? OK I admit that’s pushing it! :D)
Basically, this is a GBA game for chrissakes. If it requires footnotes to understand or be funny, chuck it. Mato will be able to easily document such changes and release a whole huge thing about it with or sometime soon after the patch, I’m sure.
Oh this blog is going to get real fun if Mato starts posting with translation dilemmas. Brave readers, brace thyself for a wave of angry Nipponophiles armed with Japanese 1 textbooks and a half-memorized Hiragana chart… D:
Also I hereby release unlimited rights to anyone to respond “TRANSLATION ONLY FINAL DESTINATION FOX ONLY NO ITEMS” or some iteration of such to deride anyone who deserves it 😉
Seriously, I remember reading posts about weird weeaboos and their requests to get some speech changed to reference their Japanese/Opera plays. *shudders*
Let Mato handle all that; he’s a professional translator, he knows what he’s doing.
Thanks for all your hard work on this ‘mato and the rest of the team. You guys rock more than you may ever know.
Hey Mato what are you gonna do about other “Don’t Care” options? will they be translated to?
I don’t think “EarthBound 2” is such a bad idea. The first two have it, why not this one? It would be nice. Maybe it could say “Mother 3” and in smaller letters “EarthBound 2” or something.
Anna posted:
Oh this blog is going to get real fun if Mato starts posting with translation dilemmas. Brave readers, brace thyself for a wave of angry Nipponophiles armed with Japanese 1 textbooks and a half-memorized Hiragana chart… D:
———————–
This blog already blows up whenever Mato releases a screen. 5 pages of discussion about things like a/an Mr. Batty, or something else taken way out of context. I can’t imagine what would happen if an entire chapter of text was released.
Its very common in fan translations to have many angry Nipponophiles lol,so I think Mato is ready to deal with them when the translation is finish.
I’m sure this doesn’t matter right now but I hope the title screen stays as it is.
Earthbound 2 is just kinda cheezy.
I agree with the sentiment that it should remain Mother 3, but for a different reason. I kinda almost see Earthbound and Mother 2 as different games. I mean, the translation was great and everything, but they are very subtly different in feeling. Unless Mato were to translate that slight difference to Mother 3 as well (which I think would overall make it lighter in tone), there’s no reason to call it Earthbound 2.
Well, that and I think “Earthbound 2” sounds dumb after hearing it as “Mother 3” for so long. =P
I too think that Mato should leave the title screen as Mother 3.
good job mato
i have a question, the ending credits will be in japanese right because (i hope this is right) kanji names are sometimes made up characters right?
ps: a small print earthbound 2 under mother 3 would be ok.
It’s just more confusing numeration that I think should be avoided.
It just seems silly to make it so confusing especially when we need it to be simple and accessible for people new to the series.
You guys are great, take a long break and don’t stress with it:) You guys sure are hardworkers:)
Just putting my 2 cents on having an Earthbound 2 screen. I don’t know, just hearing the word Earthbound brings be back to a simpler time 🙂
I seem to recall that they can’t change the title screen because the words “Mother 3” show up in several places over the course of the game, in different sizes and with different graphics, and on occasion with animation effects that would be very difficult to duplicate. So it’s better to leave the title as “Mother 3” and avoid causing any inconsistency that way. Something like that.
I for one would rather see the “Forest of Chimeras” subtitle come back, rather than an “Earthbound 2” subtitle.
Been working on the item name issue, which is two parts – the way the names are stored/loaded from RAM, and the display buffer. Display buffer makes no sense, so I went back to the RAM thing for now. The game is really dumb and it makes a section of RAM “simulate” the screen, it’s hard to explain but it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of 😐 They couldn’t just do PrintText(“Item Name”, x, y), they had to come up with this lame crap. Anyway, after fighting it for a while yesterday, I was like blargh and gave up for the night. Just as I was about to fall asleep a clever idea came to mind but I won’t be able to try it out for a few days 🙁 I hate when that happens. But with any luck, it should be really easy to implement and should allow for names almost as long as we want. Right now I upped it from 8 letters to 20 letters, but I’m thinking of pushing it to 22 because there’s an item whose name I don’t want to mess with for consistency’s sake.
But after this comes the display buffer crap and like I said, the way it works makes no sense.
Also my notebook I write notes in as I’m hacking is about 120+ pages now. Looking back at it, it’s like, “Damn, I remember hacking that stuff, I could do that so easy now.”
Wow, these people were professionals? That sounds insanely inefficient. I’m sorry that you have to put up with terrible code. I wonder what the source looks like… Maybe I don’t want to know…
Anyway, cool to hear you’ve grinded the heck out of your hacking level =)
I think the hard part of ASM hacking is figuring out what the hell the game is doing in the first place (and why). Once you know that and how all the parts intersect, you don’t seem to have too much trouble hacking it (unless you find more parts that interact with it…).
Anyhow, it’s too bad that Mother 3/Earthbound 2 isn’t the worst of Mato’s worries right now 🙂
I posted this but it got “awaiting moderation” because of some fake links I had 🙁 Here is version 2.0:
Hehe Mato isn’t that fun? I was bashing my head in the other day on a website problem to finally give up and go home, only to get 1/3 the way there and be like “OH!” Thankfully in my case it was realizing that the problem I had was I was trying to do something impossible for a trivial edge case that wouldn’t be a problem. 🙂 (The fake links got me in moderation, so you’ll have two puzzles here! For those of you that like a puzzle: if you have a security certificate that requires someone to be at domain dot com to work, not www dot domain dot com, how come you could never redirect from https www dot domain dot com to https domain dot com without getting a certificate error?)
I got a GBA development toolchain working yesterday, whoo. I don’t know how useful this is for ROM hacking though (and the GBA development folks aren’t as into that sort of thing) but hey, C works! Also I found out that the NO$GMB guy got reported to paypal by some impatient jerk and hasn’t been heard from since which is a shame because I really want the NO$GMB debugger as I’m familiar with it 🙁 Everyone’s hoping he hasn’t hurt himself–he seems a bit high strung.
Does anyone know if there are any sprite dumps or rips of Mother 3 characters? There’s gotta be something over at starmen or something, I’ll have to take a look too. I don’t need anything thorough, it’d just be nice to have a few characters’ walking and standing animations from front, back, and side.
I’ll note right now that the “compromise” of tacking on “Earthbound 2” as a subtitle would be even more confusing. Besides, after what I’ve seen of Mother 1, the “Mother” title makes perfect sense, to the point I prefer it over Earthbound by a lot. Hint: No it doesn’t really have that much to do with “Mother Earth”, think more literally, like a mom singing to her kid, and that song having a certain power for all time.
Heck, if you ask me even “Earthbound 3” would make more sense, with our Earthbound being something we could call Earthbound 2, and “Earthbound Zero” having the zero ditched (that was added later by the team that released the ROM anyway).
Creating number confusion like this didn’t help Square at all when they released FF4 as FF2 back in the day (to THIS DAY, every SINGLE time they port or remake that game, some idiot news site has to bring that up saying “previously released as FF2”, which would be informative IF WE WERE TALKKNG ABOUT THE ORIGINAL PS1 RERELEASE, but we’re talking like 50 rereleases in right now and most people DON’T in fact think of the game as FF2 or have for over a decade!), and I don’t think it’s good for Earthbound/Mother.
In the end though, Mato’s already made up his mind that he’s keeping the name the same and seems to share my sentiment that the name is a lot more meaningful to the story than “Earthbound” ever was (Let’s look at it this way, what aspect of that name connects with the story? In Mother 2, it worked because we were talking about aliens Bound for Earth, but that’s not the case in the 3rd one. The name doesn’t make sense.)
Finally just got an account so maybe I won’t have link problems :3
Also hopefully not too off topic, but that VC poll thing worked, ha!
http://starmen.net/forum/?t=msg&th=46014
Too bad this probably doesn’t mean anything 🙁 A warning to those of you new to Earthbound fandom: be excited about your efforts, but never expect any results. 😉
Remember As Well when you Make Comment like “insanely inefficient. I’m sorry that you have to put up with terrible code. I wonder what the source looks like… Maybe I don’t want to know…” you Are Just Making Self Appear Terribly Ignorant !! Mato Is Seeing Things from Interest Perspective.. Mato Not Only Dealing with the Results of Structural Decisions He Was Not a Part of Deciding Upon but Also Very Possibly Seeing the Results of A Compiler Who Behaviour and Conventions He Not 100% Sure Of ! There Are Simply Times When The Compiled Code is Going to Being Ugly No Matter How You Cut it And MAto has the Unfortunate Job of SHoveling Through It!
Keep Up Good Work Mato, Please Say You Not Going to Overdose on Methamphetamines ! We Would Hate To You Losing Health Over Hacking Of Mother ! But If Meth Make You Keep to Code Like this Then Please Puff Puff !!
This is amazing! I thought the sprite text would take longer, but when I saw it was done I almost threw my arms into the air. (With my arm in a sling) I can’t wait to play this. You are a hero to all us hardcore Earthbound fans! Thanks for all your hard work Mato and Jeffman! Good luck on the rest of this crazy game. 😛
“be excited about your efforts, but never expect any results.”
Also, take a tip from someone from the very beginning of the EB fandom: nintendo hates us and we’ve learned this
I love you Mato. Love Jeffman too.
i know this is off topic but ive been trying to find a picture that i had long ago and cant find it heres the details
Ness over a monster with his baseball bat looking serious, Paula to the right of the pic looking worried, master belch in the background and other Enemies from TREED in the picture if ANYONE can find this for me it’ll be greatly appreciated ^^
Thanks to anyone who wants to help
Is this it?
yes Thank you Mato ^^ this is gonna look great on my black T-Shirt
Added a thing on the sidebar since people’ve been asking for a more prominent link for the to-do list. The sprite there seems out of place for some reason, but I’m too busy and it isn’t important enough for me to bother any more with, so hopefully nobody minds 😛
Tell me about it, mitch. I think what’s going on with my sudden renewed interest in EB fandom is that is deep down inside I long for the days when Square hated us too and wasn’t whoring out their franchises and I clung to any glimmer of hope that they’d translate their games already 🙂
Not trying to go off topic or anything but if anyone got GTA IV today and has Xbox LIVE, my gamertag is TheMetroidMan so add me! I would LOVE to play with some hardcore Mother fans so please add me or post your GT here.
On topic wise, thanks so much Mato for all your hard devotion to this project. Everytime I see a new video or picture I show my friends it and I tell them that just ONE man does ALL of this work and they can hardly believe it. You, kind sir, are a devoted god of hacking! Boing!
Come on now, Jeffman’s done lots of hard work too. Don’t give me all the credit. You gotta be crazy devoted (and crazy) to hack this game, so support his craziness too!
Hey Mato, any chance you can divulge anything about your build-hack environment? You mentioned each hack being a new file?
Do you basically step through on NO$GBA and look for where you want to insert code? Do you have to add it to a file and recompile or does it support some live editing? Are there any “GBA Rom Hacking for Beginners” resources I can look at so I can ask less annoying questions? 🙂
sorry… lol
Majora: Your question really shouldn’t belong here on the blog for spoiler reasons.
Anna: You step through code with no$gba until it makes sense. You can do instruction changes right there if you want, but hacks are best written down in a file 😛 Before we used goldroad and had to do each hack in an individual file, but with byuu’s xkas assembler, everything can be in one file (though we still have yet to move everything over).
Majora: Ask on the starmen.net forums. Don’t do that here.
Nintendo Power’s VC Poll Earthbound #1 and Mother #4,congrats to all the fans of the mother series this is a huge victory.
Okay, I’ve been following this for some months and months now, but haven’t posted. Just wanted to throw in my support. You guys are all kings among men–and Mato, keep up the great work. Rock out those EB tunes.
its about time i posted again…
I missed the argument about the naming of Mother 3/Earthbound 2, so here’s my two cents:
Earthbound 2 is a fan-name, just like Earthbound Zero. Fact
For this next fact, I’ve actually done some research. Itoi named the series “Mother” because of a Beatles song which at one point, they sing “MOTHER,” and it moved Itoi to name the series that. Sorry, but its not because of Mother Nature(good guess though.)
Also, how much sleep do you guys get on average? If so, you should focus more on increasing THAT number instead of increasing the max name letter count. Sleep deprivation is detrimental to your health!
Heh it sounds a bit like a more obtuse version of CSS editing with Firebug–get too out of hand in your changes in Firebug and you’ll have a bitch of a time recreating it in your CSS 😀 Only with the added fun of being less visual!
How does xkas work? Something along the lines of (this is psuedocode, not actual commands): xkas –input mother3.bin –patch tomatohacks.asmdiff –output mother3trans.bin ?
I’m curious how the hack file format even is, how do you tell it where to start, how does it handle something like a hack shifting a bunch of code requiring all the address locations to change, etc.?
You can dload his xkas assembler, it’s available to all. The UPS format doesn’t support code shifting, so that’s not something we can do. It would probably completely destroy this game’s original coding anyway.
Yeah I downloaded xkas but have no idea how it operates is the problem 🙂
I didn’t think through the code shifting, heh. I at first thought the reassembler could do that stuff for you, but then I remembered the second worst two word phrase in programming: “pointer arithmetic”. (In case you’re curious, the first is “regular expressions” :D) That’d probably break things.
So damn, all hacks have to replace code bit for bit? Yikes. I hope I’m missing something here that makes this easier, but in ASMland, probably not 🙁
See the documentation, it talks all about how to use it.
Hacks can be done in-place, overwriting existing code, if you’re lucky and/or a good programmer. Most other cases you have to find some blank space in the ROM, and then branch there from the proper spot, and then branch back to the proper spot afterward. Finding blank space within the branch limits can be tough too.
Sorry Jeffman! I didn’t mean to not give you any props. Hope I didn’t hurt anyones feelings haha. Serisously though BOTH of you guys (and byuu’s uber awesome program thingy) are all awesome and I respect all you guys. By the way, that Nintendo post for VC is crazy funny. I voted for Earthbound and Mother and I can’t believe that it got #1. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo was like “Uhhhh…we didn’t see any EarthBound…lets just put up Super Mario RPG cuz thats the number 1 game everyone voted for!”. I would then be very angry at that Nintendo management team member. It probabaly will totally happen too…sigh.
Note to Wii-users: this page is so extrafantabulously long (don’t even try making a definition out of that. 😛 ), it takes a long time just to hit the bottom! 😛
Any good news for the Mother series makes my day. I’m probably not the only one expecting the fan translation to be out before an official VC Earthbound release announcement, either. Right now, this is my single biggest video-game-related anticipation. Second and third being FF4 DS and SBCG4AP. Keep it up, guys! This may be the only way we’ll see Mother 3 in English (unless Reggie gets kidnapped by a mob of New Age Retro Hippies (and Annoying Revelers), then we might get a bigger chance. 😛 ).
As for naming, I’ve grown up knowing Mother 2 as EarthBound. However, I’m starting to prefer the term “Mother 2” more, with respect to the series as a whole. I don’t mind “EarthBound 2” being a subtitle, but seriously, I just don’t like subtitles being used in the Mother series. It feels like it takes away the enigmatic feel of the title a bit. I know EarthBound and Mother 2 had subtitles, but they weren’t on the title screen or the cartridge.
blah blah blah. Yeah, I know many people have posted their versions of an “Earthbound 2” logo.. But here is my version, I myself will be using the Mother3 version, but one of my long time Earthbound fan/friends wants to use one with an “Earthbound” title screen. Thats the only reason why I’m the billionth person to bring up the “two versions, two title screens” thing. Well… here is is.
http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h270/goombaman/earthbound2-logo.gif
Sorry for the the weird pixelation on the “A”, it couldn’t be helped as I took the original logo from a Snes emulator screenshot >_>
The name was changed to EarthBound for a reason. I know for a fact that I could get more people to play this game if I told them the title was EarthBound 2. Every time I tell my friends that they should play a game called Mother, they immediately say that’s a weird name and lose interest. The name “Mother” may make sense in Japanese, but in English it just sounds creepy.
Btw, Starmen dot net seems to believe EarthBound will never come to the virtual console. They seem to have some inside information, but I hope they’re wrong.
Edracon, I think that is a fantastic logo, but the 2 will have to be a bit smaller before it can fit on the title screen.
can do.. I still have it in PSD format so it will be an easy adjustment.
Excellent work, Mato! Do you really think that the sprite text issues with the ending will be just as bad? I mean, you probably got a lot of experience from the nightmare that was the regular sprite text. It’d be ridiculous to think that the original programmers made a completely different sprite text system just for the ending.
But then again, your previous experiences with the code have shown that the M3 team basically gave the programming job to a monkey, so something stupid like that doesn’t seem that far off…
Mato: “The game is really dumb and it makes a section of RAM “simulate” the screen”
Out of pure curiosity could this be because they are double buffering in mode 3, and storing the video buffer in the RAM? Or is that completely off the mark?
No, it’s not a graphics buffer, it’s like they took a block of RAM, made it into like a 20×12 or some dimension grid, and everywhere they want to put a letter, they stick a letter there. Of course this limits the total amount of info you can have on a line, and thus on the whole screen.
The trick I’m trying right now is instead of putting letter data in a spot, I put a pointer to another part of RAM where the text is written out in full. It sort of works, but need to work out a few last things. And then I have to fight that display buffer crap too 🙁
Great job you guys! I know it’s tough, but you’re smart people. I have faith in you!
That… seems so weird…
I have to say that it’s amazing the actual game appears to play so well. I mean clearly these people aren’t idiots and can code, but how they manage to do it so inefficiently…
No wait! It all makes sense now! Japan has invented a means by which to thwart piracy attempts to circumvent protection schemes, incomprehensible code! I mean what’s more threatening, a mine field with an orderly pattern and a map, or a disorderly mess on an uneven field where some of the mines trigger by heat, some by pressure, some by noise, and the rest aren’t actually mines but pull threads to machine gun nests and ALL the traps cause other traps to drastically alter their set off function in unpredictable ways?
Draw a tomato navigating THAT mess!
Seriously though, I’ve heard that FFXI has some fiendish nightmare coding as well.
But clearly, the end product is just fine. I wonder… There’s a thing called evolutionary programming in which a program is designed to itterate mutations off an initial design, run it through a set of parameters which “kill off” whatever matches them the least, and splits off mutated copies from the “survivors”. The end result of this blind process are new types of robots, transport schedules, whatever would benefit from randomly mutated and then naturally selected (and massively accelerated) methods like that.
The joke I’m going for here but can’t pull off smoothly is the idea that this is what made this game, and the code is as messed up as human DNA is.
Sometimes I wonder if the game is 32MB because of all the different versions of code they have that does the same thing.
> but then I remembered the second worst two word phrase in programming: “pointer arithmetic”. (In case you’re curious, the first is “regular expressions” :D) That’d probably break things.
Umm, those are pretty much backwards for me 🙂 But then I love Perl and I spent a lot of time reading the O’Reilly regex book.
Patterns just aren’t worthwhile unless you can put more than one /e on the end 😉
Yeah regexes were invented by the same jerks who write their C code with as few spaces as possible because it makes it more “efficient” I swear. Being able to visualize the code is kind of important for me, and regexes are designed to be as impossible to decipher by the human brain as possible. Granted they’re slightly ingenious for the problem of complicated pattern matching when you have to do it in only one line of code (a problem that comes up far too often in Linux…) but I’d rather write a rat’s nest of ifs and elses to parse strings, because it makes more sense D:
Also Mato, I read the docs on xkas but I haven’t written anything in ASM for the GBA at all so I don’t have the first clue how the .asm file is supposed to be formatted, or how to tell it to rewrite certain parts D:
Pretty sure there are example .asm files that come with xkas.
Really shouldn’t have worked on stuff too much today, but bleh. Anyway, I messed around with item name stuff again, using the idea that came to me right before bed last night. Unlike a few months ago when I tried really hard to stuff as much text in the available room, this time I worked WITH the code and now items can be reallllllly long if need be. They’re set at 20 letters right now, but I might up that to 22 in a bit. Anyway, could never have done this without no$gba and all the stuff I’ve learned in the last few months since then.
There’s still that pesky display problem when there’s too much on screen though. I don’t really know what the problem is here, it *could* be the buffer problem, but I’m not really sure. If not, it could be that misc data about each letter/each name is being written too far. I hope it’s the latter, please be the latter.
Anyway, that’s the latest news from me. Jeffman did a whole lot of work today too.
I should probably hide my gamepad so I don’t get tempted to work on this stuff for a few days 😛
EDIT: Yes, I know the description for that bracelet is off.
EDIT 2: Good news is that this also applies to the Key Items menu, which I thought I would have to do completely separately from my last journey into this region. I should also mention that this fixes Skills menus, PSI menus, etc. too 😀
*glances at the latest mini-update post*
Booyah.
Oh and hey Mato, those crazy ||||s are the pesky display problem, right?
Yeah, that’s the display problem.
While looking around the PSI menus to see how they look and act (they’re awesome now), I noticed that the hash function used for the sprite text isn’t cutting it. I tried messing with it a little bit, and it helped a little, but there’s still these two PSI descriptions that refuse to hash differently. So gotta find a better function.
VC Most Wanted: Earthbound:
http://www.4colorrebellion.com/archives/2008/04/29/vc-most-wanted-earthbound/
Tom, Nintendo’s rebuttal…sort of.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rvkFAQ9vB7Y
> Yeah regexes were invented by the same jerks who write their C code with as few spaces as possible because it makes it more “efficient” I swear.
Learn to use and love /x in Perl 🙂 I can do string matching in other ways, but it usually involves reimplementing the finite state machine the regex makes for me 🙂
As for this update, it’s good to see things going well! I hope that you can get all these hacks behind you soon. You’ll sleep better, if nothing else 🙂
Magus: That video = pure win. The ending is so sad, but so true. 🙁
In regards to the Earthbound 2 / Mother 3 title question.
I think I have two possible solutions that everyone might like. First, in Gemeni’s (sp?) recent release of Tales of Phantasia for the PSX; he included both Romanized and Translated skill names, and upon startup of the game the player could chose which one they prefered. It should be possible to also implement something like this in the Mother 3 patch.
A second, and more fun solution would be to have a vote with the fans to decide which one they prefer.
However it’s the teams descision; I just thought I would offer my two cents. 🙂
Magus, that was…AWESOME.
I friggin’ Lol for real. 😛
That was cool, but it’s starting to become true. 🙁
Marking my place.
(Please forgive the off-topic)
Mato and Jeffman: Thanks for everything. I can’t stress that enough. You guys are fantastic and deserve to be in the video game hall of fame, wherever that may be.
Mitch: My wife and I are co-authoring a series of fantasy fiction novels, and I was wondering if you could tell me the best program I could use to create a drawing of a world map on the computer. I have one hand drawn, but I’d LOVE to create a digital copy.
(/end Off-topic)
Magus, your video rocks!
It gave me an idea…
http://nutsjesmoar.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/masterfilsaime.png
please forgive the hasty quality of drawing
200th comment!
I think you guys are doing a great job. I would definitely be willing to take the patch now if you were willing to release a beta.
Darn you and your perfectionism! (not really, please dont stop)
Thanks for all the compliments but I only found that.
It’s not MY video (it’s someone elses). I dun knoow the first thing about sprite hacking/rom hacking, etc.
Still it WAS awesome.
# Vagn said 3 hours ago:
“I think I have two possible solutions that everyone might like. First, in Gemeni’s (sp?) recent release of Tales of Phantasia for the PSX; he included both Romanized and Translated skill names, and upon startup of the game the player could chose which one they prefered. It should be possible to also implement something like this in the Mother 3 patch.”
————————————————
In a Playstation hack, Gemini might’ve been able to to pull this off, but in a GBA hack, on a rom that’s the maximum size, that’s not exactly feasible, methinks (Idk how to hack GBA games so don’t sue me if this info’s wrong). Plus… For something so silly… What for? O_o Even if you want Earthbound 2 to show up on the title, you know you’re what playing, so bleh. And the work involved in hacking some of the game’s easiest parts are a nightmare and a half… why bother with more hacking than needs to be done? (And I know this was only one of your suggested solutions, I’m not trying to pick on you or anything. 😛 Just wanted to bring this up- so no hard feelings, Vagn!)
No Japan.. No !!!!!!! Just Wonderful Work of Meth Mato.. If Want Japan, Can Download Mother 3 in Japan Language
For fun, I tried the current build out on real hardware. Seeing it all coming together and working smoothly on real stuff is like 😯 And it’s only gonna get better. Even stuff like that sprite blinky thing isn’t *too* bad on the real thing.
Now to get back to work, heh.
Ok You Have Made Too Many Meth Jokes They Aren’t Funny Anymore
Man I always feel so bad when I visit this blog. You’re doing all this amazing work, and here I am dong nothing but sitting around. The most I can do is tell people about Mother 3 and this project, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
Mato good to hear that the sprite blinky thing is not too bad,also Magus that video you found was amazing and who ever did that hack must have some skills.
Mato, you have no life at all, but we love you for it
Great. So my computer barfs on me a few days ago* and now I discover that all this awesome stuff was happening while I was cut off from the internet world.
Awesome work there, Mato. That’s is some seriously awesome shit there. *internet high five, bro*
*ironically this happened while I was making up back-up files of important documents. By “important documents” I of course mean pictures of my kitties.
Mato has a life… I mean, real-stuff, right?… And helping out fans in need… And… Yeah…
But like everyone’s mentionned, you’re awesome. Really.
I mean, it’s almost unbelievable how much initiative someone can put into a game that they can already play, just so more people can enjoy it. Thinking of it now… Wow.
And thanks byuu and Jeffman. I don’t know how many thanks I can give to the rest of you guys since I don’t know what they’ve done, but thanks for getting involved.
Anyway, thanks again, and especially to you, Mato, for putting so much love into this game.
> Great. So my computer barfs on me a few days ago* and now I discover that all this awesome stuff was happening while I was cut off from the internet world.
> *ironically this happened while I was making up back-up files of important documents. By “important documents” I of course mean pictures of my kitties.
There’s a simple way to ensure that all of your cat photos never get wiped out. Put them on P2P, then there will likely be someone sharing them until the end of time.
Why would anyone bother to download your cat photos, you ask? Well, it’s true that they wouldn’t ordinarily care about them. This is why you have to put them in a folder marked “my pussy” first. But save the torrent hash so that you can find it again. You know, because of all the other cat lovers out there…
Rog don’t feel bad, that’s an awesome thing to do! More Mother fans means more angry pitchforks! It will work! 😀
But yeah, good job Mato, I could see that flickering being less apparent on the real deal (especially with a first-generation GBA—zing!). You’re getting closer… it’ll all be behind you soon enough 🙂
Mato,is there something I can do to stop myself from checking this site every few minutes? Thanks
@ArashiSai: why would you want to?
Don’t listen to them, OK. I love those meth jokes, especially when they’re wrapped around an almost legit bit of coding knowledge. Keep it up, Mato’s meth habit needs you to keep it going so HE can keep going!
Thanks Anna. It’s kind of a bummer from time to time, but I guess every little bit helps. And the thought of angry pitchforks does make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
thought Id saysomething cause I havent posted.
Go Jefflypuff and Tomato!
Jefflypuff + hacking mastery = Jefflytuff
I wont let anyone forget the Jefflypuff comics or name
Come on already been waiting 2 years actually wait no my whole life…………..
great job man, i’m pretty sure once you guys finish the translation, you’ll be referred as gods among the eb fans XD
…I really have no clue where these Meth jokes came from. Can someone fill me in?
I have no idea about these meth jokes? (feels the same as Magus)
The meth joke has been running for months on end.
There’s nothing really to it, one day OK shows up and posts about Mato smoking a lot of meth to be such a super hacker and all around swell guy.