Caution! Expanding Items
Just wanna toss this up before I hit the hay for tonight, gotta get up early and hit the translation work hard tomorrow.
Return of the Attack of the Items
Didn’t have much time to hack the menus any more in the past couple days, but when I finally sat down to look at stuff tonight, things happened 😛
Be Nice to Items
Really busy with real-life stuff, so I haven’t had time to work on anything much. People might be wondering why a translator is hacking the game now, but I have *some* limited knowledge of ROM hacking, so I decided to toss my hat into the ring to help push the project along faster. Because of that, for a while this blog might turn more into a “watch the hacking process inch along” sort of theme or something. I guess if you’re not too interested in the actual hacking aspect, then you might be bored quickly.
More Hackin’
Only been a short day, but made some more good hacking strides. Thought I’d document them before they get lost under more hacking stuff.
Turkey Hacking
Lots of hacking work done over the past few days, but as usual, there aren’t any good screens to show of it, since lots of stuff is still broken and would scare most people 😛
A Closer Look at Hacking
Last few days has been a flurry of hacking work, but most of it is stuff that isn’t really visibly noticeable. When we combined our work with harmony’s work, a bunch of stuff needed tweaking so it would all work in harmony (ouch @ unintended pun). And one law of ROM hacking might be that fixing one thing can break a handful of other things, so I worked the last couple days getting things fixed and looking nice again. Still got lots more to do, but before long things will be looking even better than before, so I’m excited.
These pics here aren’t anything special to most people and look pretty buggy and possibly like a step backwards in some cases, but trust me, they’re indeed very good from a dev standpoint.
The music player code is helpful.
Many routines share code with it.
Unexpected (and currently ugly),
but it works!
This menu uses some shared code 
(Don’t mind the names,
they’re still in 16-bit format)
The game was developed by multiple teams within the same company, so there are lots of different routines that need to be hacked. And they’re all intertwined in a weird, ugly mess, so to hack them up, we just gotta tackle one routine at a time. Luckily, sometimes routines are shared by other parts of the game, as I showed way back in the menu update.
Anyway, while the super crashy problems are still there, the other hacking is still coming along nicely. Never mind the graphical glitches and missing hooks here, they’re to be expected right now, but will be fixed.
Names and Naming
A very busy week / weekend, so nothing too major has happened. Jeffman did some work on the naming screen graphics and managed to figure out how to make non-standard naming screens look better. He also got the text speed/window flavor screen graphics at the beginning of the game edited. Strangely enough, that stuff was stored as graphics and not normal text. And the layout of those graphics was pretty annoying to figure out. So he kicks butt for putting up with that annoying stuff.
Oh yeah, he also edited the YOU WIN! into YOU WON!. Maybe I’m just too used to how the YOU WIN! looked, but this YOU WON! seems a little malnourished somehow. So maybe we’ll edit it later to look thicker. But it’s taken straight from the EarthBound ROM right now.
One Year Later
Well, it’s November 8th (in this time zone at least), which makes it exactly one year since Starmen.Net’s Do-It-Yourself Devotion announcement. A lot’s happened in the past 365 days, so I thought I’d discuss a bunch of it here. I also prepared a couple of other little goodies so that it’s not just all a bunch of talk 😛 So let’s begin, shall we?
Newer Video:
I’ll start off with some normal update stuff. First up is a newer video of the project. I’ve been focusing on working on the main project, plus I also suck at making videos (as is probably very clear by now), so I asked cool Starmen.Net video-making guy Libra to put something together real quick. And here it is:
(just so you know, the video doesn’t spoil story stuff, but it does have more game footage than usual and more varied stuff than has been shown on this site before)
Comparisons & Stuff
Despite being pretty busy these past few days, a nice amount of work on Mother 3’s gotten done. Most of it is stuff that’s not apparent in screenshots or videos or anything though, and some of it also involves stuff in the game that I’d rather not spoil.
Mostly just upgrades to our various tools, adding on some more hacks to harmony’s work, some little utilities to help with the custom inserter, etc. Jeff’s been working extra hard on all sorts of stuff, he’s awesome.
I liked how the before-and-after thing looked in the last update, so just for fun, I did that with some other parts of the game. Here’s some comparison pics for your viewing pleasure. As always, these are works in progress pictures, so if something seems weird, there’s probably no need to make a fuss 😛
Chapter titles and other stuff
(Man, the hardest thing about updating anymore is coming up with a good title)
Pretty decent, steady progress this past week. Nothing too major to show for it, though I’ll show some stuff anyway 😛
First main thing is that after some annoying assembly tracing, Jeff figured out some important stuff. Remember how we’re doing those chapter titles? Turns out that our new titles took up more space than the original titles (the graphics for them are compressed in the ROM) so we had no choice but to relocate the graphics. Had to find the pointer to the graphics though, and that was bleh because the programming sort of invented the address out of thin air, but Jeff finally found it, along with some extra data that’s useful. So now the chapter titles are moved and nearly done. Hooray! Here’s a before and after of that Chapter 3 title.
