ROM Hack Game Center CX : Arino no Chosenjo 2 (New Start?)

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Hmm, I went looking around at the various 8x16 sized bitmap fonts and I think I found one that has the same slim style as the original Japanese text. What do you think?
(Any font is okay and I do like the Link's Awakening font. I'm just poking around)
Here is what the original Japanese looks like:

Here is the font I was looking at:

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

How about one of the fonts from this font pack? (Note: not all the previews on that site work)

 

[GHANMI]

That's a good choice actually. Retro and fitting the original appearance (thin, and rounded a bit)

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Here are some shots from the game with some taunts in place

 

[Vague Rant]

That small caps "ʏ" sure looks weird. I think a modified version of the lowercase "g" would be less offputting.

EDIT: Like so:

Original < - > Adjusted

 

[GHANMI]

About the ellipsis, the proper way to do it in English would be to use only three dots, I think. You could save those extra tiles for a more literal translation if you want.
Besides, those dots should be the same height as the dots used in the ?! marks.
Same thickness too. You can do it in 8 pixels:

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[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Okay, I've worked both those changes into the taunts and I'll continue plugging away at it. There are 8 characters that have speech (pre-match, win, lose and play again) and I've done...one.

However, all the pieces are in place so it is just a matter of putting the tiles in there. A fair number of hours work, all the same. That should be the last tedious thing of this nature left to do, though. The magazine and manual text (checking/debugging) should go fairly quickly but the images for that aren't quite ready anyway so if I don't get to it today it isn't the end of the world.

 

[cubeboy]

(All moves start with 無敵拳　which means invincible or unstoppable but I don't know whether or not to prefix every single move with it; seems a bit much)

I feel like adding it in (if possible) would add to the over the top silly charm that was around in kungfu type things from the 70's/80's?

 

[AnotherGamer]

Seeing the whole concept is a reference to FoTNS to begin with, maybe you could consider doing another thing they did with Ken's Rage and add Muteki in front of every attack.

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

About the ellipsis, the proper way to do it in English would be to use only three dots, I think. You could save those extra tiles for a more literal translation if you want.
Besides, those dots should be the same height as the dots used in the ?! marks.
Same thickness too. You can do it in 8 pixels:

░░░░░░░░ ░░░██░░░
░░░░░░░░ ░░░██░░░
░░░░░░░░ ░░░██░░░
░░░░░░░░ ░░░██░░░
░░░░░░░░ ░░░██░░░
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░░░░░░░░ ░░░██░░░
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██░██░██ ░░░██░░░
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Just a little more info to help out: ALT+0133 summons an ellipsis in Windows, while OPTION+; summons one in Mac and COMPOSE+.. summons one in Linux. I can test the Windows one, and it works, but I don't have a Mac or a Linux machine so I can't test whether they work.

A lot of fonts don't have an ellipsis character, though, so that's something to keep in mind when choosing a font to use.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Thanks, though I'm fine now. Remember I'm not typing these out. I'm taking the image of each character, working it into the source image for the taunts and mapping each phrase character by character using Tinke's OAM table editor. It is incredibly slow and I'll post some shots later showing just what I'm doing.

EDIT> First, I took the font and edited the source image, extending it and adding each character of the font. The tiles are 8x8 but the font is 8x16 so each character is in 2 8x8 blocks next to each other. Don't be fooled by the Q and R you see here. They aren't stored like that; it is random coincidence.

Next I fire up Tinke and go into the OAM editor. There I painstakingly map each letter to a place on screen, adding and removing "elements" as I need to. Basically, I remap the Japanese characters there to the roman letters I want, then add what I need at the end.

The good news is that I can change the "font" simply by editing the characters I put in the source image. It's a bit slow too, but at least I don't have to rework the OAM tables again, which takes several hours. There are dozens of conversation blocks like this. And in this case, there are 3 separate images, one for 1 line shown, one for 2 lines and one for all 3. It gives the illusion of it being typed out or displayed slowly...I guess. All this means for me is I have to do the top line in 3 different files, the second in 2 and the last one once, for each dialogue, for all 8 characters.

That's enough from me. I need coffee to soothe my pour brane.

 

[Freqman]

damn someone could learn a lot about hacking roms by following this thread (and a few other threads on this board)

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

I still don't understand the point of covering part of an image with a random color that is definitely not part of the image and may be the transparency color. For example, look at Aaron's last post. In the middle of Koume's face is a big green square that has nothing to do with the image.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

That's the transparent part. Tiles are 8x8 but when they are grouped in twos and you only need one...

There are still other ways to do that but I don't have to touch what already works.

In this case it changes the expression on the face.

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

How? The transparent part on her face is between an eyebrow and eye. Not on a mouth or anything...

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Look at the box that contains it all (the black outline). The top half is eyebrow, the bottom half is transparent. The grey rectangle is only half of the block "element"

The plain "face" is behind that. You can think of these pieces as having "layers" if that helps.

If that still doesn't make sense I'll have to show you screen shots of the elements separately and how it all fits together.

Here is that same image enlarged:

Now here it is without the OAM borders:

And here is that element moved to the left:

Here is the original image with transparency "on" (preview mode)

 

[GHANMI]

Any game with sprites flapping their mouths or blinking their eyes have that superimposed layer, it's no surprise. That's how they do animation and/or save extra frames.

damn someone could learn a lot about hacking roms by following this thread (and a few other threads on this board)

Indeed. You could get Tinke and Crystaltile2 and get started on your preferred import DS game (or other platforms, but I said DS because it's the easier platform)
(You might get stumped when stuff is compressed, but there's ASM and the debugger build of no$gba for those cases)
The more people learn how to modify and translate games (hint: it's not exactly black magic or obscure secrets), the closer we get to see import-only gems translated to something other than Japanese (or Chinese/Korean, who are very prolific when it comes to fan-translations)

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

Oh! I wasn't understanding that there was a layer beneath there for the transparency to work upon.

(You might get stumped when stuff is compressed, but there's ASM and the debugger build of no$gba for those cases)

Or try Umihara Kawase DS. Practically 97% of the stuff needing a translation is in the ROM as plain BMP files that only need to be saved with a certain amount of bits to work correctly, and the images in the files aren't jumbled up, for the most part. I have a friend who almost got the game fully translated, but they got to the tutorials and gave up. They gave me the ROM, but Chell thought it was bugged and deleted it.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

The only known copy of something and someone's ignorance lead to it being lost...

Is that translation project still in limbo? There is still work to do on this project but it is rapidly reaching it's conclusion. If that game just requires messing with bitmap files as a whole it might not be so bad to do.

In any case I ran into a few snags but I did get 4 of the character taunts done for Triotos DX (almost have the 5th done). I looked again at the magazines and realized the font is missing a few characters like . and ' and ", etc. Maybe I can hack those back into the rom.

 

[MarkDarkness]

Another week, another step closer to me ignoring my 3DS in favor of my DS. And something to motivate us all:

It's a boring job but little by little,
raise his level and it's an easy win!
Fly over the sea before your eyes!
His greatest rivals are flying birds; he hates them.
Go under! Go under!
Kacho Fighter keeps on fighting!