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

[GHANMI]

The designs are perfect save for the dollar sign (it can be easily confused with the already used letter S) and the star (it definitely could be better, but I understand where you're coming from since the space is too small).

About the letters I know Xseed were the ones who replaced those with ABCD..QRST letters in that order, but that's an area that could use improvement have we figured out the hidden message behind that specific (definitively not random) letter sequence and a way to transcribe it in English without repeating letters somehow.

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

What about that sequence of kana? (イロハニホヘトチリスルウヲウカヨタレンシ... I know, I fail at katakana)
Does it hold any significance? Any meaning?
Because replacing it with ABCDE... bugs me for some unfathomable reason.

That's how it was in Retro Game Challenge, though.

It does hold significance. If you go into the doors in a specific order, certain things happen. For example, your health could be restored or you could get a power-up.

The order in Japanese is the order of Kana (which, as far as I understand, is kind of like "KA KI KU KE KO" and all that)...which, for the localization, was changed to the order of the alphabet so people who don't speak Japanese would understand the order easier.

In other news, I have had a glorious graphical catastrophe with the Triotos DX title image. I'm actually not sure how to fix this. There isn't any OAM table for the color overlay to work with. I'm not sure how it is taking the B&W source and making the color magic happen. Anyone have any ideas? In any case, I wanted to share the "glory" before bed. It looks like that headache I had this morning.

Have you tried the .bin files with ARM in the name? Could be more than just pointers in there. I've heard of cases where people have found in-game text in ARM7.BIN.

 

[Pix3l]

How about a crown? (I made 2 versions)

Is a recurring image in this game, and also in the previous, like the challenges letter, Demon Arino's crown and the secret gold king bonus in the previous Haggleman games.

 

[AnotherGamer]

EDIT: I think reverse-alphabetical is the only special order. I can't find anything else with door orders on Google, and instant power-up is triggered by a cheat code.

Entering them in the alphabetical order will change all the doors in the level to the same color, allowing you to flip all of them at the same time by entering any one of them until they become desynchronized: this also allows you to reveal the level boss early, although I'm not sure if he needs to be hidden behind one of the doors visible on the screen for it to work.

 

[Fishaman P]

Entering them in the alphabetical order will change all the doors in the level to the same color, allowing you to flip all of them at the same time by entering any one of them until they become desynchronized: this also allows you to reveal the level boss early, although I'm not sure if he needs to be hidden behind one of the doors visible on the screen for it to work.

New speedrun strats!
Yes, the door containing the boss has to be at least 1 pixel onscreen. But back on topic now.

 

[Clydefrosch]

Entering them in the alphabetical order will change all the doors in the level to the same color, allowing you to flip all of them at the same time by entering any one of them until they become desynchronized: this also allows you to reveal the level boss early, although I'm not sure if he needs to be hidden behind one of the doors visible on the screen for it to work.

I've just replayed the haggleman challenges yesterday, its just all doors on screen that will turn the same color, but otherwise, you're right.
I'm also somewhat unsure if any not onscreen doors even move when you enter a door.

i'm getting excited since this project is slowly nearing its end stage

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

I'm dropping in to say I'm still testing the game from beginning to end, trying to pick up all of the dialogue in the game that runs over the border or has spelling errors or missing punctuation (lots of that last case) but everything is falling into place.

Also, I fixed the initial name entry screen to default to English (Roman) characters.

I did keep a few copies of the ROM image because I will need to test the Adventure Game(s) with the new background images...that reminds me, I missed one of the BG files:

The tiny blue text on the white tag on the table says "Reception" and the background on the wall is... a bug splat at that size. "CX Industries" should be fine given the context.

Oh, by the way I took a sneak peek at that "TV Game Exam" I threatened to translate after all of this. Well, I found where the text was stored but the whole game is just a series of overlay files and everything is embedded in them; I can't extract graphics at all unless I'm missing something. There isn't nearly as much text to do as I thought but without being able to get at the graphics for titles and menus I don't know how useful doing the rest of the text would be.

 

[GHANMI]

Well, I found where the text was stored but the whole game is just a series of overlay files and everything is embedded in them; I can't extract graphics at all unless I'm missing something. There isn't nearly as much text to do as I thought but without being able to get at the graphics for titles and menus I don't know how useful doing the rest of the text would be.

See if there is an alternate font somewhere
See if editing the text with 1-byte half-width katakana characters does display katakana in-game indeed (but it could also cause it to crash or not behave: a risky experiment in a nutshell so do it on a backup)

If the game does both of the above, you could do the "MTE trick" (aka Multi-tile encoding or whatever it's called):
You draw popular letter combinations to replace a single katakana character in the font (if there's enough space in the tile to draw more than one letter), say (ll) / ('s) / ('t) ... instead of (ｱ) / (ｲ) / (ｳ) ...
Then you could just use those characters or their corresponding hex code.. to type those two-letter English combinations as one.

I feel this would, besides saving you valuable text space, give a more authentic feel to the game. It was used in Crystalis (NES) and some 8-bit Megaman games, among other things. But somehow I think you are already using this trick

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Okay, haggleman's roman characters on the doors are now in place:

The backgrounds in the adventures...not so much. I'll need to look into this.

In other news, I'm fixing up the main dialogue text as I test it and that is going all right.

 

[Pix3l]

Here the new one:

I'm dropping in to say I'm still testing the game from beginning to end, trying to pick up all of the dialogue in the game that runs over the border or has spelling errors or missing punctuation (lots of that last case) but everything is falling into place.

Also, I fixed the initial name entry screen to default to English (Roman) characters.

I did keep a few copies of the ROM image because I will need to test the Adventure Game(s) with the new background images...that reminds me, I missed one of the BG files:

The tiny blue text on the white tag on the table says "Reception" and the background on the wall is... a bug splat at that size. "CX Industries" should be fine given the context.

Oh, by the way I took a sneak peek at that "TV Game Exam" I threatened to translate after all of this. Well, I found where the text was stored but the whole game is just a series of overlay files and everything is embedded in them; I can't extract graphics at all unless I'm missing something. There isn't nearly as much text to do as I thought but without being able to get at the graphics for titles and menus I don't know how useful doing the rest of the text would be.

 

[Freqman]

hehe ive been refreshing this thread constantly during the past week, following the progress, i hope we can see a patch soon!! i just finished retro game challenge 1 on NDS for the second time too, it was fun!

 

[richterw]

hehe ive been refreshing this thread constantly during the past week, following the progress, i hope we can see a patch soon!! i just finished retro game challenge 1 on NDS for the second time too, it was fun!

Same here, friend. GameCenterCX / RetroGameChallenge have infinite replay value.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Again, SubnetPie reveals he is a super genius at this whole graphic hacking thing:

 

[Taik]

Been following this thread since the beginning, checking everyday and it's really great to see the progress so often.
Retro Game Challenge was a huge surprise for me when I tried it years ago since I expected the usual shovelware collection of old games and instead got one of my favorite game ever (didn't know it was based on GameCenterCX, didn't even know that existed)

Anyway it's awesome so see this project so close to completion and I'm really dying to go play the sequel, thanks a lot everyone involved !

 

[Fishaman P]

Okay, haggleman's roman characters on the doors are now in place:

Have you tested the door combos? That's pretty important to the gameplay and would be hard to debug later if left forgotten.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

I'm testing it, hold on. I found a guide for the Koume version for all the codes:

EDIT> Okay, the life code works, though イロハ is "ABC" with the new tiles, so recovery is "CBA". Was is DBC in the first one? I don't actually mind if it is CBA because why not, this is a different version (special edition) of the game but I'd need to make sure any references to a code don't specifically say "D C B" (I don't recall seeing anything about the specific door titles in the magazines or conversation files...)

Oh, for everyone's reference, the bunch of us working on graphics, testing and other hackery fun have our own little private discussion area where we discuss the nitty gritty.

Most of the Adventure game background graphics are in the game now, I believe.

The Magazine and Manual artwork is still in progress and I'm testing the game from beginning to end to iron out the text translations since there were many spots that ran over the borders, etc.

 

[Vague Rant]

My understanding is that any three letter sequence works, so FED should work, DCB should work, and CBA should work, as well as the reverse for door colors.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Okay, that makes sense.

All right, I didn't expect to blast through most of the game in one day fixing text errors but that is going fine. I'm up to the Triotos challenges now and may actually finish the rest of the whole game by the end of the day. I'm up to the Super Demon Returns challenges now. Who knows, I might finish the whole game today. I'm at the Extra Challenges beyond the Super Demon Returns challenges. I finished the main game.

I did notice parts that still need translated graphics along the way and other things that were fine but I wanted to share them since I overload this thread with the same game sometimes, like the one I was working on at the moment.

GunDuel is fine in itself; nothing else to do, but there is a general "Now Playing" image on the bottom screen that sometimes appears. That happens with all the games, though.

Mutekiken Kung Fu doesn't have a translated title yet, but I think any random background chinese characters may be fine as is since it lends itself to the feel of the game anyway:

The secret Mutekiken arts may require translation but much like Fist of the North Star, it is going to be a mess trying to put these bizarre titles in English:

And even though most of the Adventure game backgrounds are in the game now (hooray!), I did notice a few small ones that still need to be done:

That's it for now. Once I get through the main dialogue I need to go back and pick apart the alignment, spelling, etc. of the Adventure games (and then the RPG later; some of the last parts still have not been properly tested)

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

http://aaronin.jp/shashin/arino2/.png

This link fails to work. I get a 404.

 

[Aeter]

Remove the slash.