You know what kept me up last night? Finding out that a kiosk demo for Rhythm Heaven GBA has made its way into the wild. There's
videos of it online.
Demoban’s very first ever cartridge dump is here and it’s a bit of a doozy: a retail demo for the very first Rhythm Heaven game on the GBA! In terms of content, there’s not a whole lot to it. You can play three minigames from the first tier, the karate punch one, the onion hair pulling one, and the monkey clapping one, as well as an abridged version of the rhythm test you normally have to take when starting up the game for the first time. As a cartridge used to let the Japanese public get a taste for the game about a month before its release, there’s therefore not a whole lot in the way of differences from the final version, save for one notable thing: reminders strewn in every minigame about the budget price point of 3800 yen, as pictured above. It’s charming in its brazenness, really.
That being said, this demo was, I believe, one of the very last official GBA cartridges that went undumped long after the DS had taken the spotlight. Information even in Japanese is so hard to come by, in fact, that when I first came across it, I was skeptical about its legitimacy, but bought it just in case since it seemed to be extremely rare, even on Yahoo Japan. And luckily for us all, it seems to be the real deal! I have no idea how many other cartridges still exist out there in the wild, as this is the only one I’ve ever come across myself, so suffice it to say I’m glad I could grab this and make it happen while I could. Here’s hoping I keep having good luck in the future!
It looks like the full game, or almost all of it, is on the cart!
Here's a comparison between our script and what's on the ROM. Note that the Cafe isn't accessible in the demo at all (from the YouTube videos, at least.)
// 0x8050304
//[l
//でも もし、ドラムで 選挙演説とか[l
//ボンゴで 夫婦ゲンカとかあったら[l
//やかましそうですネ。ははは。[;
// --- Literal
//But then, if we made election speeches with drums[l
//or had couple-fights with bongos and such[l
//it would be noisy, don't you think? Ha ha ha![;
// --- Edited
Then again, if we gave speeches[l
with bongos or the neighbors[l
argued with trumpets, it'd get[l
noisy, don't you think? Ha ha ha.[l
[;
A search for the JPN text for Remix 5 (リミックス 5) also returns a result. There's no reason for Remix 5 to be in the demo, so this cart should have most of the same data as the final game. Want to win my heart? Compare the demo ROM with the final game, and note all the differences. Bonus points for using our tools and ripping out all the graphics you can that are different in some way. Seriously, I'm gonna look at this ROM when I have time.
I don't know why I didn't respond to any of these, perhaps being busy (especially in late August). Here we go.
I would also like to point out Fever's vocals as being a step up from DS's vocals, though I know a lot of people prefer the japanese versions still.
Agreed on that. I've actually never finished RH DS, only got about 2 columns in. (See my signature for my unfinished attempt to add controller support to emulators for the game.) If I ever revisit the RH DS no touching project, I'd probably use Lua scripts to reduce lag, jank, and increase cross-platform compatibility and combustibility. Right now it emulates the mouse pointer in Windows and sends those commands naively to the emulator.
Anyway, what I want to do is have a process where lyrics are made first and solidified to be as best as they can be, so fitting to the game but also to the song itself as much as possible. After the lyrics are then set, I would go out and try to find someone to sing it, preferably a fan of the series.
Aanyway, I don't expect this work to get into the project, I know work is stalled right now, but I would love to try.
I'm all for it. Keep in mind the vocals are sampled, and look through the thread and source code for guidance. I don't know how complicated it will be taking the vocals and putting them into the game as samples. The basic voice command games (for example, Marcher) are pretty simple - you just drop in your samples for "left", "right", and so on. I'm not committing to doing any more work on this project, but if you give me a ready-made patch I'd link it from the OP and even the Twitter page (if I remember the log in, I think I do).
Just wanted to thank you guys for the excellent work you put in Rhythm Tengoku Silver. I love playing this on my GBA!
(yes, I came here because I read the entire credits email)
I could never figure out how obvious it was that there was more text after the second page of the Welcome email. I didn't want to make it too obvious (too self-important, IMO), but I also didn't want it to be a total secret easter egg. Nice of Nintendo and JP Room to include a good text viewer in their game, though manually formatting the text for it was a pain.
First of all, the translation you made for the is great, I am glad you made some of your own jokes and not just directly translated everything. I would love to see the project be completed.
Thanks! Making my own jokes that I felt fit the Rhythm Heaven style was the most fun part. I think SirNiko enjoyed the joke-writing as well.
Did making english voices actually go somewhere? It seems there talks about it for a while. I would like to see it in there, possibly even the songs, if you find good singers. As one of the weirdos who thinks that the ds dub was fantastic, I would to see an attempt to do that, though getting the non song voice acting is more important.
See above. It's pretty much my fault. Of all my fan projects, this one is one I really value, so I do want to revisit it, but who knows when that will be.
Perssonally, I would like all the names to be changed to be like megamix, i feel like it would be weird to translate some but not all, even though i agree that some names such as cheese hiest are better than the new ones.
Nothing stopping you from changing the text yourself, but then you have to redo the graphics.
Edit:I downloaded the source code to mess around a bit but for some reason the text is much bigger than its supposed to be.
You need to use the font patch on the Rhythm Tengoku (J) ROM. The font patch v4.ips should be included with the source code. The patcher program works on ROMs that already have the font patch. The font you're seeing on your unpatched rom uses "
fullwidth" text, straight from the JPN game.