KingMike wrote:
I haven't posted to this thread in so many years?
Well, per filler's suggestion I looked again at the coding for Legend of Kagerou (when speaking to do that or Touch) to redo the text printing from vertical to horizontal.
It's the most convoluted thing I've looked at.
It's like I got the parts of the routine worked out. Now how they work together remains to be figured out and hopefully soon.
Like it seems it'll break the window drawing routine into parts A, B and C.
Instead of going directly from A to B, A will set some stuff that will tell it to jump to part B on the next NMI.
Maybe it was a way to break it down so that it won't try to write too much to VRAM at once (as the NES doesn't have a general purpose DMA like the SNES so it is more limited in what it can write each time) but it's complex.
(and also figuring out how to actually play Kagerou is something I'm still working at. Not sure if I can use healing Capsules in battle, which is kind of bad, as the game likes to spawn encounters at random. Sometimes even right after finishing a battle. It might be time-based, but sometimes so fast that I don't know if even spamming A after winning a battle to open the menu before an enemy spawns would work. I figured out Select is the "run away" button, but if it wasn't successful it will spawn another battle, and I think my guy can still take hits just running off the screen. Still not sure if dead party members can be revived or if there is a proper place to refill health Capsules, or if I just have to farm them from random drops. EXP seems to exist but is a hidden value (I just suddenly level-up after fighting a bunch of enemies), like Aretha GB. It seems like HP is restored at the starting place, or maybe just over time on the overworld.)
Though I banged out some progress on another couple of my oldest works.
I think I figured out Satomi Hakkenden's text format completely. Wrapped up in a couple layers of pointers, it seems the game can tell the text system to print less than all of the text in a message. The thing is that value it sends to the function also uses a couple bits to tell it which text format to use, which is important for dumping text correctly. I think I got it and will need to work on dumping then. At least I wrote myself one full example in case I forget later.
Last, taking a look at RPG Maker 2, it seems that long time spent on RPGM1 might have paid off. It seems to be similar enough that I could document like 99% of the SRAM map. And just finding a couple windows to expand as an example, it looks similar in that regard too. Just a couple header bytes I can't identify in the scenario format The other holes are by the Title data and some in the Enemy Map section, which I don't think are critical for translation purposes) but I suspect are unused. Maybe a third byte for free SRAM size, were they maybe considering 128KB at some point? (the largest used SNES SRAM size)
So...Are you translating all out, or just considering projects? Many games left with your name on them. Could sure use the experience.