Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Traverse is on long hold. I haven't heard from the hacker for ages...

Hey, at least with Lennus II we were able to transfer the old dumps to new dumps. Although we did run into a few issues with text not matching up and having to fix that stuff. The Lennus II project did have a stupid insertion system though. I like that way we work now over the other stuff.

By the way, how do you handle the insertion-stuff generally? I mean - you are experts . I guess you use certain tools, right? I personally type in every letter manually using SNESEdit which becomes very annoying, especially having those epic RPG-games with huge amounts of text.

At the time, Lennus-II was cutting edge for us, but I pestered you endlessly to get Feda more user friendly to the writer. I recall you doing a complete overhaul of the Feda system at one point. You weren't even sure the new way would work, at first.

Gosh, Bongo`... Now that I'm thinking about it, I hope you never make [newl] mandatory on every single line when an (invisible) carriage return can be coded to convey that same command!

Pete, from the standpoint of a writer who is not very code savvy, I would say that no one is really an out-and-out expert because each game is coded differently and presents its own unique challenges to the team. Bongo` is indeed a coding whiz, however, and the secret for him with the toughest jobs appears to be perseverance. I believe Bongo` actually dreams in code, because I've heard him say on a given day that a game is "impossible", that he's tried every conceivable approach. Then, he will sleep on it, wake up the next morning, say a new idea just came to him that probably won't work either, but it will end up working. So, Bongo`'s secret comes down to a combination of genius (or aptitude) and very hard work.

In case he doesn't see your question, Pete, I'll answer it as best I can. Yes, we use automated, highly customized insertion systems for each individual game, and we frequently reconfigure the ROM structure to accept the English input differently than it did the Japanese - using any number of reassembly changes (such as longer or re-shaped dialogue boxes, double line item names, and variable width fonts, for example). The four key words for customization are probably decompression, expansion, re-direction (of pointers), and recompression. In this way, we can not only tailor the English story to almost unlimited size, we can oftentimes reconfigure individual string sizes, structures, and built-in limitations, giving us near-total alacrity in crafting individual story scenes (such as we needed to do in Burning Heroes). In short, doing away with the byte by byte replacement method is like giving us a whole acreage to build a new home inside instead of just a cramped side lot.

I believe the one huge shift in the Lennus-II experience and others was when Bongo` abandoned dictionary compression. It was great in its time, but we have so much more space now using our present data manipulation techniques, ROM expansion, or both.

Thanks to Atlas, generic script insertion has come a long way. Except for special games it is compatible with virtually every game I've ever worked on and it has support for lots of pointer types etc.

Yeah that is true, but can it handle redirecting of text to a new bank on the fly AND still handle boundary checks? I hear Atlas is great but having a custome system works best. When it's all said and done, the text inserted is still at the mercy of Atlas' limitations ( if any ).

Yes, yes it can. I use Atlas for pretty much everything I do that doesn't involve a CD or DVD image. It worked fine for Mystic Ark, for example - despite its thousands of embedded pointers. It does just about everything.

Ahh yeah, I remember seeing an atlas script. you need to put quite a bit of stuff in those things.
I was gonna write an inserter that worked like a compiler.

Is that the one in which a writer could see how the VWF script layout would look on the actual game screen?

This might be the one you're looking for?