The last bunch is some of my oldest work (Satomi and the RPG Makers), that I had sitting around since I started doing translations but couldn't really figure out what to do.
I'm sad that Famicom Board Game Rail King is another in that. One of my first ASM hacks but still hadn't finished as I hadn't looked into the code deeply enough to add ROM expansion (requiring a mapper hack) to get it working without glitches. The text was translated forever though.
Though someone has since done their own translation patch of the game so it's a lower concern.
Weird is that I have the graphics decompression on RPGM1 all figured out but what's odd is that they pre-flipped some of the tiles seemingly randomly before they compressed it. I could just recompress it as it is with a bit of work. (just another LZ variation otherwise like most SNES compressed graphics seem to be) (the title screen, literally the only graphic in the game that would need replacement. I only used KanjiHack's Naga for figuring out the game's existing VWF tile format so I could make a replacement set of programs to dump/insert to a normal 1bpp font) Menus were a total pain as not only did the game have a custom bytecode format that I had to figure out to do "ASM" mods on but it's menu code was also a pain. I'm not even sure HOW MANY things had to be tracked down FOR EACH of the MANY windows in the game. Hardcoded bytecode for the window size, dimensions, size and position to backup a window before replacing it, size and position to restore the window, size and position of highlighting, size and position of de-highlighting, position and range of movement of cursors, etc.
And then there is the sample game. Had to completely figure out the format of the event data to be able to write tools to dump/insert it. The end result is still quite bad IMO but it's at least understandable and that is WITH hacking DTE into the text input system to cram it back into the hard limit of roughly 17KB (since it's an edit-able game I'm constrained to the amount of SRAM allocated to it, unlike probably any other game you could want to translate).
In terms of how effectively that SRAM can be used to store the sample game (and thus possibly user game),
English still lo
ses a bit of spa
ce since unlik
e Japanese we ca
n't just cut o
ff lines whereve
r we feel like it
.
(losing some space to adding spaces to pad out lines so we get proper formatted text at least, trying to stay as close to spec of the ingame edited text as possible when inserting, to avoid unforseen bugs)
Nintendo Power wasn't lying when they said the sample game was 8-10 hours long. It is a short game that can probably be fully played in a few hours. (less when you don't have to worry about getting the boat and slowly driving through encounters you can rarely escape from, only to end up getting a line of text that crashes the game so then you have to go fix that line and have lost half or an hour of gameplay progress since you saved
)