I received my Box today and I have to compliment Ben on his excellent Hintbook. Great Job!

While we are on this topic. Is the protocol spoken by the Ext. port documented somewhere? I looked for it a while ago but couldn’t find much information. I’m not so much interested in having 2 VB communicating. Connecting something like an Arduino to a VB would be pretty cool though.

Brilliant, thanks.

I just had brief look at the game but it looks like walls, doors and so on are drawn using BGMaps while enemies are drawn using objects. Do you know the position of the respective CharSeq, BGMaps and so on (I don’t really know how Objects work but I assume quite similar to BGMaps)? I assume the BGMaps/Objects are stored in a compressed format? Do you know how that format works?

Also, are there Pointer-Arrays somewhere that identify the respective BGMaps/Objects?

HorvatM wrote:
Nice. But I already knew how to do that. 🙂

I know you pretty much completely reverse engineered this game and that you have created a pretty much complete ROM map. Do you consider publishing your results in some form?

I was thinking about replacing some more images and stuff. I don’t want to go through the whole work you did again though.

HorvatM wrote:
Nice. But I already knew how to do that. 🙂

🙂 I guessed so. I reused the tool I’ve written for SpaceSquash to replace the BGMap. Some more tweaks and I might release it (even though no one will ever use it).

Attachments:

1. 

   herrenhaus.von_.insmouse.jpg
   

Hey,

I changed something. Try to figure out what…

Attachments:

1. mario.madness.title_.patch_.2.zip
2. mansion-of-insmouse-mario-madness-edition-2.zip

Here is the final version including a translated control screen. Tell me if something is broken, I didn’t test allot.

Attachments:

1. spacesquash.patch2_.zip

OK then, here we go. I attached a patched ROM that has the translated character names. I tested if the names look fine by setting the name for the first opponent. I also played through the game a bit but SNAKU eventually kicked my ass. Maybe someone else can do it and check out if everything works fine. I also noticed that PAOZO uses his own name in one of his responses. As the names now changed it would be good if someone goes through the translation and check if there are inconsistencies.

Yesterday I started on my tool to replace Chars and BGMaps. It is basically a very simple thing that allows me to read in files produced by VIDE and write those into the ROM. It also writes the asm code to the ROM and calculates the jump positions and all that tedious stuff for me. It is not completely done yet but everything looked fine so far.

Attachments:

1. spacesquash.patch1_.zip

I also looked deeper into how the control screen works because I thought I might be able to just use a different alphabet there as well. From what I see this might be possible. However, the “Controller Functions” title is an image and not text. Meaning I would have to do a BGMap replacement for that part anyway. So I guess I will just replace the whole map as I initially planned.

btw. is there some kind of cheat to fight against other enemies or jump to later levels? I would like to test everything but don’t want to play through the whole thing over and over again.

I attached a screenshot. I looks even worse. Honestly I would prefer max. 5 letter names like:

METAB
PAOZO
RABIX
BURLE
SNAYQ
KOMRE
MONKI
LYONE

It is your translation though. I will go with whatever you prefer.

Attachments:

1. 

   weltraummansch-1.jpg
   

This is great. I was hoping you gonna release it soon after I saw the demo.

OK…. I had a brilliant idea a hour ago and had to try it out. Basically, SpaceSquash uses address offsets to the char memory to write text onto a BGMap (quite similar to libgccvb). The problem was that the character names would always use a Japanese alphabet. However, I noticed that there is a Latin alphabet already in the char memory. For using it I had to modify what is loaded as an alphabet offset which I located at 500118A. So I changed what is stored there for both names which resulted in the use of Latin letters.

I already located the character names at 0x3DD28 and a pointer array to those names at 0x3DD60. So I wrote the new names into a free spot in the ROM and modified the pointer to point there. And that’s already it.

However, there is one problem left. While I can use 7 letters for the player name, there are only 5 letters for the name of the opponent. If you look at the original names you will notice that none of them has more then 5 letters. If I use more then that the name cuts through the image (as in the screenshot).

So… either Ben comes up with shorter names or I will do it like that.

Attachments:

1. 

   weltraummansch.jpg
   

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

thunderstruck wrote:

Hacking around in the ROMS is more fun then expected and after all of that work that went into doing the translation it would be a shame to not patch the whole ROM.

I looked into how the game handles the character names this evening. Somehow I didn’t run into the problems Greg had so far. I guess I’m using a different approach. I figured out how the game handles the names and where they are stored in the ROM. I can change the names using the characters that are loaded to the memory. Meaning I can change what is written there, but only to other Japanese characters. There are some Latin letters (B D E K L N O Q R X Z) but I will need more to write the correct names there.

The solution to this is simple. I will have to copy some new letters to the memory. Well, but not this evening.

Excellent! Sounds like you will have it all figured out soon, then.

I think many people will agree that of the 8 Japan-only games, Space Squash is by far the best and, therefore, deserved a North American/English release the most. It will be great to see that dream realized at last!

I played it for the first time (on emulator) to tackle the translation problems and was surprised how much fun it is. Have to check it out on hardware. Unfortunately, my displays started getting glitchy when I did the final testing for Faceball.

Wyndcrosser wrote:
Highly Interested. Maybe you can help me expand the character size for Virtual Fishing lol.

One problem at a time 🙂
But if you have a problem you can’t solve just write a post about. History shows that I will eventually look into it.

Lester Knight wrote:
i love how this community has been revived the past few months. thank you for all of your hard work thunderstruck. i had always dreamed of a day when all of the ROMs were translated. we are well on our way.

Hacking around in the ROMS is more fun then expected and after all of that work that went into doing the translation it would be a shame to not patch the whole ROM.

I looked into how the game handles the character names this evening. Somehow I didn’t run into the problems Greg had so far. I guess I’m using a different approach. I figured out how the game handles the names and where they are stored in the ROM. I can change the names using the characters that are loaded to the memory. Meaning I can change what is written there, but only to other Japanese characters. There are some Latin letters (B D E K L N O Q R X Z) but I will need more to write the correct names there.

The solution to this is simple. I will have to copy some new letters to the memory. Well, but not this evening.

I looked deeper into the problem with control screen today, meaning I used mednafen and RealityBoy to look into what is going on. So far it seems like it could simply be done by loading a different image for the respective BGMap, quite similar to what I did with the Faceball logo.

I have already created a translated image which I gonna put into the ROM. I wanted to write a little tool to replace BGMaps in Roms anyway, so I gonna take the long route one more time.

The character names on the vs screens seem to be more complicated though.

jumpman wrote:
Sadly, this will only happen once the 3DS is hacked. Miyamoto said in an interview that it would be possible, but due to time, cost, and efforts required, we will never see it on an official basis.

I think they would sell rather well on the e-shop, especially if they are priced right. There are a handful of VB games that are actually very good, and would appeal to new gamers as well as old schoolers like myslef.

Also, for them to ever release VB games, would also be showing the public one of their past “Failures”, and Nintendo’s pride/ego are way to BIG to allow that to happen.

The red/black would also be an issue for most, so it really is unlikely, and without a HUGE push or want from the gaming community, I’m sure it will never happen(at least officially, Wink, Wink). LOL

I gave up on hoping that VB games will officially make it to the 3DS a while ago. I could imagine they are doing a 3D remake of Wario like they did with other games like Excite Bikes and Kid Ikarus. In the end it is a solid game and would even be better in full color.

Still, I doubt it will ever happen. Then again, I also though there would never be a re-release of Earthbound.

I just had a first look at Space Squash. Took me a while to find the control screen. I think that one can be changed with relatively low effort. I didn’t look into the code yet, so there might be a surprise waiting for me.

The character names on the versus screen seem to be more complicated though.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

thunderstruck wrote:

I just checked and I still have the vector graphics of the translated Space Squash manual. So if there are some typos or stuff I can provide you guys with an improved version.

I think a lot of rework on the first manual is going to have to occur. Uncle Tusk said that the less pages for a manual, the better, and right now, the original manual has a lot of pages, and the information on them can be condensed into far fewer pages, so I will probably try to do that. Plus, the current translation is a very literal translation of the Japanese text, which doesn’t read very smoothly to an English-speaker, admittedly. Thus, I was going to try to reword it to make it more presentable and similar to the official English VB instruction booklets. Not only that, but Emulator screenshots should be made to replace the poor quality scans of the in-game screenshots on the original instruction booklet pages, so I was also planning to make those.

Well, just tell me if you want the svg files then. If done everything with inkscape, so stuff is easy to change. For my version of the manual I’ve redrawn the IPS adjustment image and the controller overview image. So you want get a better quality if you clean up a scan.