Oh yeah, I still have this thing...

Hooray, it's time for another pointless update!

Um, yeah, I don't think I've done much of anything regarding the usual projects since the last time I posted. Although, maybe I did, and it's just been so long that I forgot about it...

I started working on a Final Fire Pro editing program, but of course that hasn't gotten very far, either. The plan was to allow easy editing of the default wrestlers and "Management of Ring" data (wrestlers, groups, titles, etc.) in the ROM and even the save file, but I think all I've really finished is the design of the MOR group edit form:



Yeah...

I mean, I know how to program all the things I had in mind, it's just usually too much of a hassle to take the time to actually do it. Besides, I'm working on a different type of program(s) which I place a much higher priority on (sorry to the FFPW crew :P), but I really don't want to get into that just yet...

*shifty eyes*

Oh, as a follow-up to my last post, the "KOC2 doesn't like my hacked wrestler" thing was due to the total edit points exceeding the limit, rather than the individual parameters, and I still haven't tested out my theory about expanding the move data in FFP.

Guess I'll see you in another ten months or so (when I'll once again have no real news...)

Blah blah blah...

So, over the past week or two, I've been sporadically messing with ye olde wrestling game hacking stuff.

First, I found out that King of Colosseum II apparently doesn't like h4x0red r4ssl3rs...

I wanted to see if you could make an overpowered character by setting the attack parameters higher than a '10', like how my stupid old program FPDEdit allowed for Fire Pro D. Since I figured there'd be some sort of save checksum, I didn't even try to edit the save file in a hex editor, but used a RAM editor while running KOC2 in the PCSX2 emulator.

I found the right spot(s) in memory, changed the values, and checked out the move selection menu, where sure enough the wrestler had his ridiculously high stats assigned. So, I backed out and saved to the virtual memory card. At this point, I can't remember for sure if I went back to the edit menu, tried a match in the emulator or copied the save file to the real PS2 memory card and played the match there...

Whatever I did, I eventually found out that during either the memory card save or load process, the game reset all the wrestler's stats to default. The thing is, I don't know if it was solely because of the parameters or because the total edit points exceeded the limit, and I never got around to testing if there was a way around it...

I did get it to work somewhat, though, as I later changed the values in RAM again, and then went directly to a match rather than saving the changes to the file, where the changes stayed intact.

There are also other 'hidden' wrestler appearance parts and moves in the game, but I haven't seen if it's possible to save those to file yet, either...

On to Final Fire Pro, I got to working on the translation again, and of course like every time I do so, I wound up getting distracted by playing the game. By the end of my MOR season, my original fed had EVERY GROUP'S TITLE. The title list on the ranking screen was hilarious, as my fed had between 700-800k points, while the rest had ZERO. In fact, it was so many points, that I would've wound up ranked first overall even if I would've been last in all the other categories. :P

Of course, I constantly 'cheat' while I'm playing, but still... :X

Anyway, I also had a thought that it may be possible to expand the move/animation data, so that I'm not limited to the currently used space if I wanted to add more moves, but I still need to test the theory out... And of course, it'll take forever for me to actually USE that space even if it is doable, but SUCKAS GOTS TO KNOW!

WTF

YOU STOLE MY MOVE!

Obligatory update

Figured it was about long enough since my last update to post here again, so here we go...

For those that care (all two of you), I was continuing to work on Final Fire Pro since my last post, but stopped half-way through October, at least partially due to the Phillies playoff run ("World FUCKING Champions", says Chase Utley), and didn't get back into it completely for months (though I did mess with it sporadically), between working on other projects and (gasp) actually playing other games.

That brings us to the first week of April, when I decided to get away from the FPC and ZOMG for a bit, and not surprisingly, I got working on the FFP translation again. Really, it seems just like in 'real life', I get far more done if I'm away from my friends, as frankly, I'll get NO work done otherwise, because I just tend to goof around instead...

Of course, now the problem is there's a new distraction. My birthday was last week, and between gifts and birthday money to put towards purchases of my own, the end result is me now having a new medium-sized LCD TV for my bedroom (where I usually play video games) to replace my crappy 20 year old set, a component cable for the PS2 (holy shit, what a difference in picture clarity that makes compared to composite), Venture Bros. Season 3 DVD set, and (wait for it) King of Colosseum II. Yes, after all these years, JB finally has a KOC.

So I've spent most of my free time this past week with KOC2, between playing and messing around in edit mode, so I don't know how long it'll take me to touch FFPW again...

Anyway, as far as Final Fire Pro progress goes, I translated a few more graphical menus (there can't be more than a handful of those left to do at this point), and have been doing more general text translation work which hasn't actually been implemented in the game yet. The reason for that being that I realized shortly after I restarted this project that the length of the MOR messages didn't necessarily have to be limited to the amount of lines the original Japanese text used.

Like, say the default text was only two lines; before I would have tried to fit the English translation into two lines, which a lot of the time is fine, but sometimes, you have to cut a good deal out of an ideal sentence/paragraph to make it fit and it would help to have that third line (or even more, if you're dealing with 'multi-page' messages). I think it will be easier to do all the pointer work after all the text has been decided upon ahead of time (especially since I'm changing the number of lines in many messages), so I'm holding off on actually implementing the text until I'm fully done translating each section.

The only other thing I'm having any sort of trouble with is my font replacement idea I mentioned a while back, which is more of a 'tedious' problem than a difficult one. I would have to write a program to render the final output, as I really don't want to do more than 3000 characters manually, but even then I need to at least type in the code for each individual letter/number/symbol that I'm going to use. I also drew up other letters for foreign languages (accented vowels and the like), but I don't know how I'd want to put them in, as there wouldn't be enough room to do the double-letter character thing with them and I don't think I can just replace the original single-letter roman characters, because I may need to keep those in the game. I've probably got plenty of time to figure that out, though.

Eh, guess that's more than enough for now...

The Most Tedious Blog Post Yet

Pardon the nekkid Fujinami guy, as I just used the default new wrestler.

Also ignore the fact that the parameter and move names are still in Japanese...

Anyway, this ordinary looking screenshot actually represents a new breakthrough in my hacking of the game.

Here's what it looked like in the original version:


And here's the shot from Fire Pro Wrestling 2:


See to the left of the parameters where it says main and sub? In Japanese, you can have a single symbol represent the word or concept, but it usually requires more space when written in English. Well, I didn't like the idea of having to write "main" on two lines like it was in FPW2, so I made those boxes (and by extension that whole section) wider to make it fit.

(Everything on the screen except for the parameter names and values, affinity grade, the wrestler(s) and the cursor(s) are part of the background(s), which are made up of tiles. The layout of these tiles come from a tile map.)

Now, making the new graphics and creating the new tile map is relatively simple (for me), but if you were to just do that, the screen would look something like this:


Yeah, the text up top is now out of alignment because the game doesn't know that I moved the boxes that lay underneath it. You have to TELL the hardware where that text is supposed to go, and the existing code tells it that it should be where the boxes used to be. Fixing that is not as easy as working with the tiles, as it actually requires altering some of the programming.

See, everything that I've done up to this point has been changing text, graphics, palettes, tile maps, pointer tables and other assorted data. But that stuff is just that -- data. You don't really need any programming knowledge to mess with it. The game knows how to load and deal with this information.

But by modifying the actual code, you could change HOW it deals with the data, and that's what I had to do to get the text at the proper offset.

So, I've actually learned a little about assembly language. I mean, as far as assembly hacks go, this is pretty basic, but it's a start...

The funny thing is, once you know where to look, changing that programming can be done in a matter of seconds, while dealing with the "simple" graphic designing takes for-frigging-ever.

With this new knowledge, I've also gotten distracted from my translation work a few times, as I started looking over the programming, trying to figure out how things in the actual match engine work -- even things that I basically know how they work, like damage calculations, but now I'm trying to get more insight into it all by deciphering the actual code behind it.

It's kind of interesting (to a nerd like myself) to see just how many instructions are going on behind the scenes in a fraction of a second to make everything in the game tick...

A Blast From the Past

lulz

TWO DAYS LATER EDITTO:

Perhaps I should've written a little more...

I just posted this video on YouTube, but it's from at least 3 1/2 years ago (hence the post title), when I tested out porting a few moves from FPZ into the GBA games. For this experiment I used FPW2(US), even though if I ever put this stuff into a game FOR REALZ I'd use Final Fire Pro.

Two other videos actually exist of other moves I did (I think Dave put one on his YouTube channel), but that's all the testing I've done, and I'm not even gonna get back into this until the FFP translation is finished...

Back again, but for how long...?

I finally put the link to this blog in my sig and/or profile at FPZOMG! and FPC, so it's possible somebody else might actually stumble upon it eventually. I mean, Davey's the only person I bothered to tell about it, lawl...

In typical JB fashion, I posted about working on the FFP hack, and then after a couple more days, I proceed to not touch the damn thing for three months.

So, yeah, that means that I just got back to it...

I figured out the cause of the annoying bug from my old ROM that I mentioned in my last post (which is just a botched cursor when going into the initial MoR booking screen), because I wound up having the same thing happen in my new translation... Turns out there are too many text characters in the description in the preceding menu, which runs over into the space in RAM where the cursor tiles are supposed to be. (For some reason, the game loads up these graphics before they're even needed. If they didn't get called into memory until the corresponding menu also gets loaded, this wouldn't be a problem.)

Anyway, I have a solution to this that also ties into extending the naming limitations: replacing the kanji with double romaji characters.

Now, this is different from the hack Dave did with two ASCII characters simply typed in place of the kanji codes. That might work for the name entry screens (though even then there are some issues with this method), but it wouldn't do anything to help the characters from running over their intended space in the RAM.

See, each character takes up the same room there regardless of its width when actually in use, meaning the 12-pixels-wide kanji and 6-pixels-wide romaji are treated as equals. And the fact that many more romaji characters can fit on the screen is why the graphics run long in RAM.

Ah, but two of those 6-pixel romaji could fit in the same space as the 12-pixel kanji and be counted by the RAM as only one character, meaning it'd only take up half the space there and it'd fit without any troubles. But, in order to do that, I've got to replace the actual font, which might be a rather tedious undertaking...

It's also interesting (and by "interesting", I mean "fucking boring") that the game has many more characters in the font than what's listed on the name entry screens. For instance, there are a handful of Greek and Russian letters selectable when you go to name things, but the full alphabets are actually in the ROM. That's right, all this time you could've been using the Strangle Hold Lambda, but those bastards at Spike held out on us.

Yeah, this is exactly why I have this blog. I can ramble on about frickin' fonts for 27 paragraphs without worrying about cluttering up somebody's message board...

Hmm, I wanted to post some other shit (and possibly some more screenshots), but I forgot what it was. Guess that'll happen when it takes you almost 2 hours to finish a fucking blog post...

FFP Update with PICS~!

I have actually been working on the Final Fire Pro translation again! I know it's hard to believe, but I actually did something I said I was going to do...

Last week I decided to start over with a new ROM rather than continue the one I had started, like, five freakin' years ago. Bah gawd, has it been that long already...?

There was this odd bug in my old version, which didn't really affect the function of the game at all, but it still bugged me (pun unintended), and I had no idea what caused it, which along with the jumbled mess of iffy translations the hack had become, inspired me to start over.

Anyway, things are going much faster this time around, as I've got more experience than I did when I was working on the old one (in translating from Japanese, altering this particular game and ROM hacking in general). I've finally been doing the menu graphics, too! After I literally worked one whole day on one menu screen, I've gotten better at the whole process, and I've done quite a few more in the following days, as can be seen here:







YEAH!

Still have a lot more to go...

...

Plus re-doing a million lines of text... D'oh!

Final Fire Pro Wrestling Introduction

Likely the most widely anticipated of the translations/hacks I've publicly revealed I was working on is for the GBA game, Final Fire Pro Wrestling. Sure, the game was (sort of) ported to the US, but it featured less wrestlers than its Japanese counterpart and cut out the "Management of Ring" mode, which was, like, THE MAIN FREAKIN' MODE OF THE GAME! I mean, the subtitle of FFP was something like "Organization Management of Dream", but modes like that get eliminated from US ports of Japanese games far too often.

Unfortunately, there have been loooooong periods of time where I haven't worked on it at all, thus it remains unfinished five years after starting it... I did resume working on it again recently, but got sidetracked by Fight da Pon! However, for the foreseeable future, I'll probably be concentrating on both Fight da Pon! and Final Fire Pro, and alternate between the two. Hopefully they both get finished before my interest fizzles out yet again...

Not only was I intending to translate the whole thing into English, but I had ideas of adding new moves (there's unused room that can be used for this), improving animations of some others already in the game, putting real promotion logos into the game, updating the roster, and whatever other tweaks I can come up with, basically making it a fan-made "Fire Pro Wrestling 3". The downside to making a "new" game out of it rather than just a translation is that it would require a new save file, meaning players would have to recreate all their wrestler edits. I was considering making two patches, though: one with the full hack and one with just the translation, so people can use whichever they'd prefer.

WHAT'S FIGHT DA PON!?!

The project I'm currently working on is a translation of Zennihon Puroresu: Fight da Pon! (or "Bong's Fight!" as a certain auto-translated chat participant calls it), an odd Japanese SNES game featuring the wrestlers of All-Japan Pro Wrestling moving around a board-game map, facing off against each other and strange fictional characters from the Black Pro Wrestling group in card-battle wrestling matches and participating in wacky cutscenes complete with canned laughter. Yes, this game has a laugh track, and it is awesome.

Thus far, I have played through the game and transcribed the entire script (as far as I know), but only have a small portion of it translated. Though I can tell you, the game is funny enough without even being able to undertsand the dialogue, but the parts I've deciphered are as strange as you'd imagine.

Also found some oddities, as there are some control codes that can be utilized within the dialogue that aren't actually used in the game, which led me to wonder if the game was built on a preexisting engine. They might not be of much use in this translation, but I figured out something new so I have to talk about it here...

On to some bad news, it turns out a good deal of the graphics (including the technique cards) are compressed, meaning I'll have to crack the compression scheme and write decompression and compression programs before being able to fully translate the game. I've just started on the first step, so we'll see how long it takes to complete (if it ever gets done).

I've also encountered the first of what's sure to be many translation problems, where there's a pun in Japanese that doesn't make sense when translated to English. Still trying to figure out what to do with those two sentences, but I've got time since it'll take a while to translate everything else and put a new font into the game before I can start figuring out exactly how much space I'll even have for this dialogue.

All this for Fight da Pon!...

o hay gusy s^ n/m u

I was bored and decided to start a crappy blog where I can write about my various video game manipulation enterprises. Yes, now people can read about dozens of unfinished hacking and translation projects that remain untouched on my hard drive for years at a time! Whoopdeedoo! Who knows, maybe this'll inspire me to actually finish some of these things. (Not bloody likely...)

I should note the blog title is a bit facetious, as I'm not really that advanced of a game hacker. I'm more of an "intermediate" level, with a few special interests (i.e. Fire Pro games) that I'm intimately familiar with...

Anyway, enough of the introduction, I should probably start posting some actual content.