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...