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...