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...