UHATEIT wrote:
This is amazing! I had the patched one that still had the Japanese title screen and some other Japanese things in the game. This looks amazing with the full translation!

I know someone posted the translated instructions somewhere too, so I need to get that since I have no clue how to pull the damn fish back once it bites!

Yeah, I needed a break and released the half done translation. The remaining screens actually didn’t took that much work. But damn, that work was annoying.

VmprHntrD wrote:
Love that last image with the screaming monster, seems useful.

Just really posting to say great job all around and on the final cobbling of all that into a working translated game. I forgot it had never been done, and it was like the last big one needed (I think) around Gundam, Fishing, and Space Squash. Virtaul Lab maybe? I’ve never attempted it.

Again thanks, and great job. I’ve got a flashboy so this should be fun to take a crack at as time allows.

I did remove the Japanese from Virtaul Lab, translated the remaining few things in Space Squash and did the complete translation for Fishing.

Always wanted to translate the title screen in Gundam. I think VTetris has some screens that can be translated as well.

Thanks everyone.

HorvatM wrote:
Disturbing? I don’t remember seeing anything that wasn’t already shown in the game. But I know I haven’t mapped the whole ROM yet. If you tell me the addresses, I’ll add them to the list.

Yeah, I thought for a moment I found some hidden images but they all ended being used in the endings. It seems like that’s what’s missing from your current map. I also didn’t really debug the ROM or anything. Just looked at charsets and BgMaps that happened to be in the empty spots of your map. Still, disturbing stuff if you look at them out of context. I attached some.

I have to say that your analysis made this work so much easier. I also included you into the credits in case you didn’t see it.

I will provide you with a detailed list of my findings as soon as I have my tool done.

VirtuousRage wrote:
You’re the best Thunderstruck!!!

It was really fun making all the sprite edits for the patch. 🙂

I should have pointed this out more clearly in my initial post. While I did patch the ROM VirtuousRage is the one who did the translation and did painstakingly create the image for the translated credits. He also made the new title screen logo. I just slapped everything together and patched it into the ROM.

VirtuousRage wrote:
Thanks again for helping me complete this project that began 2 years ago! One step closer to the finish line~!

It was really fun working with you. I can think of many more ROM hacks we can do.

Attachments:

1. 

   charset_wtf.png
   

2. 

   charset_hand.png
   

3. 

   bgmap_thunderstruck.png
   

4. 

   bgmap_screamingmonster.png
   

Ferris Bueller wrote:
Hello there!

You may not know me, but in many circles I’m know as the Aftermarket Archivist. My goal is to collect all Nintendo aftermarket games with the focus of creating a library for research and historical purposes. I know, it’s an odd calling, but I love this stuff.

My aftermarket VB collection is complete, with the exception of one game: Virtual Fall. I finally managed to find a FlashBoy CIB (first edition), leaving just one game left. I totally missed the ebay auction in the fall due to it being international and eBay being dumb and not showing it to me for some reason.

Want to fund another project? Need money for life changes? I’m your guy. I pay fair and it will go to a good home. Ask around, I never sell and I cherish my games. I’m also the guy who has the two-player VB display at the Let’s Play Gaming Expo each year, with the AV modded out VB so people can watch the Hyper Fighting tournament.

WTB: Virtual Fall

Hey Ferris,

The Virtual Fall cart has actually never been sold. Every participant in the coding competition got a copy. So there are like 10 copies in existence. Making it pretty rare now that I think about it.

HorvatM wrote:
I had a quick look at the ROM. The main debug menu function (which prints the “round select” string at 40140 by calling 2E2C) seems to be at FF6 (F20 in “Kitaro’s” ROM), but it is indeed not called from anywhere.

If you set the PC to 7000FF6 in Mednafen’s debugger, you will get there, but the text won’t be visible because the worlds/charsets are not set up. From there, you can press L or use the left D-pad to get to the round selection mode (which seems to be buggy), or A to go to some other menu (function AA4), which will play one sound and then freeze.

At 12AA is the sound test function. You can access it by first setting the PC to 7000FF6, then to 70012AA (but not directly or it will freeze). You can use the left D-pad and A to choose and play sounds. Again, nothing of use will be visible on the screen.

To summarize, the important addresses are:
5CC: vbReadPad equivalent, never called directly but only from 7F4
AA4: Function that references the “another stage” string
7F4: Wrapper for 5CC, also resets the game on L+R+B+A+Select+Start
8BE: Called from within FF6, indirectly calls 5CC
FF6: Main debug menu function, references the “round select” string
12AA: Sound test mode function, references the “sound test mode” string
2E2C: Text printing function?
40000: “another stage”
40140: “round select”
4014D: “sound test mode”

I don’t have the source code (what are the rules regarding its usage anyway?), so this is just a stab in the dark. You might already know all this.

The “round select” and “sound test” methods are still in the code. That’s most likely what you found at FF6 and 12AA. They do exactly what their name implies. There is another one checking for certain button combinations.

There is some code that is excluded by a define statement. This code calls the above methods. It can select the round, do the sound test, enable auto move, change the rank and activate something called nishume. The last one I’m not sure about what it does.

Hey,

if you end up making a tutorial series I would love to help. I had this idea of recording a stream in which I try to get something to work with your engine for a while.

Cheers

I guess I might be one of the few who really appreciates this. Thanks allot!

I can have a look if you like.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I plan to continue these. I will most likely start over next year. Right now I’m in the middle of moving to a different house which takes up most of my time.

astro187 wrote:
… I was planning to ask how difficult it would be to take a RAM dump and convert it into something that Mednafen can use since I know nothing of the details of that file format… but apparently it wasn’t too difficult for Thunderstruck to tackle!

It’s actually the same format. Both are simple binary dumps. Mednafen expects the files to be 64kb though. So I simply made the file bigger by appending zeros. You can flash your mednafen saves to your carts as well if you reduce them in size.

Hey everyone,

astro187 told me that the UI would stop working when dumping Wario Land directly to the PC. I could actually reproduce the problem. Turned out it was a known WPF problem when bombarding a TextBox with method calls. I fixed that by calling the UI update less often.

I also added a feature to receive the SRAM directly to mednavens sav format. So you can simply extract your savfiles from your games and continue playing in the emulator.

Someone remind me to setup a public git for this project.

Attachments:

1. mellotprogrammer.1.0.0.2.zip

Hey everyone,

I will doing some work on GameHero Legends today. I want to setup a system that should allow me load/unload images from charmem in a certain way. The ultimate goal is to have a simple system to allow the easy creation of animations. Till now it’s just an idea an I have no idea if this works.

I will start of by showing the current state of the tools I developed. After that we will setup a test-screen and build a POC so that we can see if my idea actually works.

Start is around:
18:00 German Time
12:00 am EST
09:00 am PST

VirtuousRage wrote:
I wont be able to tune in this weekend because of PRGE, but hopefully you get the VODs working!
I’d love to watch it after. 🙂

I can archive videos on twitch but I don’t want to for different reasons. If I ever become a Twitch affiliate or partner I can do VOD for subscribers. However, I managed to record the last stream and will upload an edited version to Youtube.

RunnerPack wrote:
Not that I have a problem with it, but I don’t see why this program was necessary. The existing padding tools (DogP’s and mine – which I made around the same time as the ROM shrinker, but doesn’t seem to be hosted on PVB) have both always supported padding to theoretically any “power-of-two” size (limited, of course, by RAM and HDD space, among other things).

Haha, I actually didn’t know that. I wrote this in half a hour while being on a boring conference call. Some people asked for it as well. I think it would be best to have the padding as part of the programmer firmeware.

RunnerPack wrote:
I just did a test with mine (which is attached), and I was able to pad to 128MB (16Mbit) and 512MB (64Mbit) easily. I even used my shrinker to automatically reduce the 128MB to 64MB. I started with a 128KB ROM.

I keep confusing this but I think 16 Megabit are 2 Megabyte. 64 Megabit would be 8 Megabyte.

RunnerPack wrote:
Run the tool by itself to see how to use it. For reference, passing a value of 27 results in a 256MB ROM (adding one will double the size, subtracting one will halve it, and so on). Passing no number (e.g. dropping the ROM on the executable) should automatically pad the ROM to the next power-of-two size.

I only added output options for 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 to not confuse people. The code is simple enough to support other sizes though.

RunnerPack wrote:
The source is included with both programs (the shrinker is here on the site), and they should, in theory, also be cross-platform, since they use the C standard library.

I’m really impressed by what Microsoft is doing with c#. Asp.net and the core for console applications is now open source and can be compiled to other systems then windows. With 3.0 they want to include WPF which means my GUIs could be compiled for Mac.

astro187 wrote:
Ok, so I finally got to trying this out tonight and I’m stuck on step one :\ My programmer starts up and I get the “VB Cartridge Programmer” message on the unit’s screen but when I start Thunderstruck’s program, nothing is in the drop-down (i.e. no “COM3”) so I can’t connect. What do I need to setup in advance? I noticed that it is shown as an unrecognized device and failed to install any drivers when I plugged it in. I’m running Windows 7 if that matters in the troubleshooting. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: So I open up Device Manager and see that I have no COM ports shown at all. So I install a default one and try to set the settings you suggest, but it has pre-set bit rates and you specify the terminal program uses 500000 Baud. And I’m too dumb to get a clear answer on how to convert 500000 Baud to a bit rate so I’m dead in the water again. Or maybe I was barking up the wrong tree in the first place with this approach.

You shouldn’t need to set anything up. It should aromatically detect it. As soon as you connect it there should be an entry called “Ports (COM & LPT)” and “Arduino Mega 2560” underneath. If it doesn’t show up maybe try a different USB cable or USB Port.

The bad news is that I didn’t manage to record the stream the last time. The good news is that I figured out what the problem was and I’m confident that I will be able to record the next stream.

I was thinking about maybe setting up my VirtualTabs on Saturday and just have the stream running. So everyone can see how it’s not done right. I might not find the time, so maybe I will do this another day.

Sunday I want to do some actual VB programming. Will schedule everything soon.

The other day I remembered that the programmer can output SRAM and ROM content to the command line. So I figured I could simply read that data and output it into a file. So you can now Receive the ROM and RAM from any cart using the USB connection. It takes a bit longer though.

New version is attached.

Attachments:

1. 

   screen.png
   

1. mellotprogrammer.1.0.0.1.bin.zip
2. mellotprogrammer.1.0.0.1.src_.zip

astro187 wrote:
…it looks like this program will act in lieu of a separate terminal program…

yes, you don’t need the terminal if you use this.

mellott124 wrote:
Thanks Thunderstruck!

It’s two t’s. Mellott. 🙂

It’s actually named after Alphonse Mellot:
http://www.mellot.com/presentation/presentation.php?srub=2&LangueSite=en

Lovely place.

Hey everyone,

the good news is that I’m feeling much better. So I will try to do another stream on the weekend. I might take a couple breaks this time… we will see where it goes.

This time will be on Saturday at
-> 19:00 German time
-> 10 am PST
-> 13 am EST

I’m almost certain I got the timezones right this time around.

As a few requested we will have a look at Kevins Programmer. I will write a padder and start writing a simple UI to make usage easier.

I choose the topic and day (I know some prefer the Sunday) to make things a bit easier for me. Also, someone remember me to hit the record button.

So the good news is I got a very good chair from work for my home office. I also bought a keyboard that isn’t so loud and microphone that should be a bit better. Bad news is that I’m still in pain and that I will need a bit more time.

As for topics, I recently had an idea of how to handle graphics and animations more efficiently. It is an extension to what I did with Snatcher. It would require me to write quite a bit VirtualBoy code but also the respective converters and stuff. So I plan to do that next.

STEREO BOY wrote:

thunderstruck schrieb:
I actually wanted to record the stream and upload it to youtube later.

Did you already upload the first stream anywhere?

I actually forgot to record that one. I will try to do better next time.