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Author Topic: new Final Fantasy III NES translation  (Read 2 times)
AD0220
Guest
« Reply #30 on: April 07, 2008, 10:27:10 pm »

Well, seeing as somebody's already pinned me for this, I guess I might as well own up! I (Andrew Church) was the one who wrote this, way back in late 1997, as more of a free-time project than anything else. I have no idea where the comment about "thumbing my nose" comes from, because I was certainly never approached by anyone, and in fact I had only mentioned it to Andrew Vestal at the time; I didn't "look down" on the scene so much as I was simply uninterested in it. I probably would have just left the project sitting around, but when I casually mentioned it to a couple of friends later on, they encouraged me to put it up somewhere. So I went back, touched up the translation a bit, wrote a quick patcher program to apply the changes, and there you have it.

Re: the 1-megabyte size and Dragon Warrior IV, it looks like some old bit of (incorrect) folklore stuck with me through the years, and I seized on it when explaining the size change in the README file. In all honesty, I never even thought to check it out. (: Mea culpa. That said, there really isn't enough space in the 512k ROM for a proper translation, so I stand by my decision (and would probably have turned down the job if I'd had to do it on real hardware that couldn't support more than 512k).
Ryusui
Guest
« Reply #31 on: April 08, 2008, 01:20:12 am »

Quote from: AD0220 on April 07, 2008, 10:27:10 pm
That said, there really isn't enough space in the 512k ROM for a proper translation, so I stand by my decision (and would probably have turned down the job if I'd had to do it on real hardware that couldn't support more than 512k).

That's what we have DTE and dictionary compression for nowadays. Isn't progress a wonderful thing?
Spinner 8
Guest
« Reply #32 on: April 08, 2008, 10:33:18 am »

Hell man, I'm still impressed that you went and expanded the ROM, back when common ROM hacking knowledge prevailed that expanding NES games was next to impossible. It looks great, and it's a hell of an accomplishment, and I'm glad you sent it out to me way back when. Sorry for the lengthy turnaround. ;)

And hey, at least it works in NESticle. :D
AD0220
Guest
« Reply #33 on: April 08, 2008, 10:47:06 am »

Quote from: Ryusui on April 08, 2008, 01:20:12 am
That's what we have DTE and dictionary compression for nowadays. Isn't progress a wonderful thing?

True enough, though to be honest I'm not a fan of squeezing things in like that; it feels too much like a kludge. In any case, I was more interested at the time in the logic changes needed to display good English text (window resizing, single-spacing and all that) than in figuring out tricks to reduce memory usage.
Nightcrawler
Guest
« Reply #34 on: April 08, 2008, 11:11:19 am »

You're not a fan of data compression? You somehow think data compression is a kludge? Perhaps you thought he was talking about squishy tiles or something. Imaging a technological world without the advent of data compression makes me sad.
AD0220
Guest
« Reply #35 on: April 08, 2008, 12:23:14 pm »

Quote from: Nightcrawler on April 08, 2008, 11:11:19 am
You're not a fan of data compression? You somehow think data compression is a kludge? Perhaps you thought he was talking about squishy tiles or something. Imaging a technological world without the advent of data compression makes me sad.

I won't deny any and all forms of compression, certainly; how else could I enjoy a full Studio Ghibli collection at home? (: But in the end, compression is a trade-off of space for complexity, and I prefer the simple. Simple is beautiful, as they say, and I like to program beautifully (when I can). In the sense of using compression to squeeze out a few more kilobytes of space in a 512k buffer -- for something being run on machines with megabytes or gigabytes of storage -- yes, that feels like a kludge to me.
Ryusui
Guest
« Reply #36 on: April 08, 2008, 01:25:57 pm »

Well, that's one way of looking at it. But it didn't stop Square-Enix from using it in the SNES and PS1 era.
Tauwasser
Guest
« Reply #37 on: April 08, 2008, 02:31:24 pm »

Now I don't see how these Consoles have mega- and gigabytes of storage... I mean, sure, the cart size is one thing, but didn't ps1 games for instance have to load every file into ram? In my opinion, small code and ram structures also make for efficiency. Some people research windows programs and found out that even the most simple programs were 1000% bigger than they should have been because whole libraries were statically linked to it.

Sadly, nowadays people think small programs are somewhat worthless and so on Sad

cYa,

Tauwasser
AD0220
Guest
« Reply #38 on: April 08, 2008, 10:10:42 pm »

I certainly don't approve of pointless bloat, but I also don't particularly enjoy trying to squeeze every last byte out of a program. Sure, as a sort of puzzle to solve it can be fun, but there are too many other fun (and more productive) things I could be doing instead. I suppose that's part of why I never really became interested in the scene. (:
DaMarsMan
Guest
« Reply #39 on: April 09, 2008, 10:11:03 am »

There are other reasons for compression that don't have to do with saving disk space. Certain systems can only access a maximum amount of data. CD based systems get faster load times with compressed data. Compression is your friend.
Nightcrawler
Guest
« Reply #40 on: April 09, 2008, 12:11:47 pm »

Quote from: AD0220 on April 08, 2008, 10:10:42 pm
I certainly don't approve of pointless bloat, but I also don't particularly enjoy trying to squeeze every last byte out of a program. Sure, as a sort of puzzle to solve it can be fun, but there are too many other fun (and more productive) things I could be doing instead. I suppose that's part of why I never really became interested in the scene. (:

It's not even squeezing every last byte. Simple compression can yield you savings of 50% of more. You exaggerate the complexity. You could add dual character or dictionary compression in say 10-20 lines of code. Possibly less depending on the game. I'd hardly call it kludge. I'd call it smart programming instead. Dictionary is an over glorified pointer swap trick when it comes down to it.

Furthermore, sticking in a working compression routine can help you across the board. It can save space on the menus too or whatever else you're doing that may need some type of expansion like this.

I'm sorry, you're supporting evidence for not using data compression is pretty weak. You can choose to not like it and not use it and that's fine, but don't try and argue that it's too complex, bloated, or kludgey. Simplicity or beauty as you like to say can be something as simple as literally few lines of code for bitpacking or RLE. Instead, it appears to be the exact OPPOSITE of the severals definition of 'kludge' on dictionary.com.

Please elaborate how 10-20 lines of organized code of an established algorithm that can save your a large % of space  is inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together?
Reiska
Guest
« Reply #41 on: July 28, 2008, 03:50:41 pm »

Apologies for the bit of thread necromancy, but it's only on page three and I didn't see the wisdom in creating a new thread to ask a question about the particular patch referenced in this thread.

Has anyone tried running this in imbNES for PSX, and if so, did it work?  I'm hoping to avoid wasting a CD beforehand if I can, and I remember epsxe not running imbNES very well (emulating an emulator... now that's meta).

EDIT: I went ahead and tried it (was right on my suspicions of ePSXe having issues with imbNES to some extent).  It DOES work on imbNES 1.3.2.

EDIT2: Discovered a couple interesting easter eggs.  You can B-button dash in towns, and if you hold Select on the save screen at startup, it will let you set the message speed to 9 (normal range of 1-8).  Also, pushing Up+A together during the intro enables a sound test (use left/right to change tracks, A to play, B to stop.  The sound test has no video output - the game will look as though it has frozen.  Reset to get out.)
« Last Edit: August 03, 2008, 09:53:27 pm by Reiska »
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