I came to a startling conclusion just a few scant hours ago: my VWF hack is ugly. That is, the VWF itself is quite well-done, but it relies on a bunch of hacks scattered elsewhere in the code that make sure its vital stats reset every newline. Otherwise, I get crap.

I did all my hacking work back in the Stone Age of seven months ago when my philosophy was "a solution, however kludgy, is still a solution", rather than my modern "if it can't be done awesome, it's not worth doing". (For example, I'm still working with my thoroughly gruesome script dumps that would probably give anybody not used to sparring with them a one-way ticket to catatonia. I also deleted the original Japanese text wherever I encountered it, rather than my modern practice of simply commenting out the original for the sake of reference later.) I was using Gamelad, which failed to actually run the game properly but was handy in its own way for hammering my VWF into some semblance of shape; since then, I have discovered the joys of bgb, which forced me to fix up my VWF so that it would work on an actual Game Boy (just a minor VBlank check, really).

So I realized that what made my VWF so ugly was that I never figured out how the game identified the $0A newline code. (Gamelad was like that.) So I just looked at the game in bgb, set a read breakpoint, scrolled through a few lines...

It took me a while to get the significance of what I was looking at. The trick is almost identical to the one used in the game's GBA-based great-granddaughter. I was not looking at a mere newline routine. I was staring into the guts of the entire freakin' script engine.

The project is already dangerously close to completion, but this information, once I follow up on these leads, will allow me to turn BMD into the full-fledged Script Editor O' Doom I've been dreaming of...and maybe more.

Side note: I've added my own extra credits to the opening and ending. So I already have a dangerous level of control over this game. Handy how the entire event engine is wrapped around the text...who would've guessed I'd be turning my worst enemy into my best ally?