Hi, I was hoping to do a one-day project to knock out something else since it's been a while, but the plan failed pretty miserably. The game in question is Modaozi (魔道子) (loosely translaed as Demon Child, listed on Home of the Underdogs as Prince of Darkness). It's an fantasy-China action-RPG where you play as a swordsman and have to go about the overworl map killing lots of mythical monsters to find and explore dungeons. I think there's 6 dungeons and 7 bosses in the game. The graphics and music aren't too bad and each dungeon has its own music.

The only text in the game (except start/load game on the title screen) is on the system menu accessed off ESC and it's all stuff like Save Slot/Load Slot/Dungeon 1...6/Overworld/Empty/Fast/Bright/On/Off/Quit?. Not exactly necessary at all for game play, but necessary to get in onto the site here. I was kind of hoping to get it done in the spirit of Gid's Recca or demi's Twinbee translations which really translate ... one or two words just to get th egame promoted a bit.

Anyway, I dumped the font after a few hours of scratching my brain and talking with Kitsune about the incredibly queer mirroring system is was stored in, so that's not a problem. I just cannot for the life of me figure out how the game writes these tiles to the screen. Three hours of relative searching turned up absolutely nothing.

If you want to take a crack at it, feel free. I have something done to insert/extract the font now so I'll throw you an English font (sans a couple unused letters since the font doesn't even have enough) if you're interested.


Update: The EXE files are all compressed with LZEXE, but even after decompressing them I didn't have any breakthrough on this. Given every part of the game is powered by its own EXE and each area has the ability to access the menu, however the chars are called in has to be a method shared by all EXEs. :-/

P.S. If you don't use the trainer in the HOTU zip the game is absolutely balls hard. I still can't finish the third dungeon. It works great in DOSbox and looks great with its hq2x screen filtering.

Kitsune: See my last message on MSN. What the problem was is the font was plain 16x15, but every 4 pixels was mirrored. So lets say for example one row is:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

Once you unmirror it, you get:

3 2 1 0 7 6 5 4 B A 9 8 F E D C

When I told you before "Try flipping only the first 4 pixels" that's what I was getting at.

It took 4 FEIDIAN lines. First I dumped the font to a vertical block that was 4x2400 pixels, then I mirrored this BMP, reinserted it as 4x2400, then dumped the result as straight 16x15. Again: FEIDIAN can do --anything--.

(Added pictures to the original post to make sure this thread breaks Aerdan's style sheet)

I can vouch for FEIDIAN. Had to install PHP to get it running, but it ripped the font from Wan Wan Meitantei just fine.

Weird setup there. It's a standard 16x16 font with a line of "junk data" (probably with some purpose, but I have no idea what that might be) in between each character; it doesn't line up properly in Tile Molester, and I doubt anything short of FEIDIAN would get it ripped properly. (One oddball thing about it is that the kanji are all lined up in "alphabetical order"""; that is, they're sorted by the common kun pronunciations. Hmm. Maybe it's a standard format, which would save me some trouble...)