Hi,

First a short intro. Haven't really romhacked in close to 7 or so years. Used to go by the handle of WeirdMan, and worked with Kuel on a craptastic Deep Dungeon IV translation and hung out in #romhack alot. I think the only one that would recognize me would be Neil. Anyhow...

I've got a boring day job with lots of spare time so yesterday decided I'd start reading up on rom hacking again. Has come a long way and there's a ton of great info and tools compared to what their once was. Already just from reading and playing the past 24 hours I've done more than I ever did back then. One suggestion I have though is maybe keep an updated list of the best docs and tools currently out. I'm having to use a lot of time digging reading and piecing together ways to do things from multiple docs, most outdated because it's a bit hard to locate the up to date stuff. Not that I mind but could help others new to this in the future get a faster head start.

The rom I'm settled on for now is Itadaki Street for NES, but wanted to check if anyone else was already messing with this, or if anyone has and is here to tell me that it's much too difficult for a newbie like me? I'd like a somewhat simple but still challenging project to get my feet wet with again, this stuff makes a lot more sense than it used to. So if Itadaki is a no go what would you suggest that hasn't been done?

So far I've built a good table for it, dumped some of the script and am slowly figuring out the DTE I believe it uses. I'm still grasping that whole concept. The problem I'm going to run into however is the fact that it seems to have multiple Japanese fonts scattered all through the ROM. They're *close* to identical but the characters do shift a round in a few places, or might be on one level and not another. To be honest though I haven't tried it in Nesticle to make sure that's the case but going through the ROM with yy-chr seems to look that way. I can post screenshots if necessary. What's the best practice for tackling something like this? Just creating multiple tables and guessing when they're used when script dumping?

Anyhow, I'm having a blast with this stuff, and thanks for taking the time to read my rambles.

Isn't this a board game of some sort? I remember someone mentioning they were interested -in the series-, but not the NES version specifically. It was probably a PSP port or something.

Oh, FCEUXD can't change the stuff in VRam, so. Nyah to Gid.

So uh. Sup.

Gid - Thanks for the info and the welcome. I really didn't do much on the Deep Dungeon IV translation, Kuel did the majority of the work. I'll check out FCEUXD and play around with it.

Kitsune - Yeah it's a series I really don't know much about. I think Top Shop on PSX is heavily based on it though and hell it may even be a part of that series. This is the original one I'm translating I believe and was designed by Yuji Horii. Didn't realize that till I saw a chunk or ASCII text in the ROM with his name in it. There was recently a PS2 and PSP release of Itadaki Street with Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy characters. Wish I could translate that but probably just a *wee* bit outside of my expertise

Real men edit graphics with a hex editor.

O_O Darn... I had asked for a translation request for the PSP one... I remember also trying to make an attempt to hack Itadaki PSP... But I did it ala brute... And since I'm not experienced in even hex, I will probably not get too far.

Although I never knew Yuji Hori did an Itadaki for nes... O_O I only know that he did a murder/ detective game, Dragon Quest, and worked on Chrono Trigger.

If you ever do get around translating Itadaki, g'luck!


Heh... Brings memories of my first post here... XD LOL. I haven't tried doing anything on FCEUltra... Hmmm... Maybe I will be able to do that Link -> Kirby hack with this new information... (No bashing at me for being a stupid person trying to sound smart often).