While I skirt around finishing off the last few strings of BoFII, I've therefore been playing around a little with another attempted project: King of Bandit Jing Angel and Devil Versions for GBC.

Now, the last time I touched these games was way back. Way back indeed. Quite possibly before I made my first attempt on SF1. But I digress. Back then, I had no ASM experience save for my caveman kludges on G Gundam and Zeta Gundam for SNES, and I gave up after I tried and failed to create a table for the game.

In commemoration of having read the final volume of the manga, I took another look at the Jing games and made four major discoveries.

1. Yes, I was able to put together a table this time.

2. I used WindHex's compare function on the two versions, and surprise surprise...there are exactly four bytes different between the two. That is, the two games contain all the same resources, graphics and strings. So all I really have to do is hack one version, then manually tweak a few bytes to get the other.

3. I've traced the print function, and the good news is that it's more like SF1's than Bistro Recipe's. This means implementing a VWF should be...well, not trivial, but certainly easier than dissecting BR's hopeless "copy tiles then draw tilemap" system.

4. The game is a 1MB MBC5. The irrelevant thing about this is that it's actually smaller than SF1. The relevant thing about this is that I can expand it to 4MB, which means script space shouldn't be an issue. :3

Which all begs the issue: is it a worthy project? I have no idea yet. ^_^; I've played a bit of it, and it's a MegaTen-like: while Jing fans (such as myself) may be scratching their heads as to who thought this was a good idea, it's a monster battle/fusion game which, oddly enough, reuses the name "Aquavitae" as a major plot element. And yes, there are locations named for drinks, as per Jing tradition.