Successfully expanded the menu's... Now I can fit in those long weapon and item names . All that's left to do is implement a DTE routine into the menu's text routine. Unlike before, the expanded menu's don't overlap the character you selected.

This one, definitely. It just looks...more pleasing to the eye compared to the others.

I'll be thirding with that.  Looks absolutely great.

A space or dash could be added, but it'd be one less character availble for item names, unless I made the menu even wider. I don't want to do that because then I'd have to make the shop title shorter and I'd be unable to fit "Black Magic" or "White Magic" in there. Furthermore, the current length works idealy for my redesigned inventory system.

That's the way FF VI does it and it doesn't look bad. However, the original FF icons do look a little off like that. I plan on updating the icons anyway.

The NES doesn't have HDMA. So, to do a half space, you have to either do tricky scrolling hacks in a complex V-Blank routine (I've written one in a little tech demo), use the same methods used for VWF, or use two tiles and add a half space before the icon as well.

The first requires much more invasive changes than even my ambitious plans contemplate. I may someday try hacking VWF support into FF, but it's not an immediate priority. Using two tiles per icon would probably require more tile space than I've got availble at the moment.

We don't know the skill level of the anonymous hackers, but the Chinese translation of FF (I forget what it was called) was really laggy (possibly because each string had to be drawn to VRAM, unlike a kana or English font that can fit in VRAM and be tile-mapped). Not leaving me with much confidence as to the feasibility of VWF (as I suspect it to be a more labor-intensive process).

Since I've been doin' all this work on FFIV recently, I figured I would find a save at around the end of the game on the internet, and test to see how things looked. Here's the results:





This showcases the hacked magic screens, and the fact that all of the white/black/summon spells (except for "Thundara", "Thundaga", "Teleport" and "Leviathan") fit. It showcases the newly hacked equipment screen, and some of the various longer names that I can now use for equipment. It also showcases the hacked status screen, and how my hacks do not break anything, even once your stats get into high digits.

I do need to find a new way to express 神々の剣 in English, though. I don't like "Pantheon Sword", which is what Ryusui came up with. "Sword of the Gods" would be fine, but doesn't fit. Thus, "Gods' Sword". It's the best sword in the game, so it needs a badass name.

~DS