Messages

1

Final Fantasy V Research & Development / Old RPGe FF5 documents and tools

« on: November 18, 2011, 02:48:21 AM »

I found an old backup DVD I have of the hard drive from 1997 when I made the FF5 translation with harmony7 and SoM2Freak.  It has some stuff that might be of historical interest, I suppose.  It has my original source file "chicago.asm" for the hack's assembly code.  The hard drive image also has a very old DOS paint program called "NeoPaint", from which I got the modified Chicago font in FF5.

It might be incomplete or from an older version of my hack, though.  Also, I was 15 years old at the time, so my reverse engineering skills weren't the best. =^-^=

Is anyone interested in this enough for me to package it all up?

2

General Discussion / Re: Annoying registration questions

« on: October 16, 2011, 01:48:48 AM »

I like the question idea to help against bots.  I just think that there could be better questions and better handling of ambiguity (ie, accepting multiple answers for some).

Dynasty Warriors is too relatively obscure to be useful for such questions, but given the content of this board, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy are clearly fine.  As is the bee question, since I think we'd know that one if we have experience with the NES and SNES.

The "byte" question may be ambiguous, particularly for those for whom French or Spanish is their native language; they may give the correct but less common English answer "octet".

I don't mind the system, and completely understand why.  I just think that the questions could use more thought.

~melissa
(\___/)
=^-^=

3

General Discussion / Annoying registration questions

« on: October 15, 2011, 02:24:56 AM »

Those questions when registering were annoying.  You ought to change them.

* Not everyone has played Dynasty Warriors.  I had to do various Google searches to find out the best horseman in the game, in the end guessing from various documents I found.
* The questions should accept multiple answers when there is ambiguity.  For example, "honeybee" should be accepted, too - it took a bit for me to figure out that it wanted just "bee".  Similarly, "magenta" instead of "purple".

I understand the need to prove humanity, but don't annoy legitimate users so much. >.<

4

Game Modification Station / IDA Pro 6.2 - 65816 support!

« on: October 13, 2011, 07:49:53 PM »

IDA Pro 6.2 came out last week.  Among its features are these very interesting ones:

Processor Modules

    + 65816: A 65816 CPU module (used in SNES consoles)

File Formats

    + SMC: added a SNES rom loader

I guess I won't have to implement such a processor module myself, then. =)  Previous versions came with the source code for some Hitachi microcontroller that I quickly recognized as being pretty close to the 65816, so I guess it wasn't too hard for them to make it.

I haven't had a chance to try it yet, since I only have IDA at work. =(

5

Final Fantasy V Research & Development / Re: FFV Enhanced by Dark Knight Kain (Dragonsbrethren)

« on: October 13, 2011, 07:14:19 PM »

(no idea why they were changed for the translation patch; new ones are terrible),

We did that because we needed a way to convey distinctions between items that would otherwise have the same name, due to their English translations not fitting in the space allotted.  I wasn't skilled enough at the time (1997) to actually rearrange the windows.  I actually made a test FF5 hack a few years ago that rearranged the item menu's layout to be a single column like the US FF6.  This would have allowed better results without the item icon changes.

The menu font was just copied from the Ted Woolsey version of Final Fantasy 6.  I believe that the new icons were mostly copied from FF4.