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Update: Slayers Enters Beta Testing (V0.98)
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The Updated Report: Uh, you may have heard it here second. The story is finished, and
the team is completing technical tasks, testing, and polishing. For those who enjoy classic RPGs, this
will be a good one, folks. I realize that no one who is familiar with Slayers is neutral concerning Lina
Inverse, but I urge all RPG-lovers to sample it. Without altering the Slayers culture, the Japanese developers
have succeeded in a plot that has rendered this game into something that may possibly surprise a few people - pleasantly!
The Older Report on 1-28-10: While the refined story is approximately 75% complete,
other stages of development exceed that level, so the actual version number might be even higher. Rather than
speak of what has been completed, I'll mention what we still need to do:
1. The final 25% of the story.
2. Refinements to Minna the Save Girl (debugging and ASM to fix the "Continue" Game).
3. Sprite work translations at the top of the Navigational Maps
4. Ending credits (if anything needs to be done).
5. Random spot fixes to pointer redirections.
6. Splash Page.
Having expanded the ROM to 2.0 MB, we now enjoy virtually unlimited dialogue space. I placed a sizable
quantity of screen shots in the animated graphic, to showcase our diverse progress and certain added features
such as a bold font. The graphics also include Bongo`'s successful port of the Introduction's sprite work
that Filler and his former team mates accomplished some time ago. Soon, Red Soul will begin in-house
Alpha/Beta testing. Right now, I see a good possibility that we will release this game in the late
winter-early spring time frame. All who enjoy classic RPGs should find Slayers a good play.
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02/17/2010 - Wildbill, Bongo`, Filler, Red Soul, ultpaladin, and alexander_13
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Released: Universal Mystic Ark V1.01
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Merry Christmas!
This patch replaces V1.00 for those who wish
to play Mystic Ark on real hardware or accurate emulators. BSNES is the recommended emulator for this version.
From the updated Readme.doc:
"[Version 1.01] includes a small number of final edits and corrections of typographical errors. Our patch has also
been modified to allow "universality" in playing options. It is compatible with Super Nintendo hardware and all
premium SNES emulators.
This version was hardware-tested via a Super Wildcard - DX2 "piggyback" configuration, using both floppies and an
external Iomega 100 MB Parallel Port Zip Drive).
We have also tested V1.01 with ZSNES151, several releases of SNES9x (including a version adapted to the Nintendo
GameCube), an SNES emulator adapted to the NDS, and BSNES."
If anyone has been waiting for this release, blame me (Wildbill)! I have been working on Slayers and Burning Heroes,
so that's my excuse. But back in October, I played all of MA V1.01 on NDS. That was a trip! The NDS SNES emulator isn't
perfect, but I got it to work. My test using the Gamecube version of SNES9x worked well with this patch. Available at the
Download or Mystic Ark page. Enjoy!
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12/24/2009 - The D-D MA Team
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Chaos Seed Dialog Scripts Reach Beta!
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It's been a few months since Chaos Seed got any love here on the update page, and now is no better time than ever!
Just today, Draken finally finished his first pass of the entire segment of Chaos Seed dialog. This means that
everything related to character-spoken text should insert without any errors, and that the game is entirely
playable if you ignore all the Enchanted Cave battles. Thanks to the help of a few nice translators over at the
RHDN forums, most missing strings have now been totally squashed!
However, the game isn't ready for a release just yet. Most of the scripts dealing with everything related to menus
remains untranslated to this day. Anyone who has struggled through the Japanese version knows that this game is extremely
menu-heavy, and that it would be darned near impossible to get through the events without them. We're awaiting these
final translations to come in, at which time, Bongo` will have to slave away to figure out the best to make them fit in
the tiny little borders we have in the game.
Stay tuned, though! We're hoping things will continue to pick up for this great game, and we'll continue to bring you
constant update via the forums here on the site.
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12/09/2009 - Draken
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Burning Heroes Achieves Major Strides! (Updated on December 30, 2009)
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Ritchie has forwarded six translated script blocks and is working on two others. Bongo` has coded a working script inserter,
and Wildbill has formatted those blocks and written the first draft of the opening scenes of Ryu's and Gaou's scenarios.
Thus, Burning Heroes is off and running in a very big way! Bongo` has also loaded a VWF routine and is looking
into expanding that font to include D-D's first built-in international support for Western languages such as Portuguese,
French, and Romanian. The additional letters will be entered into different ROM patch languages by holding down the
control key on an English keyboard and typing a three-digit code number that is unique to each international character.
We could use a graphically talented volunteer to design the international letters to match the existing font. Once we
insert those letters, Bongo` will load their addresses into the table file, and we'll be one step closer to working on
international versions of Burning Heroes simultaneously.
Soon, we'll be building in additional insertion support for the miscellaneous files that Recca and LostTemplar have
already translated. Ritchie has not indicated whether he will be available to translate all 69 script files, but we
certainly appreciate the six he has contributed thus far and the fact that he is working on numbers seven and eight!
This Burning Heroes update is being provided by the four active project team members who are submitting
major work on a regular basis.
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12/03/2009 - Wildbill, Bongo`, Ritchie, and Recca
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Slayers Menu Work Advancing
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Bongo`'s assembly work redesigning the menu system in the Slayers project is advancing in good stead. Wildbill translated a few more miscellaneous files to insert,
and now the menu support has taken form sufficiently that he may continue with the storywriting process. A number of menu refinements remain to be done, but those will
be polished in due course as additional files are translated and formatted for reassembly, if necessary, and insertion.
The Slayers project is a joint effort between D-D and
Matt's Messy Room.
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11/08/2009 - Bongo`, Wildbill, and Filler
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Slayers Forges Ahead
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A Week of big progress for Slayers: Bongo` has coded the basic insertion tools,
Filler has translated a number of miscellaneous files, and Wildbill has written the
second introduction, from the point in which a villager discovers Lina Inverse lying
on the ground until Connie joins her "party" at the bottom of the goblin pit! Menu
work is now underway.
The Slayers project is a joint effort between D-D and
Matt's Messy Room.
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10/22/2009 - Wildbill, Filler, and Bongo`
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Feda - Service After the (Patch Not for) Sale!
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D-D is comprised of folks who were game players and lovers first, long before we banded together to translate
unported works. As such, we know what sort of documentation we prefer while playing a game, items such as
world maps, hints and tips, and flow charts that give us a leg up toward becoming comfortable during the early
stages. While Red Soul has been compiling a number of revisions for Feda: The Emblem of
Justice, fixes that have been either reported or discovered since our most recent release of that patch,
he has also drafted the following chart that briefly decribes Feda's Emblem system. Enjoy!
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10/16/2009 - Red Soul and Wildbill
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Chaos Seed VWF Progress
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Bongo` is making significant progress with the testiest VWF routine he has coded in a while, with at least two more routines to be inserted.
Chaos Seed uses a number of different font routines for menus, script, and various supporting features. Two of the fonts will be thin designs,
similar to those loaded into Feda. This will allow more characters to be typed into limited spaces, but a larger font will be used for
displaying the main dialogue. Presently, Bongo` is redesigning the textbox width calculator to work with Chaos Seed's VWF routines.
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10/01/2009 - Bongo`
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Mystic Ark V1.01 Work - AKA Debugging the Debugger!
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Wildbill has implemented Bongo`'s redesigned tools as work continues toward an eventual release of Mystic Ark version 1.01.
This upgrade will incorporate fixes to the three typos that several players around the world reported and also be playable in SNES
copiers and emulators that are designed to have a full 100%
compatibility rate with all known commercial software. Indeed, Byuu has convinced us that the next generation of SNES
emulators are headed in this direction, so we are resolved to climb aboard his train.
Red Soul has been testing the MA V1.01 beta on BSNES, and the biggest challenge thus far has been pulling screen shots with Byuu's
program. Never fear... We have succeeded against all odds as the graphics below will attest, along with a demonstration of full functionality
in the most buggy part of the game - the dreaded Clone Cave in Wind World - something even our debugger with the now pretty menus couldn't
manage to chase away until recently. Me, generic Clone, gotcha no more with blank page conundrum!!
We will release our universal patch in due time, unless someone wants to scream for the beta to test further, preferably on copier. Meanwhile,
V1.00 remains playable end to end via the venerable, much-loved ZSNES151 platform.
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09/27/2009 - Wildbill
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Slayers (RPG) Update
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Bongo` has successfully inserted a variable width font into Slayers, a joint translation project
between D-D and Filler of Matt's Messy Room.
Filler is providing his own translation of the Slayers
script, and he's also working on D-D's Aretha-II project. With Filler in charge of these translation duties,
expect two more fine RPG's to play down the road. Oh, and I (Wildbill) spoke briefly to Lina Inverse, shortly after she
regained her memory at the end of this game. She said to tell Taskforce her heart may belong to him, but
unfortunately her a$$ belongs to the series, hee-hee...!! She added, "S'long, my love...! I'll see ya in the funny papers!"
and gave that little wink. What a gal!!
Description (from Moby Games) - Slayers
is based on an anim?series of the same name (also known as Lina the Teenage Sorceress).
The heroine of the anim?(and of the game) is Lina Inverse, a seventeen-year-old girl who can use
magic and is also proficient with the sword. Lina particularly likes money, and often robs rich
people and hunts for treasure. She also has a sense for justice - if a village or a town is in
trouble, Lina will do anything to protect it and to fight the bad guys! In the game, Lina is
knocked down after a fight against mysterious attackers, and is found by the inhabitants of the
nearby village. The trouble is, she can't remember anything! When she meets her long-time companion
Naga, their first objective become to investigate the goblin attacks on the population, but Lina's
ultimate quest is to regain her memory and to find out who or what has attacked her.
The game is a traditional console-style RPG with towns, dungeons, random enemies, and turn-based
combat viewed from first-person perspective, in a Dragon Warrior fashion. The characters can attack
physically or use special attacks. Lina can also cast various magical spells. You cannot travel on
the world map, but "jump" to various locations instead. The game features anim?style cut scenes.
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09/22/2009 - Bongo`, Filler, and Wildbill
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Mystic Ark: Arks Pages from the Manual - Translated by LostTemplar
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With LostTemplar translating, Recca coordinating, and Red Soul transcribing, this trio has provided the gaming
community with an English version of these important pages from the Mystic Ark Manual. The Arks are like fairies
and are the keys to the game. They not only bring allies to life to fight alongside the hero, they bolster the strength
of weapons and equipment and even open doors to mysterious new worlds that must be explored in order to complete
the game. In the end, all of the Arks reunite to bring powerful forces together for a final showdown. Thank you, LostTemplar,
Recca, and Red Soul for providing us with this valuable adventuring tool!
To make the pages larger, right click and view image.
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09/22/2009 - Wildbill and Red Soul
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Newbie Friendly Patching Guide (Second Update)
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Red Soul has drafted a little guide that we placed in our Downloads section, hoping this would assist
some of you novices who are confused about game patching procedures. This guide is written in rtf
format, so you will need a program capable of viewing that type of document.
Update - Red Soul's Patching Guide for Dummies now resides in the recently activated Documents drop-down menu,
courtesy of Taskforce. We have also added documentation for the venerable hacking tool, Gizmo, also designed
by Taskforce. Finally, we have uploaded the official Mystic Ark, Ranma RPG and Villgust manuals into Documents. Unfortunately,
all are printed in Japanese, but the pictures are nice! Perhaps some kind soul will translate Mystic Ark and Villgust and superimpose the
English into the manual. Ranma RPG has an english translation at the bottom of the page but it has not been superimposed into the manual so
if someone is willing to superimpose it on the scans, we would be thrilled.
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09/21/2009 - Red Soul
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The Adventures of Hourai High School Update
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Now that Mystic Ark is released, let us take this opportunity to report
progress on another project that has resided in our list of uncompleted
games for quite some time. We haven't said much about Hourai High School
lately. That is because we were keeping it under wraps as Secret Project
#2 while working out some of the technical details and finishing equally
challenging labors with the high profile game, Mystic Ark. However, just
because Hourai High School may not be as popular as Mystic Ark does not mean we
will not give it all of the love and attention it deserves. To illustrate
our point, in the wake of outstanding new assembly work by Bongo`, observe
the following results!
The top left graphic displays Hourai High's new VWF font. As with many of our fonts,
this one was hand designed by Taskforce. The graphic to the right reveals a typical
screen dialogue with the new font loaded, but this script has not yet been edited,
formatted, and polished. It will be done, however, by the time we release, along with
the rest of the game.
The third image is a typical Yes/No screen. The fourth picture is a sample game fight
menu. The fifth graphic reveals the main menu, and the sixth shot illustrates one of
the many sub menus we have expanded to hold additional English text. The seventh
screenshot demonstrates our new 2-line item feature, and finally, one of the many club
room selection menus rounds out this progress report in pictures.
For gamers who have played the Japanese ROM, you may notice that many of these menus
don't necessarily match the Japanese game. As revealed above, that is because we have
expanded them. Thus, we are expending every effort to ensure this game sparkles
outside of Japan. Hopefully, everyone will appreciate the amount of time these efforts
require. Even though we are far from finished, we are fully dedicated to seeing it
through. So,keep your eyes peeled here. We will be bringing you more updates as we
proceed, the same as we have been doing regarding many of our other projects.
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09/19/2009 - Taskforce
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