Progress! Real, actual progress! WHEE!

The title says it all, everyone! There’s been some actual progress made! I don’t know what made me realise, but I had this sudden suspicion that this game doesn’t use pointers, so I added some text to one of the intro lines, and so as to not mess up other stuff, removed an equivalent number of bytes from the blank space at the end of the rom bank. The new text showed up, and the game proceeded just fine, no errors, glitches, crashes or whatever else.

 

So, I took it a step further. I looked at the font text and found there were 12 tiles ready for use, yet unused at the end. Perfect! I picked one of the scenes here that had been translated (thanks nice people that have been helping out! =3 ), made some font tiles needed for the English words, putting 2 8×16 letters in one 16×16 tile, then hex edited the script for that screen to use the new tiles. I also changed the location of the line break, and shortened the line in general. Excess bytes were fed into the blank space at the end of the rom bank to balance out size.

The result:

Hmm, the font is a little squished together in places. Back to the tiles!

Some changes turned out this way:

Much nicer! Now, not wanting to, just yet, overwrite existing font characters, I had a limit of what I could work with, so the “!” at the end, and the little square Japanese quotation mark (which I like and may leave) are original font, and so is the name I have the thing, just a romanization of the original default name, SHITO.

 

So, now I just need to get in touch with my translator friend and determine how to proceed. But at long last, years after wishing to do this, progress is made, and will now continue to be!