Last Bible Special update

Just a quick note to say I'm nearing completion on this one. The hacking is completely done, and the script is about 75% inserted, I'm just waiting on one more big block of dungeon text and then I can start beta testing it.

Boundary Gate

This is a first-person dungeon crawler heavily inspired by the previous generation of dungeon crawlers. Or you might say it's one that hadn't realized it was on a system capable of more than step-movement. Either way, it's a great game if you like the genre. It's super fast, has nicely animated sprites in the battle scenes, is fairly linear, and has some great dungeon layouts (with full auto-map!).

Plus it's by one of those misunderstood old 8 and 16-bit developers, Pack-In Video. They made some bad games, sure, but my heart has a soft spot for them since they always meant well. Their programming skills were just a generation of hardware behind, that's all.

But I digress, Boundary Gate is actually a really, really fun dungeon crawler. I'd already beaten the PCFX version years and years ago and loved it to death. The PSX version is technically superior (at least it uses real 3D for the step-movement, the PCFX version uses choppier sprite scaling, but which looks better is up to your eyes, personally I liked the PCFX choppy scaling better.), but the PCFX version had the automap on screen in the lower left-hand corner which was really nice. Everytime your mages cast a level 3 spell your characters all cover their heads and look like they're getting buffeted by a gale, it's a super-cool effect. The game is full of little touches like that.

Anyway- hacking is nearly done. I'd like to move the cursor over about 16 pixels on the battle screens so I can fit a couple more letters in there, but that will take some detective work. The game already had a built in single-byte, variable width English font so basically it's all just translating from here out. I have about the first 1/3 or so of the game done.

Also, I really need some help translating, so if you're interested please email me! The script is actually pretty small, basically I just need help with the event dialogues (only about maybe 15k or so max) and I can do the rest myself.

Illusion City

This is an awesome RPG by Micro Cabin for the Mega CD. Micro Cabin is one of my all time favorite companies and this is a game I've been curious about for ages since it seems like a really cool mix of Phantasy Star and Blade Runner.

So far I've found all the text, but the main problem is inserting an English script back in. The game uses dual-byte encoding and I can't figure out anyway to either make the game only look for a single byte or find the god damn pointers to the text. Right now I have an ugly dual-tile method for the text since there's like 400 tiles to work with (enough for nearly every possible 2 letter combination in the alphabet) but inserting translated text is incredibly tedious this way. The game also uses a 12x12 font which is super huge and ugly for letters when you mix dual tiles and regular tiles, so finding the pointers looks like the only really viable option right now since each script has a ton of empty space at the end where I could cram all the overflow text.

So for now this one is on hold until I can either find the pointers or figure out a faster and easier way to input the text with dual letter tiles.

Last Bible Special

This is a fucking amazing 3D dungeon crawler for the Game Gear. The scrolling is nearly on par with the original Phantasy Star and looks MILES better than any other scrolling you'll see on SNES or even Genesis dungeon crawlers. It's also a blast to play. There's auto-map magic, a compass you find in the first dungeon, and tons and tons of demons and characters to recruit. This is easily the best Magami Tensen game I've played (and I've played them all- they all suck total shit except for the NES, SNES, and Game Gear ones).

Progress- So far I've inserted all town dialog and menus, battle text and menus, monsters, items, weapons, jobs, and some demon questions.

To do- dungeon text, eavesdropping dialog, spell descriptions, and whatever other random stuff I stumble across.

No patch yet since I want to finish it or at least get it mostly done before I release a beta.

Sorcerian partial patch

Ok this one is at a standstill until I can figure out how the text pointers work for the main quest and town conversations. Everything else has been translated- all scenario descriptions, every menu, magic, some items, and some other random stuff.

Any help on figuring out the text pointers would be welcome, I'd really like to finish this one since I don't believe there is really all that much text in the game to be done.

Your rom must have a header.

Link to patch
Link to patched rom