------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PSMC-Manual.txt This file should be viewed using a mono-spaced font like "Courier". Use a font size where 79 columns are visible. Please don't distribute the ROM file in patched form. Please don't distribute the PSMCrevA.IPS file without this file, the NES ROM Expander.exe program, and PSMC-Map.jpg. Thanks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The PORTOPIA Serial Murder Case AKA PORTOPIA Renzoku Satsujin Jiken Suspense Adventure Game Original Game Copyright 1985 by Enix English Translation Copyright 2006 by DvD Translations Patch Version: Rev A Release Date: June 16, 2006 DvD Translations www.geocities.com/dvdtranslations Text Translation by: shiroi Text Context by: DvD Text Editing by: DvD, shiroi, & KlD Text Dump by: DvD Code Deconstruction & Re-Programming by: DvD Tile Editing by: DvD Alpha testing by: DvD & KlD Full Beta testing by: Radical R Some Beta testing by: Arnold Rimmer, DvD, & Dar NES File Expander by: DvD Manual by: DvD & Mika Takamura Translation Details by: DvD & Radical R Map by: DvD Old Map by: Mika Takamura Old Character Table by: Neil_ Translation of 1st Two Phrases by: Maht ----------------------------------- CONTENTS ---------------------------------- THE MANUAL (1) Story (2) Controls (3) Main Menu #1 (4) Main Menu #2 (5) Helpful Hints USING THE PATCH (6) Expanding & Patching the ROM file (7) Playing the game on an emulator TRANSLATION DETAILS (8) Why DvD chose to translate THIS game & Why YOU should bother playing THIS game (9) DvD's Hacking Comments (10) shiroi's Translation Comments (11) Radical R's Beta Testing Comments (12) Project Timeline Highlights (13) Software Used In This Translation ---------------------------------- THE MANUAL --------------------------------- (1)--------------------------------- Story ------------------------------------ It's 1982 in Kobe City, Japan. The newly completed man-made Port Island in Kobe harbor is now a permanent fixture on the horizon. Evidence of the 6 month long PORTOPIA '81 Expo remains on the island, but the large crowds of visitors have all gone home and life is starting to return to normal throughought the Kansai region. But then it happens. For no apparent reason, a successful banker named Kouzou was found dead in his house, the Yamakawa Mansion. Two of his employees, his secretary, Fumie, and the security guard at the mansion, Komiya, found him dead inside the mansion's study, with the only door leading to the room locked tight. When they forced the door open to get inside the room, his lifeless body was found lying on the floor with a single stab wound to the neck and the murder weapon lying close by. At first glance the evidence seemed to indicate Kouzou had taken his own life. But the facts in the case didn't add up. Kouzou was a successful business man and things had recently been going well for his company. There really didn't seem to be a reason for him to commit suicide. The police are beginning to suspect foul play. This is where you come in. You are a detective. One of the best... Along with your faithful assistant, Yasu, it is up to you to figure out who killed Kouzou, arrest them, and bring this investigation to a close. But it won't be easy. It will take all your wits and a little luck to follow the clues that bring the case to its exciting conclusion. And be careful, because the killer is still on the loose, and until caught, no one is safe... (2)-------------------------------- Controls ---------------------------------- Up, Down - Scroll through menu choices Up, Down, Left, Right - Move magnifying glass or hammer Pick key to dial on telephone A - Accept a menu choice Choose a location with the magnifying glass or hammer Choose key to dial on telephone Advance the text when you seen a down arrow B - Switch between the two main menus Cancel any menu choice A, Start - Start the game Select - not used Note: At a certain point in the game you will move based on the direction you push the control pad. Up - Move forward Left - Rotate counter-clockwise Right - Rotate clockwise Down - Turn around 180 degrees A - Bring up Main Menu (3)------------------------------ Main Menu #1 -------------------------------- Move - Move to a new location Some places you might go to: Kobe City: a city on the coast of Japan, Area Code 078 Hanakuma: a part of Kobe City Port Island: a man-made island in Kobe harbor Shinkaichi: another part of Kobe, a place where American military people hang out Awaji Island: off the coast of Kobe Sumoto: on Awaji Island. Hanchou: the shopping district of Sumoto Kyoto: a city far inland of Kobe See "PSMC-Map.jpg" to see these places on a map. Question Someone - Ask questions of the people: * who are at your current location or * who you just called on the phone Investigate Someone - Have Yasu tell you more about: * suspects or * people at your current location Show An Item - Show a piece of evidence to someone at your current location. You can show: * an item you picked up or * a photo you took. Photos are used for field investigations only. Look For Someone - Search for a suspect that you can't find. Call Out - * At Police Headquarters, have a suspect come for questioning or * simply yell the person's name Arrest Someone - When enough evidence exists to arrest the person who you are currently looking at, this is how you need to do it. (4)------------------------------ Main Menu #2 -------------------------------- Investigate Thing - Examine a specific object at your current location in greater detail. To examine objects taken as evidence * go to the place you found them or * go to Police H.Q. Magnify[ing] Glass - This will allow you to look in further detail at any area in your current location. Use the control pad to move the magnifying glass. Don't just try this once, a good detective investigates an object more than once in slightly different locations each time to find clues. Evidence - List all items taken into evidence. Tap On or Hit - This will allow you to strike at any area at your current location with a small hammer. Control is the same as for the magnifying glass. Take An Item - Attempt to take an item into evidence at your current location or simply remove an item from its current location. At Police H.Q., this also includes taking pictures of people or having people remove their clothing. Kinky. Ponder Suspect - Discuss with Yasu which suspects are most likely to have committed the crime. Dial Phone - Call any phone number. Remember, this is 1982; no cell phones. So, you can only use this command if a phone exists at your current location. Phone numbers in Japan are just like U.S. numbers with 3-digit area codes, and 7-digit phone numbers. And of course you only have to dial the area code if you are out of area. One difference is that both phone numbers and area codes can start with any number, including 0 or 1, which they can't in the U.S. Some important numbers that may or may not be useful: USA Japan 411 104 Phone directory service 911 110 Emergency (Police) 911 119 Emergency (Fire & Medical) *66 *58 Repeat Dialing (Redials busy number) *69 *55 Call Return 74#[0-9] *2[0-9] Speed Calling - Configure #[0-9] *1[0-9] Speed Calling - Dial A Stored Number Like in the US, special numbers only work on phones where the customer has paid for the service. Stop The Inquiry - When it's obvious who did it, you can stop the investigation. Of course, if you stop when there is no clear suspect, you might as well be saying: I'm a lousy detective, and this case is too hard... (5)----------------------------- Helpful Hints -------------------------------- * If you want a general hint as to what to do now, just keep hitting the 0 key on a phone... * Try every menu command at every location. You'll soon start to see which things are always the same and which change based on your location and which people happen to be there. Sometimes you need to do the same command more than once. * Remember the magnifying glass and hammer have to moved to a specific location on the screen. All the unique screens have at least one important location and many screens have more than one. It is important to make sure you use the magnifying glass in the exact location you wish to investigate. It may not always be in the center of an object, try looking at different areas of an object. And if you are really stuck, remember to especially investigate at and near the scene of a crime with your magnifying glass. That's what a good detective would do. * Don't be afraid to use the hammer. * You cannot make a mistake. So try everything, even if you think it is wrong. You may get a funny response or look like an idiot, but you can never do anything that will get you fired (and prevent you from passing the game.) * You are not going to pass the game in one setting. So, keep detailed notes. Write down which actions cause you to: - increase your suspect list - allow you to go to new locations - find pieces of evidence You'll need this to quickly get back to where you were when you reset or turn off your NES before passing the game. * Sometimes there is more than one way to do something. So, don't be afraid to turn off your NES and start again from the beginning. If you do things in a different order, you may hear information that you weren't able to hear the first time around. * Make a map. * While playing the game, whenever you are stuck, re-read this section and the Main Menu sections. Many hints and necessary pieces of information are given in both places. * If you manage to complete the game, you will be given the name a web page. This page will show you the 1 line of hidden text and the 1 image that you never get to see in the game. Go to DvD Translations homepage and then type the name of the page after the last /. www.geocities.com/dvdtranslations/[type the page name here] Good luck! ------------------------------- USING THE PATCH ------------------------------- (6)------------------- Expanding & Patching the ROM file ---------------------- For this translation, before patching the ROM file, you'll need to expand it first. Original game ROM size: 2 16k program ROM banks & 1 8k character ROM bank = 40 kBytes = 40960 Bytes Games designed for the original Famicom/NES hardware could be 1 or 2 16k program banks and 1 8k character bank. Later, all games made for the NES used special mapper chips to expand the size of the addressable ROM beyond these limitations. As this game only uses 2 program banks, it is the largest a game for the NES could be without using any mapper chips. This made it cheap to produce, but tough for the designers to fit everything in. Because English text uses roughly twice as many characters to say the same thing in Japanese, we needed to expand the size of the ROM file to fit in the text. Although I can think of a lot of other reasons this wasn't ported to the NES, (graphic violence, adult themes, etc.), the fact that it needed to be expanded was a big factor. How to expand and patch the ROM file: You need: 1) A ROM file. The file may or may not include the standard 16 byte iNES header followed by the program ROM. With header, the ROM file is 40976 Bytes in size. I'm not telling you how to get the ROM file, but once you do, call it PRSJ.nes. 2) For PC users, use NES ROM Expander.exe, included with the patch. It's pretty self explanatory. You'll have to rename the file to ".exe" instead of ". exe". I changed it to this in the zip file so that people's e-mail programs didn't block the zip. Just make sure you determine if your ROM has a header or not before expanding it. 40976 bytes, with header - Choose Replace Existing Header 40960 bytes, no header - Choose Add New Header NES ROM Expander.exe will not modify your original ROM file. It will instead make a copy of the file and modify it tacking "_Expanded" on to the end of the filename. Re-name the expanded file PSMC.nes. If you don't own a PC, you'll have to expand the ROM file on your own using a hex editor. I would have made a ROM expander for the Mac, but I no longer have access to any Mac software development kits. Since King Mike was in need of an expander too, I thought of creating a new standard for expanding ROMs, like the IPS standard for patching them. This way, a savvy Mac or Unix programmer could make their own expanders. Both King Mike and I are interested in working on a standard but I'd like to hear if others in the community would support it. Please, contact DvD if you are interested in pursuing this venture. Expanding using a Hex Editor: First, if your ROM file has a header, remove the 16 byte header, the first 16 bytes of the ROM file. In other words, remove bytes 0000 through 000F. Then triple the first 16 kBytes of the ROM file. In other words copy bytes 0000 through 3999 (hex) and then insert them twice at the beginning of the ROM file. Finally, insert the following 16 byte header at the beginning of the ROM file. 4E 45 53 1A 04 01 E0 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 3) Patch File: PSMCrevA.IPS 4) An IPS patching program Remember to patch the file only after it has been expanded. Recommended patching program for IBM PC: Snes-Tool.exe by The M.C.A./Elite Recommended patching program for Mac: UIPS Using SNES Tool: a) If you haven't already, make a copy of the un-patched ROM. You always want to keep the un-patched ROM around for later revisions of the patch. b) Place an un-patched but expanded ROM file (I'll call it PSMC.nes), PSMCrevA.IPS, and Snes-Tool.exe in the same directory. c) Run Snes-Tool.exe d) Type 'U' for "Use IPS" e) Press the down arrow key until PSMCREVA.IPS is highlighted. f) Hit Enter. g) Press the down arrow key until PSMC.NES is highlighted. h) Hit Enter. i) Hit 'Q' to quit. (7)-------------------- Playing the game on an emulator ----------------------- Almost all emulators can play the original ROM file, since it doesn't use a mapper, but unlike the two emulators I list below, most can't handle the sound and many get the colors wrong. For the PC, I recommend FCE Ultra, it supports Mapper 78 and gets the sound and colors correct. For the Mac, NEStopia worked great. RockNES is the only other emulator that I tried that worked fine on both PC and Mac, but any emulator that can run "Uchuusen - Cosmo Carrier" by Jaleco should work with the translated ROM. If you try to run the translated ROM in an emulator that can't handle the mapper, and the emulator (like iNES!) still tries to run the game, the game will technically run fine, but 2/3 of the text will be really messed up, so don't bother. Don't try to use Nesticle, iNES, or Loopy NES; they don't work. If you've got a Mac, you'll need OS X, as all the Classic emulators don't work. The game came out way before NES games had batteries and it doesn't have a password save like Hydlide. Using an emulator, you can use save-states to save your game, and I recommend it. Just remember, if you get stuck, you might get different clues if you play the game from the beginning, so don't hesitate to do this, since that is what all the Japanese kids had to do when they played the game. In fact at least one part of the game was most likely made easier/quicker than the original PC version to make it easier to replay the game and quickly get to the same point where you left off. ----------------------------- TRANSLATION DETAILS ----------------------------- (8)------------------ Why DvD chose to translate THIS game -------------------- & ------------------- Why YOU should bother playing THIS game ------------------- Since the Famicom version of Door Door is completely in English (I know for sure because I made myself play all 50 levels of the game), and Bongo & Shih Tzu have graced us with an excellent full translation of Just Breed, PORTOPIA was the only remaining game that Enix produced for the NES that has not been translated, professionally or by one of us crazy people who do it for free. That alone got me interested in the game. But, when I learned more about it, I realized how important a role this game played in the history of console gaming. You may already know this, but the people behind early Enix are as follows. Enix = Yukinobu Chida - Producer CHUNSoft = Koichi Nakamura - Programmer Armor Project = Yuji Horii - Designer Bird Studio = Akira Toriyama - Artist (DragonBall Z) Koichi Sugiyama - Professional Musician The chronology of games that Enix produced for the Famicom/NES is: 1) Door Door - CHUNSoft 2) PORTOPIA Renzoku Satsujin Jiken - Armor Project, CHUNSoft 3) Dragon Quest* - Armor Project, CHUNSoft, Bird Studio, Koichi Sugiyama 4) Dragon Quest II* - Armor Project, CHUNSoft, Bird Studio, Koichi Sugiyama 5) Dragon Quest III* - Armor Project, CHUNSoft, Bird Studio, Koichi Sugiyama 6) Dragon Quest IV* - Armor Project, CHUNSoft, Bird Studio, Koichi Sugiyama 7) Just Breed - Quintet *Called "Dragon Warrior" in North America. Some more stuff about this game: (Much of the information in the following paragraphs I directly quote from the Atari HQ review of Manga Dragon Quest e no Michi www.atarihq.com/tsr/books/fc/dqm.html and what CHAZumaru posted on www.mmcafe.com/cgi-bin/forums/bbs/messages/11480.shtml.) The fledgling game company Enix sponsored a national game programming contest in 1982. Yuji Horii was a journalist for Jump Comics when he covered the game design contest, and while covering the contest he decided to participate. Koichi Nakamura placed with his game, Door Door, and Horii placed with a tennis game; both were hired by Enix. Together, the winners all used their prizes, trips to America, and went to AppleFest '83 in San Francisco. There they got to play the RPG, Wizardry, for the first time. Once he returned home, Horii bought an Apple to play the Wizardry on. He still worked part-time for Jump. Enix started out making games for the NEC PC-8801, a Japanese personal computer. Released in 1983, Door Door was (probably) their first release for the system. Later that same year, Horii wrote and directed PORTOPIA Renzoku Satsujin Jiken for the NEC PC-8801. He incorporated the dungeon crawler aspect of Wizardry, but none of the RPG elements. The game had a crude text parser that required you to type two words like "get" "book" to do all of you actions. Also, screens had to be drawn with lines and fills which actually took some time. Still, the game was a huge hit and the inspiration for all future Japanese visual novels, much like how DQ is the source of all modern Japanese RPGs. For instance, one could argue Snatcher was to PORTOPIA what Final Fantasy was to Dragon Quest. Enix continued to make games for the PC-8801. Many were of a similar style to PORTOPIA. It is also rumored that an NEC PC-6001 version of the game was also made, most likely at the same time, but I have no concrete evidence of this. Thanks go to Radical R for a picture of the PC-8801 version of the game which can be seen on the DvD Translations website. When the Famicom was released, Enix first ported Door Door to it in July 18, 1985. It did well enough that Horii wanted to work on Dragon Quest next, but Nakamura and Chida agreed that, although they'd love to release an RPG for the FC, the time wasn't right yet as the console was still fully an action game platform. So it was decided to first port The PORTOPIA Serial Murder Case on the console to test how well an adventure game would do on the Famicom. To convert the game to a system that didn't have a keyboard, commands were now entered usually using menus and sometimes cursors. And the graphics, although more crude due to no mapper chips being used to increase the amount of graphics tiles used in the game, were drawn very quickly when moving from one room to another. These two changes made the game go much faster. Most agree that even though you couldn't save the game on the Famicom, it was the superior version. Again, unlike Dragon Quest, PORTOPIA was small enough that it didn't require a mapper chip for expanding the ROM beyond the addressable space of the Famicom, which kept the costs down. Plus, porting the successful PORTOPIA was much less work than creating a new game from scratch. Still, I can tell you that it did require some fancy programming to get all of the text and decision making aspects to fit in such a small space. Plus some aspects of the game were changed to make it easier/quicker than the original PC version to make it easier to replay the game and quickly get to the same point where you left off. As it turns out, PORTOPIA sold rather well. The console gamers in the Japanese market were interested in an game that required thinking instead of button mashing. Now, Horii convinced Chida and Enix that a console RPG was the best next step. Work on Dragon Quest began. The general scenario was done by Horii, and Nakamura made the game system. He and Chida decided on a combination of the overworld from Ultima and the battle and stats screens from Wizardry. For DQ, Enix hired professionals in the areas of graphics and music, to improve the two things that PORTOPIA really could have used some help with! Sugiyama, who met with the crew after writing a consumer response card for PORTOPIA was contracted to make the DQ music, against Nakamura's wishes. Toriyama, of Dragon Ball fame, who met Horii while they were both doing work for Shonen Jump was contracted to make the monster graphics. And the rest is history! It is rumored that, like Door Door, DQ 1, and DQ 2 were, PORTOPIA was also ported to the MSX, but as with the PC-6001, I have seen no concrete evidence of this. In case you didn't know, between Dragon Quest II and III, Yuji Horii made a sequel to PORTOPIA for the Famicom with a company called LoginSoft: Hokkaidou Rensa Satsujin Ohotsuku ni Kiyu And... no, I am not planning on translating it... But, if anyone else is, contact me, as I would be interested in contributing to the project. "Itadaki Street" for the Famicom was also designed by Horii. It was created by LoginSoft and published by ASCII. The newest version of this game was just released by Square-Enix for the PS2 and contains characters from both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. So, let's recount what makes The POPTOPIA Serial Murder Case special: 1) According to multiple sources, PORTOPIA was THE FIRST ADVENTURE GAME MADE for the a Japanese PC AND the first adventure game made for the NES. So, whereas Dragon Quest is the granddad of all console RPGs, this is, in many respects, is the great-granddad. 2) The ONLY Adventure, RPG, or Action RPG titles ever made for the NES that used the original NES hardware only (no mapper chips to extend the games ROM size) are: PORTOPIA and Hydlide. Other games of this size, like Namco's "The Tower of Druaga" and Game Arts/Square's first release "Thexder", that have some elements of adventure, are not what I would call Action RPGs. Hydlide and PORTOPIA were ported from and to multiple Japanese PCs along with the Famicom. But only PORTOPIA was really improved for the Famicom release. 3) When asked for the first time a story in a game really struck him, Hideo Kojima, the man behind Konami's Metal Gear series, was quoted as saying: "It was when I played Portopia Murder Case (Famicom) by Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest). Along with my encountering Super Mario Bros., experiencing this game led to my working in this industry... There's mystery, a 3D dungeon, humor, and a proper background and explanation of why the murderer committed the crime. That is why there was drama in this game. My encountering this game expanded the potential of video games in my mind." (from Greg Kasavin's article for Game Stop) 4) Lastly, the game is not simply a choose-your-own-adventure with screens and objects, like it may seem at first. Incredibly they were even able to fit in a dungeon crawler portion to the game!... the part of Wizardry that didn't make it into Dragon Quest! 5) This game is so good, Square-Enix recently ported it again! Now if you live in Japan and can read Japanese you can play it on you iPhone. See for yourself at: www.square-enix.co.jp/mobile/portopia.html (9)------------------------- DvD's Hacking Comments --------------------------- Anyway, since the game is so small, I thought it would be relatively easy to work on. Boy, was I wrong! Because the game ROM is so small, there is literally no unused space in the ROM. Not only are the text and graphics compressed, but Nakamura even had to compress the rest with something I call PseudoCode just to make it all fit. Unlike a simple table, PseudoCode is like a whole different language that the game reads with a custom interpreter. The main type of PseudoCode is used for displaying all the 496 pieces of text below the window. Along with displaying this text, and performing if..then statements, this code can jump to other pieces of PseudoCode or call portions of the normal code; that is really what makes it different from just a complex compression table. 2 other types of PseudoCode are used for the handling the menus and the magnifying glass/hammer location checking. I wrote a custom disassembler for the main PseudoCode and menus as the latter was short enough to do by hand. Because all this compression was already in place, there was nothing left for me to compress. I had to expand the ROM with a mapper chip to fit in the English text. But, I only needed a really basic chip that simply doubles the lower bank of program ROM as this is where all the 496 blocks of text are stored. I would simply swap it based on which of the pieces of text need to be displayed at any moment. It turned out that Mapper 78, the Irem 74HC161/32 chip was perfect. With it you could have any number of program banks replace the first program bank, but not change the second program bank--exactly what I needed. You can switch character banks with it too, but I didn't need that. Supposedly, "several Japanese Irem titles use this mapper", but I could only find two. * Uchuusen - Cosmo Carrier by Jaleco * Holy Diver by irem And they switch banks quite differently, so in reality they are actually two completely different mapper chips. Holy Diver's mapper needed a special 256 byte table to work... yuck, I didn't have that kind of room to waste. But Uchuusen's mapper, you simply load the bank number you want into register A and then perform this 4 byte piece of code. Easy and efficient. tay ;A8 sta $d548,y ;99 48 D5 Of course, not all emulators support Mapper 78, but FCE Ultra does, and it gets the sound and colors right too. One thing, FCE Ultra didn't like it when I simply doubled the lower bank, I had to triple it as it only likes an even number of total program banks with Mapper 78, something Uchuusen and Holy Diver both have, so I guess that's fair; although RockNES was okay with it either way. Looking at how much space we use, I could have fit the text in if I had only doubled the first bank, but I would have had to actually use the text compression table for more than just the people who are speaking and character names. By tripling the first bank, I had to get lucky on fitting in my more complicated bank switching code. After writing it as efficiently as I could, I still needed 1 byte. Arrgh! So, I modified the code that calls it to do things in a more efficient way and put two bytes of it there. And thus I didn't have to utilize the text compression table for anything but names and I didn't have to cut out ANY of shiroi's text. But, the bigger issue is that this game relies heavily on the text being correct to be interesting. The script was initially translated without any context. In that state, I was able to alpha test the game, but aspects of the story didn't really make sense. So extensive analysis of the code had to be done to determine when pieces of text are displayed in the game. Every piece of text was edited to not only have the individual sentences make sense, but to make the whole story make sense. It was a VERY time consuming process. There were 2 pieces of text in the game that you couldn't see. One was due to an obvious coding typo. I fixed it so you can see it. Enix may not have noticed this one, as it doesn't affect the game, There is one picture drawn with some sprite graphics that you can't see. Pass the game and I'll give you a link to a page that shows you both the text and graphics you can't see. There are many items/events that seem important but are not actually necessary to pass the game. The game has one true bug. The bug would not prevent you from passing the game but would make you re-do something you had already done. I felt it was okay to remove this bug and still be a faithful translation because: 1) I'm sure it is a bug. 2) I'm sure Enix was soon aware of this bug after releasing the game in Japan and would have removed it for the North American release. 3) The bug was common enough for Radical R to actually stumble upon it in his initial beta testing. 4) I had done so much work analyzing the ROM that fixing it was easy. Since the game is port, the graphics that are not used in the final game may have been used in a scene in the original game but couldn't be used here because there wasn't enough room for code to display them in this version of the game. The text you can't see, and the actions you do that should be important but aren't, are closely related. I believe this part of the game was changed over in the port because you could not save the game in the Famicom version and making the player do this part over and over every time they restarted the game would have been really annoying. Once again, shiroi worked with me on this as a translator. I dumped the menus and game speech in January 2004 and shiroi quickly finished an initial translation of the menus. But, the whole project took practically two years! Essentially, the last year and half was spent finding all the context for the 496 phrases used in the game, editing the text and testing the game. I saw no point in releasing this translation, until I felt it both complete and polished, unlike some other translations I've seen come out in these last two years... Anyway, many thanks to shiroi for hanging in with me until we finished this thing. You know I can be a little anal. Thanks to KlD, my wife, for helping me out with testing and editing. Thanks to all our beta testers, we now know where people would have gotten stuck. Thanks especially to Radical R, for passing the game so quickly and getting stuck so few times, and for helping to proofread not only the game but this document too. I hope to work with you again in the future. (10)-------------------- shiroi's Translation Comments ------------------------ wow, two years on this one game. without any kanji, it was sometimes a little tricky, but we muddled through i guess. i ended up really liking this game. poor little yasu-kun! anyway, i don't really have that much to add here, just to say thanks to DvD and KlD for putting up with me. I hope everybody has fun with the game! (11)------------------ Radical R's Beta Testing Comments ---------------------- Well, what is there to say? I saw the post from King Mike on romhacking.net and figured since my translator had disappeared for a while (Real life is such a burden) that I could do some beta-testing, since I have had some experience with Rom-hacking - Yes, I'm THAT Radical R.. So I emailed DvD and after a few emails, I was set. The part I hated the most was the dungeon crawler. I always seem to get lost in those. But I completed the game and I can honestly say that it wasn't who I expected. Who was it? Play the game yourself; it's worth it. Thanks to DvD for putting up with me when I got lost. Also, thanks to KlD for giving me hints even though she wasn't supposed to (just kidding :P). I look toward to the next project I get. (12)--------------------- Project Timeline Highlights ------------------------- Jan 9 2004 - Text Dumped Feb 2 2004 - Text indexes added, 000 through 1EF Character Name Table Dump Added Feb 4 2004 - Main Speech PseudoCode disassembler written Feb 15 2004 - Phone Number Dialing Text Dump Added Feb 17 2004 - Sound Effects Played Before Text Added Feb 20 2004 - Bank Switching Code Completed Feb 23 2004 - Script Inserter Finished, Script sent to shiroi [shiroi busy with real life, time passes...] Aug 7 2004 - Complete Translated Script File sent back to DvD Aug 12 2004 - 1st Script Inserted DvD Sep 17 2004 - Hacking done!! (Name) extra space problem fixed!! Early 2005 - Finally finished determining when every Speech PS gets called from Main Code, Menu PS, or from other Speech PS Feb 9 2005 - Finished analysis of in game variables not related to text, started matching up all speech to speech PS to define context Feb 22 2005 - 25% of context is 100% done. [DvD busy with real life, time passes...] June 9 2005 - Context is 100% done, Version 0.5 script inserted, this Manual written, DvD can finally alpha test the game! shiroi & DvD speak for the first time and edit some of the more key pieces of text together Jun 14 2005 - DvD passed the game, Walkthrough finished, Script sent to shiroi for polishing now that she actually has the context of all of these phrases Jul 28 2005 - DvD sends State of Completion doc to shiroi, Editing is 78% done [shiroi busy with real life, time passes...] Nov 24 2005 - shiroi sends back here edits, Editing is 94% done Dec 14 2005 - Editing is 100% done, Beta script inserted, ready for testing ? ? 2005 - Version 1.0 script inserted, ready for release [various beta testers are unable to get the job done] Apr 5 2006 - Radical R started beta testing the game Apr 25 2006 - Radical R passed the game May 6 2006 - Final Patch Made, Final Testing of Final Patch Begins, new map created by DvD May 19 2006 - Game name changed to PORTOPIA, history of game greatly edited in the manual Jun 16 2006 - History editing done, game released (13)------------------ Software Used In This Translation ---------------------- * Emulators PC - FCE Ultra 0.94 by Bero & xodnizel - FCE Ultra 0.98.12 (the newest, but buggy, use 0.94 if you can find it!) - RockNES 1.952 Mac OS X - NEStopia 1.2.3 - RockNES 4.0 * Disassembler NES Disassembler v1.0 beta4 by Morgan Johansson * Table Dumper, PseudoCode Disassembler, Script Inserter Table Dumper (many versions!) by DvD * Hex Editors, Script Dumper - Thingy Version 0.98 by necrosaro - frhed 1.0.156 beta 1 by Raihan Kibria * Script Dumper Thingy * Script Editing JWPce 1.42 by Glenn Rosenthal Whatever shiroi uses! * Disassembled Code And Table Analysis WordPad (Win 98) by Microsoft * Manual Creation Notepad (Win 98) by Microsoft WordPad (Win 98) by Microsoft [This file got too big for Notepad!] * Tile Editor Tile Layer Pro 1.0 by Kent Hansen * Mapper 78 Info Mappers.exe by ? * ROM file expander NES ROM Expander by DvD * IPS Patch File Creator Snes-Tool Version 1.2 by The M.C.A./Elite ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 987654321098765432109876543210987654321 123456789012345678901234567890123456789