Google never fails to amuse during April Fool's Day. And this time, Google Maps has introduced a new feature that's totally relevant to this forum.

But first, go watch the promotional video for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rznYifPHxDg

No idea how long past April Fool's Day it will stay up, but right now, if you go to Google Maps and click on "Quest", you'll be able to browse the entire map in this mode.

So a while back, in an access-restricted thread (this one, for those who can access it), taizou observed that there is a singer/songwriter in Taiwan named Liao Yi-shen (廖益伸), who also goes by the pseudonym Liao Da-sen (廖大森). Here's the Wikipedia article on him (in Chinese), and here's a song credit confirming the pseudonym. This guy's no small fry; he's written for some big Chinese pop stars such as Andy Lau.

So why am I bringing this up in this thread? Of course it's related to bootleg games. There's a 廖益伸 credited for music in games by Chuanpu and Vast Fame, with perhaps the most famous works being Barver Battle Saga and Soul Falchion.

Perhaps this is sheer coincidence... but the more I find on this guy, the more likely it seems that it's not a coincidence. For instance:

#1: He appears to be from the Taichung area. Which, not coincidentally, was also Gamtec/Chuanpu/VFame's home turf.

#2: He's written music for a modern Taiwanese RPG (水靈仙子 "Shui Ling the Fairy").

(Anyone with sufficient knowledge of Chinese want to try contacting him? He appears to have several social media presences that I've found, at least under the 廖大森 name...)

If you've seen the videos of Crash Bandicoot IV, Rayman IV, or Digimon Adventure, you already know what awaits in... Spider-Man 3 (Russian Version)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK13JpH8ZUU

Edit: And I see from the comments that Barver already discovered this a month ago, but hey, it's news to me.

I already brought this up on the Digimon Ruby dump thread, but I figured out how to dump the text from the Digimon Ruby and Sapphire ROMs. The trick is that they're not only encoded using a non-ASCII encoding table, but that it's a 16-bit table (i.e., each character uses 2 bytes).

And, well, the translations in these games are hilarious, so a text dump was totally necessary.

Each of these files is a ZIP file containing both the text dump itself, and the Python implementation that I used to extract it.

Digimon Ru[rb]y: http://cl.ly/2u3r191k3J1k1m2I1J2R
Digimon Sapphire: http://cl.ly/0N1F3746041G0h3L0n38

The latter, of course, is significantly smaller than the former, since it's a platformer. But its translation is equally hilarious.

Enjoy!

So, I've successfully managed to reverse-engineer the font format used in DeluxePaint II Enhanced. Which, as I'm sure I've mentioned numerous times here, is second only to PC Paint in how often its stock fonts are used in bootleg games. (These fonts are also used in more than a few legitimate games, incidentally-- DeluxePaint was quite popular amongst video game developers in general.)

I'm considering converting all these to TrueType at some point in the future, but I've already got the whole set converted into Unix BDF format as it is (they load into FontForge and look perfect!). Here's the zip of the BDF files, for anyone who might be able to do something with them, along with the Python script I made to convert the originals.

Y'all might recognize this one from a few bootleg games, for instance:



Or how 'bout this one?



Or this one? I think I've even seen this one used by Nice Code:

So, as y'all might have noticed, VT03 ROMs use a slightly non-standard format for their 4-bit-color sprites that none of the tile editors seem to be able to properly handle.

However, one nice thing about Tile Molester is that it's very easily extendable by design: it's possible to add new formats simply by editing a human-readable XML file.

So here's the trick:

In the directory where tm.jar is stored, you'll find a file "tmspec.xml". Edit that file in your choice of text editor (Notepad works fine). Above the line "</tileformats>", add the following lines:

Code: HTML

 

       <compositetile id="CP04" formats="PL00,PL00,PL00,PL00">
            <description>4bpp planar, composite (VT03)</description>
        </compositetile>

Now, when you next launch TM, you'll find that in the View → Codec menu, there's a new option "4bpp planar, composite (VT03)". Choose it, and voilà. Legible sprites!