Things have been progressing even slower than usual. I’ve been in the slow lane for awhile now thanks to an injury I sustained last September that has caused me months of pain, months of therapy, and is still not better. I’ve been unable to play any games, and for many weeks was even unable to use the keyboard with two hands. This has been a real set back for me and has limited my hacking and related game playing time significantly amongst other things.

I was able to get some stuff done here and there. I continued on with menu hacking and the unified VWF core. Most recently, I added support for tile mapped text engines. The further I got into the menu hacking, the more routines I discovered that needed to be converted to VWF. It really is starting to get ridiculous. I have to assume this game was worked on simultaneously by different people who all wrote their own text engines for the pieces they were working on. I got some menus translated, but there’s still many to go.

As can be seen in the screen shot above, I am in the middle of working some things out. I have to find a new thinner font for the menus. What I have just isn’t going to work. I hate finding fonts. That’s why I have kind of kept the same few for all my projects. If anybody has any suggestions for a thinner font that might look good with Tenshi, let me know. I’ve asked around at RHDN and gotten on suggested font so far.

I am also running into speed problems. My unified VWF routine suffers from overhead as a result of being so flexible. I’ve got menu screens using 2 or 3 different text engines. Converting them all to VWF is showing some sluggish performance. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about it yet.

If you’re interested in any other details, check out the forum. I’ve made several posts over the past few months updating on things along the way. Unfortunately, due to my current situation and continued doctor visits, I wouldn’t expect much output from me in the near future. The verdict is still out on whether or not this will be a permanent injury for me. I’m hoping some more time might help, or continued doctor visits will reveal something that can be fixed surgically or something. I haven’t quit, and will continue when I can. In the meantime, I’m going to go enjoy my soon to be new wife and subsequent honeymoon cruise to the Carribean!

-Nightcrawler

It’s that time of year again. It always seems to be a motivating time of year when it comes to ROM hacking. As you can see, I’ve been working on Tenshi No Uta in recent weeks and will continue to do so throughout the holiday season. I did a VWF hack for the game a long time ago, but as I picked this project back up I soon discovered there are at least 4 or more different text engines in the game that could use a VWF (Main dialog, cut scenes, menu, items, battle, etc.) It wasn’t going to be very fun hacking in several more VWFs, so I came up with an idea for ‘one hack to rule them all’ so to speak and spoof a line from Lord of the Rings.

After some conceptual discussion with byuu over at RHDN, I came up with a plan for a set of routines that will act as a ‘universal’ SNES VWF hack. By breaking down the VWF hack process into small enough pieces and setting up the various routines to use ’standard’ variables. They end up acting like macros. Low level and high level concepts meet. For each VWF hack, there are several lines of initialization code setting up locations of different items such as font, text, output, tile counters etc. and the routines work their magic from there using only those initialized parameters. Then, at the end, there’s a few lines of VWF specific code to handle special cases such as control codes, format conversions, or game variable updates. I’ve been successful so far with three VWFs working with this new code design. I’m hopeful with a bit more refinement, I can easily support the rest of the text engines in the game.

What’s even better is I’m planning on being able to use this set of routines and templates to ultimately be able to add a VWF hack to any SNES game with the least amount of work possible. That’s a little bit further down the line though. For now, it’s going great for Tenshi No Uta, and I hope to have some more screen shots showing several more text engines working soon!

In the mean time, I’m also continuing to work on menu hacking for the game and doing test insertions for English text as seen from the screenshots to really move this project forward. Hope to see you all around the forums during the holiday season! Be happy and be safe!

-Nightcrawler