Emerald Dragon QQs...

[SavagePencil]

I received a copy of Emerald Dragon yesterday and had a couple o' questions that I was hoping I could get answered:

1.  The game came in a double-disc case.  I'm guessing this is one of those instances where they used the second "bay" for holding the map?  I hope I'm not missing a fan art disc or anything, but pcengine.co.uk and pcedaisakusen don't indicate the #/discs, and pcecp search appears to be broken.

2.  Speaking of PCEDaisakusen, they list an Emerald Dragon Taikenban (link http://www.pcedaisakusen.net/2/28/504/1/Emerald-Dragon-Taikenban-Guidebook-jp.htm), which is described as a "Magazine Insert" but also as a SCD.  What is this, exactly?

[Necromancer]

1.  It's one disc.  There's only three titles I can think of that had a second disc: Galaxy Fraulein Yuna re-release with the HuVideo disc, Princess Maker with a soundtrack mini-cd, and Urusei Yatsura with a soundtrack disc.  There might be others, but it's definitely not common.

2.  The taikenban is a booklet (mook) that came with a CD containing a demo for the game.

[SavagePencil]

Got it.  I had usually assumed mooks were strategy guides for people who already owned it.  Was this one more of an advertisement for the game?

[esteban]

Got it.  I had usually assumed mooks were strategy guides for people who already owned it.  Was this one more of an advertisement for the game?

Mooks served many purposes... If a game demo was included, then "promotion & marketing" of said game was certainly a major desire for the publisher.

[NightWolve]

As an additional FYI, this RPG will see an English patch some day courtesy of SamIam and myself. Both of us are doing other things right now (he's happily busy with Xanadu), but we'll resume eventually. I feel no rush, but the most difficult aspects have been overcome and compressed English text blocks are working 100% bug-free with a good font at present, so it's just a matter of time.

http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=18358.0

[Necromancer]

Hot damn that looks awesome. 

[xelement5x]

Woot!

[esteban]

PCE FAN: Utterly Fantastic!

[SignOfZeta]

There are tons of PCE games in double cases. No PCE game is more than one disc. Presumably this is to fit bigger manuals or whatever. I stopped thinking about it a long time ago.

[seieienbu]

I was wondering what had happened with that project; I'm glad to see that it's still alive if on the back burner.

[BigusSchmuck]

Totally forgot about this one. Looks pretty sweet!

[SavagePencil]

There are tons of PCE games in double cases. No PCE game is more than one disc. Presumably this is to fit bigger manuals or whatever. I stopped thinking about it a long time ago.

Yeah, the reason it came up was because I recently got a Psykio shmup that had a second disk just for fan art and it made me paranoid.

As an additional FYI, this RPG will see an English patch some day courtesy of SamIam and myself. Both of us are doing other things right now (he's happily busy with Xanadu), but we'll resume eventually. I feel no rush, but the most difficult aspects have been overcome and compressed English text blocks are working 100% bug-free with a good font at present, so it's just a matter of time.

http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=18358.0

oh shi-

EDIT:  I wanted to mention that I really enjoyed your Ys IV work and am looking forward to Xanadu.  I picked up Xanadu recently along with Xak III so I can do some ripping & patching.

[elmer]

As an additional FYI, this RPG will see an English patch some day courtesy of SamIam and myself. Both of us are doing other things right now (he's happily busy with Xanadu), but we'll resume eventually. I feel no rush, but the most difficult aspects have been overcome and compressed English text blocks are working 100% bug-free with a good font at present, so it's just a matter of time.

Excellent ... I hope to see/play this when I finally stop monopolizing so much of SamIAm's time! 

Those screens look good! 

I've got to ask, did you have to do a font-hack to get it to display an 8-wide font instead of the Japanese font, and were they using the 12x12 Japanese ROM font?

Now that I've done it on 2 different games and it turned out to be fairly easy on both, I'm wondering if Emerald Dragon could use the same kind of 4-wide/8-wide bi-width font hack that worked so nicely in Team Innocent and the Xanadu games (before the final VWF code went in).

[NightWolve]

I've got to ask, did you have to do a font-hack to get it to display an 8-wide font instead of the Japanese font, and were they using the 12x12 Japanese ROM font?

Now that I've done it on 2 different games and it turned out to be fairly easy on both, I'm wondering if Emerald Dragon could use the same kind of 4-wide/8-wide bi-width font hack that worked so nicely in Team Innocent and the Xanadu games (before the final VWF code went in).

If you look at the History log post here, I noted what I had to do and the 8x12 font harvested out of the PC-FX BIOS actually works nicely. The hacking was just about overwriting character tiles, that's it. It would be great if you did a better font hack job though, if you ever became interested when other projects finish off. The other thing I'll definitely need help with is hacking the title screen. Haven't looked yet if the graphics are compressed or not, I'm betting they are. David was gonna look at that some day for me, but since the project is asleep for this year also, he's likely waiting for me to prod him.

[elmer]

If you look at the History log post here, I noted what I had to do and the 8x12 font harvested out of the PC-FX BIOS actually works nicely.

Oh, darn! I hadn't seen that timeline before, thanks.

Sorry, but if the original developers limited themselves to 8-wide glyphs (Hiragana and Katakana), then it's really, really unlikely that they used the 4-pixel text-coordinate step that makes the bi-width font an "easy" hack.

Perhaps they did ... but I'd be very surprised.

Both Team Innocent and the Xanadu games originally used 4-pixel steps because they chose to deal with the 12-pixel wide Kanji ROM font that meant that alternate glyphs would start on a half-tile boundary.

It would probably take a pretty major hack to use a bi-width or VWF font in ED.