dog

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So I've run into a very interesting situation with the Magic School Lunar fan translation: one script is too big. I've gone above the RAM budget for the first time in the start of chapter 4. The original is the largest script in the game, at 162KB, and the inserted English script is hitting significantly above that. It seems the game crashes on load if the generated script file is any larger than 170KB, and the generated English version is currently 198KB.

One option would just be to get ruthless with editing and try to get the character count for English down to around where the Japanese is. I think there's room for another approach though; there's something like a spare 30-40KB in the game's kanji font, which is mostly blank now. It should be possible to relocate some of the excess script data from this chapter into that, since it's otherwise just wasting RAM.


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in reply to @dog's post:

evil guy voice: use the spare glyphs to store common 2 character sequences "ee" "ft" "th" etc
and do cheap and crappy huffman coding that way

This is probably way worse than just using that space for text because now you have to store bitmaps for all your combined glyphs but it is funny

Pretty much every game hacker also has to be an editor at one point or another. In the best of cases, it's just a few bytes that can be shaved off with creative editing.

In the worst. Well. You're at that spot. :)

I've seen projects that did that! You joke about it being evil, but it really does work.

In my case though, saving space in the script involved a swap from two-byte encoding to one-byte encoding and from 16x16 fixed-width text to 8x16 fixed-width text. So it's not really a good match for this project's constraints.