I too like to play games in order, and I had passed Hydlide and owned Super Hydlide and wanted to play it as it was the oldest Genesis RPG game I owned that I hadn’t played. But Super Hydlide is Hydlide 3. Hydlide 2 was made for PC-8801 and MSX. I was going to translate the MSX version of H2 so that I could play it, but I discovered that Woobm.net had officially done so, and so I bought their official translation to give it a try. I passed the game, but it was fairly hard and quite boring… but I was expecting that. What I didn’t like was that there were not enough clues as to what to do for some major things needed to advance/pass the game, which made the game essentially impossible for me. I hate having to use a walkthrough, but for this game, it’s really necessary, which takes all the fun out of it for me.

I remember stumbling around on the web back in 1996 one day while bored at work and coming across Archaic Ruins and Daves Videogame Classics. That day changed my gaming habits forever. Later it was sites like Atmospheric Heights, sys2064, … Good thing for me that Internet usage was never monitored back then.

First emulators I got were colem, c64s, ines (with the crack), EMU and of course Dave Spicers arcade. Later Nicola released his pacman emulators which later became MAME, and at the time I didn’t think too much would come of it. Hmmm….

And the history about your life is curious too…

Keep it up

I’ve found a lot of problems in the NINJA2 implementation I wrote before. When I finish the GTK patcher and libPirate, I will rerelease all the patches on my site. I’m changing the distribution license anyway.

Contact me on ICQ or MSN or something. I can send you a zip of the patched files or whatever to get you by for now.

The remake is pretty damn good. On top of all the nice graphical improvements, you have the option of changing back to the old style graphics of what I think to be the MSX version. And then it counterbalances this by giving you the most terribly annoying music; the NES melody a professional composition in comparison. It reminds me very much of the differences between the PC-98 and PC remake of The Roots of Darkness. Enhancing graphics while losing all BGM redemption by switching to MIDI. A hell of a lot easier to choose Hydlide PC since WAV allows for so many more options to switch out than MIDI.

You might want to give Hydlide another look. My last upload of the patch includes a hack for Download Edition. If you download the installer from Vector.co.jp, apply the patch file, then enter any 10-digit (or was it 8-digit?) number, you can install fine. Just apply my patch after that. The only thing you’ll be missing was my cheesy music patcher, but you can swap in any new WAV file on your own.

Die Bahnwelt is a very fun game. If you are serious about doing an Emerald Dragon translation, you should get in touch with Talbain or Venatyr over at Lakuuna. They have the original 650MB ISO instead of the ISO+MP3 rip I released. Of course, you’re still stuck with Unz for an emulator … I asked the author about adding a debugger, and he gave me, “When hell freezes over,” as a response.

No doubt my attraction to your works lies mostly in their obscurity. I think you might be the cause of my “giving certain games a second chance” tolerance. I recall playing Hydlide like most else. Dying on the first screen, loathing the repetitive music, not even bothering to understand the controls. I read the reviews of the PC remake and figured I just needed the better version. I missed its release and subsequent death on the internet in general so I was out of luck in that regard. I also read your review of Super Hydlide. I really wanted to get to this game but I have a habit of finishing a series in order. So I conceded to try Hydlide again and one more chance was all it took.

Mr. Xu practically forced me to play Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan. It was surprisingly good as were your English poems therein. I can really see everyone in China liking that game since we convinced others to play it who had pretty much ceased playing video games altogether.

Langrisser is one of the few turn-based strategy games I can stand so I certainly wanted to play the PC remake in English. I remember stumbling across this listed translation along with another translation that was apparently babelfished by a langfandood (who’s site is absolutely hilarious). I never figured out how the heck to get the best endings in that game but leaving the scripts up on this website so I could read those endings was helpful indeed.

Recently, you’ve gotten me hooked on Solomon’s Key type games. I’ve played Solomon’s Key (NES and arcade), Solomon’s Club, Monster Rancher Explorer, Tang Tang, Wizzy’s Quest, Spherical, and of course, Zipang. Zipang is clearly the best of them all despite the anticlimactic endings. Abracadabra got lackluster reviews so I’ve stayed away from that. Wuchtel mit der Zauberfuchtel is borderline enduring.

demauk- At risk of sounding naive, I dream of one day hacking EmeDora for X68k.

You might want to get in touch with RadicalR (http://radicalr.pestermom.com/) since he’s the only person I know of that has bothered approaching an X68000 translation. Imperishable Night demands his attention as of now but only hacking graphics remain. I too share in the dream of hacking Emerald Dragon for its superior counterparts especially since they’re the most difficult versions. Tomaitheous, David Shadoff, and SamIAm appear to be working on the PCE-CD version. Nightcrawler on the SNES version.

I’d rather see Die Bahnwelt out the window first. Partially because that’s the X68000 translation RadicalR has been working on and partially because it blows The Chaos Engine out of the water.