Can hack Metroid

One cold January day, I pulled out the old archive SoM2Freak had given me a month before. I quickly realized the supplied tools were totally useless. X-Late would never help anyone translate anything, and X-Char crashed every time you tabbed out of it.

I decided to try out BreakPoint Software’s Hex Workshop 2.20 — yes, you read that right. 2.20 was a long, long time ago. It lacked tables, so everything had to be done in raw hex.

Raw hex is how I have done things since that day: only twice in my life have I made a Thingy table.

Seeking better tools, I did some Internet searches which eventually turned up Quatch and Lord Pinto’s Web site. The two were attempting to translate Dragon Quest I&II for Super Famicom, and had written their own sprite editor called SNES Sprite Editor. Imagine: if we named things like this still today, Google might actually be helpful.

I took a screen shot of the game’s font, then started cutting and pasting it into the right order using Adobe Photoshop 4.0. I printed out the Japanese font and the English font, and then made myself some flashcards for the hex associated with each character.

Why would you make flashcards of a table?

Well, when you are forced to look up everything in raw hex, it helps to know the values for each letter instead of having to look them up.

Also, it gives you something to do while you wait for you HP DeskJet to print the Mark Rosa’s 380-page paper translation of Final Fantasy V

From my time reading the Final Fantasy Mailing List (FFML) and following random Squaresoft web rings, I knew a paper translation of the script was just released. I came up with the master plan of taking that script, author’s permission be damned, and cramming it into the game. Besides, wouldn’t he be glad to see his translation was now less of a pain in the ass to use?

So it printed out and spent the time memorizing the hex table. As pages rolled out of the printed, I punched them and stuck them in a three-ring binder my dad lifted from work. I also printed out the hex dumps for the item list regions.

I think that much paper rolling through the poor, low-end printer was just too much for it. It began pissing ink all over the pages, and shit itself to death like a geriatric who’s colon exploded.

Dad, if you were wondering how that thing died, now you know.

The binder became a permanent addition to my backpack, and whenever I was in school, I spent my time transposing the hex into romaji. It was certainly more interesting than listening to the teacher discuss which color socks Mr. Hyde would buy and other topics that dominate high school English education.

My lugging of the binder got to be something of a joke amongst the people who talked to me back then. I think everyone figured my whole translation plan was a pipe dream that was never going to go anywhere.

After the new semester started, I moved my Web site from GeoCities, where I had some address in SiliconValley and the user name “interceptor-1″ — yes, the dog — back to Andy Church’s Dragonfire where I was now paying for space. I threw up a small site, which may or may not have been titled Shadow’s Realm at the time. The account name was “shadow1,” because despite how tiny Dragonfire was, someone else had already grabbed the “shadow” user name.

The page was the typical reverse-type style that dominated the web at the time. It used frames, I think, and on the right was some simple stuff about the translation.

I remember I posted some faked photographs where I had ‘shopped out the game’s text and entered things from the text script using Arial font. I can’t believe I thought anyone would believe it; moreover, I can’t get over how many people did believe it. Somehow, the pictures shot around the Internet, and no one found it odd that the Super Famicom was suddenly smoothing its fonts and alpha-blending the smoothed edges.

Stupid faked photos aside, I was making progress on items and monsters.

Eventually, a guy named Dave Pavlisak, who later demanded he only be referred to as “Hooie,” sent me an email to say he was interested in the project.

(Dave, if you ever end up at this page, thanks again for doing that tape trade with me back in 1999.)