Archives for December 2003
You better appreciate this
23 December 2003 | Obsoleted | No Responses
Ok, the update I promised days ago is finally here. And it’s pretty big.
First off, for those who don’t keep in touch, don’t read forums–be they the JS ones or GameFAQs–and generally stumble through life like a blind, deaf mute, Der Langrisser is back on schedule for a public release.
FEIDIAN is a cooler acronym, right?
20 December 2003 | FEIDIAN | No Responses
I spent all day working on FEIDIAN. SARS has been renamed because byuu wanted to keep it open for our SNES tool, besides, I came up with a better acronym for FEIDIAN.
Massive optimizations have been done, even the most mangled custom tile definitions rarely take more than 3 seconds to dump now.
Yes, I know that’s slower than C, but this doesn’t require a massive development environment and complex coding knowledge to make your own definitions.
A few people have asked me why I’m working on this, and what exactly it could be useful for. I think this screenshot says everything:
Gaia is all done
19 December 2003 | Obsoleted | No Responses
The Crest of Gaia is finished. I told you it would happen today, right? 
It comes with a nice, colour PDF manual I was able to make thanks to Dave Shadoff sending me scans of the Japanese manual and player’s guide. I’ll hopefully have an update regarding Der Langrisser in the next 10 hours too.
Regarding SARS, which I put out about a week ago: I’ve been doing a lot of work on it (thanks to Soulfang constantly requesting new features ;)) and I hope to release a new version in the next few days. It’s been updated to support every possible tile width and height in 1bpp mode.
I’m working to add support for building and inserting a new font set based on a text file of two-letter combinations, which will be useful if you’re doing a Saturn or PlayStation project and can’t perform a true font-size hack.
I added 15 new sample font dump strings for a bunch of PSX and Saturn games including all Langrisser games, Dracula X: Gekka no Yasoukyoku, Slayers Wonderful, Fengshen Yanyi, La Nouvelle Fanpasia: Gulliver Boy and Wild Arms.
It can dump fonts and cause death
17 December 2003 | FEIDIAN | No Responses
I fixed a very important feature in SARS today, namely the ability to dump non-*8 width fonts. It now correctly dumps true 12×12, 12×18, 7×8 and all other monochrome bitplane data.
For the sake of speed, the multiple of 8 width and non-multiple routines are separate, because it would be an unnecessary hit to speed of *8 width fonts to force them to bit-based reading.
I still need to finish the reinsertion routine before a new release. I’m also considering an extension format that would allow you to define tiles by a pattern of As Bs Cs and Ds to show the bit arrangement of the tile. This could be handy for dumping odd tile formats like in Der Langrisser.
In other news, I caught a translation error in one of The Crest of Gaia’s Easter Eggs. It’s fixed now. Work on the instruction manual is about 20 percent done and going smooth, but tedious. One problem is the game’s credits–it has none.
What little is known of the NCS staff is found in one of the Easter Eggs. No credit to what they did, or even full names. If anyone has ideas on where I can get the credits, I’d really like to add them to the instruction manual.
That release date went poof …
15 December 2003 | Obsoleted | No Responses
I know only four people visit this webpage, mostly because I’ve 404′ed all URLs that link to it. Well, this is for those four.
Yes, The Crest of Gaia was supposed to have been released Friday. But I contacted David Shadoff who sent me some manual scans. I’m developing a nice instruction manual to package with the patch as I did for Langrisser I.
That’s the only reason it’s not out yet. No bugs came out in beta testing. I am very pleased about that. I am preparing a few more cosmetic tweaks and shooting for release this Friday.