The best music in the universe

Those who have been stalking me might remember Manufactured the “album” byuu and I made back in the earlier part of this decade. After six years of being unavailable on the Internet in any form, I have decided to re-release our monstrosity.

Last year when the Der Langrisser translation project drew to a close, byuu and I talked about revisiting the concept and doing better songs. At the time, we were really just screwing around. The album is incredibly unbalanced, and you can figure out precisely how we learned to put this together if you listen from the first track to the last.

At the moment, the script we used to generate the songs is missing in action, but I will try to explain what we did below.

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Chugging along on FF5

Dave Pavlisak was my instant idol. He was the first college student who ever really bothered to talk to me, and he gave me some respect for being as ambitious as I was for 14-year-old.

More importantly, he built his own Super Nintendo cartridge copier. I had looked at DiskDude’s schematics and was just left scratching my head. Where I was confused, he was not. In fact, he built his without ever hearing of those plans, and at a time when the only documentation on the system was some old postings to the “famidev” newsgroup.

What can I say, the guy was smart.

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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.

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It’s possible to ack at romhs

Piña Consolada was a section of Chris “Typhoon_Z” Hickman’s Web site, Archaic Ruins, one of the early hubs of emulation. From the day I discovered it till the day it vanished from the Web site, it never featured more than three projects.

The first one, and the one I’m saddest was never completed, was Super Kid Icarus, a game being developed by Jeremy “Y0SHi” Chadwick, who went on to run Parodius Networking. Even though nothing ran it and the only screenshot was of the title screen, it still offered promise.

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Stumbling about

It was around this time I stumbled onto Node 99, a Web site designed by Sean Whalen that was dedicated to what I would come to learn was the “emulation scene.” To be honest, I had really never heard of anything being called a “scene” up till this point, except for maybe New York’s theater “scene.”

As I browsed around its red pages, I found all sorts of other emulators–most related to some machine called the “MSX,” which I’d never heard of, and some PC emulators for Commodore 64, which I’d heard of, but to this day still have never touched.

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When I encountered emulation

In 1996, I pretty much tanked the eighth grade.

Earlier that year, a student in my school named James White gave me a disk with a wonderful script that exploited the Luhn algorithm–the one credit card companies use to validate card information–to make you an account. Of course, at the time I did not know that. I just knew your pushed the button, it played music, and magically you had an account.

Yes, I was a script kiddie.

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A new section: memory

For those who don’t know yet, I am done translating games.

I will try to finish the two projects I am able, those being Der Langrisser and Heroine Anthem, but I’m otherwise finished with what has been most of my hobby and life for ten years.

Ten years is a long time, and at this point, there is nothing left for me to translate.

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