Category: retro

Romhack Thursday: Two Translations of Idol Hakkenden

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Most of the things we’ve presented here so far have been play hacks, or occasionally graphics hacks, but there are lots of hacks that exist purely to translate games into other languages. This week we offer two of these, both translations of Idol Hakkenden.

One of these, and arguably the much more playable, is from LIPEMCO! Translations and was made in 2018. (Say it aloud with me: “LIPEMCO!”) It is a fairly direct translation that keeps all the references to Japanese culture, and has much more text.

The other is from 2020, and is from Polinym of Woolsey Fan Company, which retitled it Pop Star Debut. It’s less technically impressive, with brief text that enhances the feeling of crazy logic that suffuses the game through.

Opening to Pop Star Debut
Notice how, due to sprite mirroring to save memory,
Erika/Sabrina’s one sock keeps switching legs

Portopia-style adventure games are all heavily menu-driven. Portopia was written by a young Yuji Horii, who would adapt the style into the combat system of Dragon Quest and, soon after, became an ultra super rich person.

But in those ancient days there were a lot of games that used a Portopia-style system to present adventure stories, and a lot of them were on the Famicom. Not a lot of them made it overseas, but sometimes we’d get glimpses of the style, like in Princess Tomato of the Salad Kingdom, or the adventure sequences of The Goonies II and Dr. Chaos. The popular NES ports of ICOM Simulations’ computer adventure games Shadowgate, Deja Vu and The Uninvited could also be considered of this style, even if the games themselves started out on the Macintosh, in English.

While Portopia was a murder mystery, some of these games, like Idol Hakkenden, were not. It’s pretty much just a traipse through a linear plot where you help a fairly dopey young girl to become one of those media-destroying pop culture sensations. Take a look at the fairly hype intro movie I included above for a sense of it. In it, protagonist Erika (Sabrina in this translation) dances to the theme song, alternatively spinning before monitors showing her face, the lava pit of a volcano, and outer space. I don’t think two of those three settings actually appear in the game, but I haven’t made it through the whole thing yet, so, who the heck even knows?

These kinds of adventure games are known for being sometimes a bit random with the actions that are needed to advance the plot. To pick just one example (this is from Pop Star Debut, it does make a little more sense in the other translation, although not much more):

  • Early in the game an item that can be looked-at is a Rock (it’s an Ashtray in the more accurate translation), suddenly appearing on the list of things that can be examined in a room despite Sabrina having visited that location before, when it was Rockless.
  • Looking at it causes her to react in disgust. A passing old man compliments her on her tidiness, and gives her tickets to a planetarium show. The Rock, meanwhile, vanishes again. (They’re probably filming another Fast and Furious movie.)
  • While at the planetarium, you can speak with one of your entourage, a girl named Sonya, who tells you that she has an idea: you will need a nutcracker. “Like the ballet?” asks Sabrina. We hope.
  • So you go back to the Lobby, and ask the lady there for a nut. They sell “Fortune Nuts” there, ah. They don’t have nutcrackers, but you’re told “Aquariums have them.” Standard aquarium equipment, certainly.
  • The aquarium does not, in fact, have a nutcracker. What they do have, however, is an otter named Kip.
  • Kip cannot open the nut himself. But one of your followers, if asked, will tell you he might could do it with a Rock. Like, the one that was in the Lobby?
  • When you go back, it has reappeared, in the Take list, and it can be picked up. Then you can bring it back to the Aquarium where, if you perform a song for the otter, it will deign to open the nut. The lyrics go, and I quote: “Kip! Can you? Big jaws! Klap! Snap! Open my nut Oh! Kip! Please! Yeah!!” I am given to understand that in Japanese the lyrics matched music that played in this sequence, but it was too difficult a task for the translator to manage. The first translation’s version of this sequence is presented below.
  • The song communicates to the otter the nature of your request, and he agrees. Sadly, it breaks his teeth, and also the fortune sinks to the bottom of his tank. Some other means must be sought to retrieve it and learn its no-doubt essential wisdom.
The otter song in the first translation has lyrics that match the music

And the game continues from there.

The group sponsoring the Pop Star Debut release, the Woosley Fan Company, borrows its name from 8- and 16-bit era Square translator Ted Woosley, who gained some notoriety for his loose, but distinctive and energetic, translations. It was he who added the well-known “You spoony bard!” line to Final Fantasy IV (a.k.a. II) in the US. The description of the hack mentions it’s not a literal translation, but tries to convey some of the same energy. It turns out that the translation takes a lot of liberties.

The hardest thing about writing a fan translation is not always the language itself, but squeezing the changed script into the memory space of the original game. Japanese is a more compact language than English, with concepts generally expressible using fewer glyphs. Pop Star Idol uses many subtle cheats to get its script to fit, including condensing common digraphs into one character. Even with these savings, some of the translated text seems rather terse. The first translation expands the rom size by over 100K to fit a more accurate translation, although Pop Star Debut’s much abbreviated text is entertaining in its own (largely unintentional) way.

Both versions have places where you’ll probably end up just trying every option available to you to find the trigger to advance the story, but that’s pretty much what you have to expect from this kind of game. So long as you’re prepared to accept this, and bring along a great deal of patience (especially for Pop Star Debut), Idol Hakkenden is a fun glimpse into a style of game we mostly never got to see in the U.S.

One more thing: Pop Star Debut did go the extra mile of creating an English PDF of what the manual might have looked like had their translation been released as an English NES release. It’s included with the hack!

Cover to the simulated manual

Idol Hakkenden Translation (romhacking.net)

Pop Star Redub Fan Localization (romhacking.net)

“LIPEMCO!”

Gaming Hell: The Speed Rumbler

We’ve been meaning to do an Arcade Mermaid article on Capcom’s very difficult late-80s arcade game The Speed Rumbler, since it’s a stand-out inclusion on Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium on current console. This article is still coming, but in the meantime you can read Gaming Hell’s own take on this sadly unknown yet really cool game.

There’s a lot to like about it, but my favorite thing about The Speed Rumbler, known as Rush & Crash in Japan, is the CAR meter:

*CAR*

There is no reason that I know of to put the word CAR in a red splash, other than that the word CRASH in its arcade title screen is also within one. It somehow seems appropriate in the game though, since sometimes just rolling through things is as useful as shooting them.

If I wrote more about Speed Rumbler here I’ll just be using words I’ll have to repeat when I write about it myself, so go read Gaming Hell’s article!

Gaming Hell: The Speed Rumbler

Kimimi on Korokoro Puzzle: Happy Panechu!

Kikimi the Game Eating She-Monster’s blog is on the short list of blogs we watch for interesting stuff, and she’s found a winner this time! Korokoro Puzzle: Happy Panechu! is a Japan-only GBA puzzle game that uses a similar kind of tilt sensor as found in Kirby Tilt N Tumble.

It’s a game that involves moving colored blog creatures around to connect them in groups of four or more to clear them out, which sounds pretty typical at first. But doing this also creates bombs that you can also connect, to make them into bigger bombs, and clear out larger fields of clutter as you do so, as voices proclaim things like “So happy!” and “Mega happy!”

The tilt sensor comes into play in that it allows you to determine from which side of the screen new objects enter from.

Korokoro Puzzle only got the one entry, but we have it from Kimimi’s that it hides a whole lot of gameplay within its little rectangular case.

Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster: Happy! So happy! Mega happy!

Romhack Thursday: Gradius AC 2000 for NES

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Gradius for Famicom and NES is a well above-average port of a game for very different hardware than the arcade original. It was good enough that it was converted right back into arcade game, released for Nintendo’s Unisystem arcade hardware as Vs. Gradius. Graphically and aurally, it is quite similar to the arcade game.

It’s similar, but not identical. Now this hack doesn’t change the major downgrades from arcade Gradius. There is no vertical scroll in levels two or three, and you still can only have two Options at once. But in a variety of subtle ways, the game looks a bit nicer. In particular, the game’s text fonts being changed from the boring old font used on the NES back to the arcade’s snazzy line-drawing affair is a nice change.

The original version of this is quite an old hack, created back in 2000, but it has been periodically updated over the years, most recently changed in 2018. That’s a long period of support for a romhack!

Gradius AC 2000, by Kaison (romhacking.net)

The Arcade Blogger on the Development of Xevious

December 30th of last year, The Arcade Blogger did a piece on the creation of Namco’s classic vertical shooter Xevious.

Xevious was modestly successful in the US, where it was produced by Atari, but it Japan it did amazing numbers. Jeremy Parish (in his NES Works and related series) has mentioned several times that it was a vastly influential game in Japan, inspiring a whole generation of designers, and a whole bunch of clones and similar games. Its US release was around the time of the arcade crash, which was mostly an American thing. If it hadn’t had happened, maybe now we’d think about Xevious the way we consider Pac-Man.

The team behind Xevious

Xevious basically invented the vertical scrolling shooter where your ship has free movement of the screen. It also included a Bomb button to attack objects on the ground, displayed on the game’s background layer. It was a concept that would later be iterated upon in Konami’s Twinbee games.

Revealed in the article is an interesting fact. The scrolling background is stored in ROM as a huge 1024×2048 bitmapped image. That’s much wider than the screen is though. What the game does is send the player into a vertical portion of it 224 pixels wide.

When the player reaches the top, they wrap around to the bottom of another vertical stripe of the game world. In a complete loop, the player will travel from the bottom to the top 16 times. You can tell when you’re about to start another loop because the background will reach a place with trees all the way across!

You always start off a life in a tree-filled area because it begins you at the bottom of a stripe; each vertical pass over the map functions as a checkpoint. The stripes overlap somewhat, so you sometimes pass over an area you’ve seen before but offset by a bit.

For more facts on Xevious and its development, be sure to click through to the article!

The Arcade Blogger: The Development of Xevious

Arcade Attack Podcast: Ed Rotberg Interview

The podcast Arcade Attack interviews former Atari designer and programmer Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone! His introduction identifies him as the creator of the first FPS. Is he? I do not know for sure, but it seems awfully plausible. I think it’s a little distasteful identifying him by his connection to a genre that, when he created Battlezone in 1980, wouldn’t even exist for a decade yet. Rotberg’s accomplishment feels more profound than that, but Battlezone is definitely foundational!

Arcade Attack: Ed Rotberg interview (an hour 16 minutes)

Classic Game Dev Andrew Braybook On Computer Conversions

Andred Braybrook is a legendary computer game dev from the Commodore 64 age, and before and after. In addition to the classic C64 games Uridium and Paradroid, which perform feats of scrolling that machine are really not designed for, he went on to many several other games, including the excellent computer ports of Taito’s sequel to Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands.

(Although Braybrook mentions that Taito hadn’t told him about the three secret islands that can appear at the end, so they got left out. They didn’t know about them either!)

Image from Braybrook’s blog

He has a blog post that details many aspects of he and his co-workers’ process back then that is fascinating to anyone with knowledge of these platforms, and even someone who doesn’t. Thanks to @acb@mastodon.social for the link!

Andrew Braybrook: How We Made Computer Game Conversions, from his blog

CD-ROM Compilation Search Engine

Set Side B often verges into adjacent tech areas, especially for older software, especially when those areas happen to contain a lot of games. This is just a note that the always-great Jason Scott of the Internet Archive has a great post about Discmaster, which is hosted at the IA, and is a search engine into the contents of a bunch of old CD-ROM file compilations. Many of these were shareware collections put out by companies like Walnut Creek, intended in the age immediately before the internet to put out collections of shareware, but sometimes bundling freeware, or libre-free software.

The error, presented in class Web Gray and Times New-Roman.

Some of these files are very hard to find on the wider internet. When I visited Discmaster myself it was down for an upgrade (it’s a bad sign when your filesystem runs out of inodes) but I look forward to scouring its archives often in the future!

DiscMaster (Internet Archive)

Random Pac

Pac-Man is rightly heralded as a classic, not just the best-selling arcade game of all time at over 100,000 units (even more when you consider every Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine has the elements of a Pac-Man machine inside it), but it’s solidly well-designed. All of its elements come together to produce a solid test of skill and strategy.

It’s not perfect though. The game possesses two major flaws that, in retrospect, made it a little less interesting to play now. The ghosts behave deterministically when they’re not vulnerable, meaning that patterns work against them and turning the game into a test of memorization and execution. And, every level’s maze is the same, which gets kind of monotonous. Tellingly, while Pac-Man was extremely popular for its time, its GCC-made follow-up Ms. Pac-Man had a much longer life in arcades, and it addressed both of these issues with the first game: ghost movement at the beginning of boards is randomized, and it had four mazes, instead of the original’s one.

Random Pac is a fan game, available on itch.io and made by Luca Carminati, that also solves the issues, and a bit more simply: it randomizes the maze for each level. This one change makes the game immune to memorization, and makes each level a kind of situational puzzle, as the player must use the maze layout as best they can to avoid being caught.

It’s not the only change made, but the others are, for the most part, in line with that one. Since the game is much less likely to extend endlessly, extra lives are awarded multiple times, first at 10K then every 50K points, instead of the once, by default, of the original. There are bonus levels in place of the intermissions that can be worth a considerable number of points.

The fruit bonus items that showed up twice during each level of the original game may now appear up to four times per level, which can be worth the majority of the player’s score if they can get up to the 5,000-point Key boards. Getting all four Keys is 20,000 points, which is two-fifths the way to an extra life by itself.

The game increases in difficulty a bit more slowly than classic Pac-Man. I’ve been to the 7th Key level; in the original, on the the 5th Key board, and from the 7th Key on, ghosts no longer become vulnerable when eating an Energizer (a.k.a., a power pill). Vulnerable times kept decreasing in my 7th Key game, but hadn’t cut out completely yet.

Another difference, and I’ll be going into some deep Pac-Man internals here. In classic Pac-Man, ghosts have three states, Scatter, Chase and Vulnerable. If Pac-Man doesn’t eat an Energizer, ghosts periodically enter Scatter state for a few seconds, then change back to Chase. You can tell when ghosts change between these states because they all reverse direction.

In most boards there are two Scatter periods, and the timers, both for entering Chase and Scatter, freeze while an Energizer is active on any ghost. In Random Pac, the timers don’t freeze; Chase and Scatter periods continue even when the ghosts are vulnerable. This makes Energizer timing very useful for decreasing the amount of danger you face: a short way into a Chase period, eat an Energizer and disrupt their pursuit! By the time they catch back up to you after it wears off they may be time for them to Scatter!

In place of intermissions there’s a bonus round that asks you to eat as many randomly moving targets as you can in 35 seconds

Ghost AI seems to be mostly the same, although unlike classic Pac-Man, each ghost doesn’t seem to have a set “home” location. They don’t intend to chase Pac-Man during Scatter, but instead fixate elsewhere on the board. The Orange Ghost’s Chase AI also makes use of its home location, making its behavior much less predictable, although it’s still easily the least threatening ghost.

Random Pac was Luca Carminati‘s first classic game remake. Since then, they’ve made many others, including Tutankham Returns, which we’ve linked to before. They’re terrific!

Random Pac (itch.io, $0)

Romhack Thursday: The Legend of Zelda Automap Plus

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Last month we brought you Metroid + Saving, a passable attempt to make a classic game, that has a number of quirks related to it being a fairly early NES game, less frustrating to newer (younger) players. This week’s hack is another with that theme, snarfblam’s hack of NES The Legend of Zelda that adds a working automap to the game.

Like Metroid, finding your way around 128 screens of Hyrule is challenging, even if the game isn’t as large as, say, the Gameboy Link’s Awakening, which had 256 screens. But the limited number of tiles also decreases each screen’s visual distinctiveness, especially up in the mountainous regions.

The map appears in the upper-left corner of the overworld screens, which you can see in these screenshots. A special touch is that the map isn’t revealed all at the start but fills in as the player explores, and doesn’t consist of blank squares to show explored areas but even shows some detail. Places where screens are blocked internally are shown on the map, which is a great aid to both navigation and memory.

It immediately becomes evident that, like with Metroid + Saving’s mapping feature, it’s how the game should have been written originally, and probably would have been if design trends had evolved just a bit further at the time.

There are a couple of other graphical niceties in the hack, like health being shown in the life meter in 1/8th-heart increments. But overall the map is the main attraction here. It’s such a fundamental change to the game that the much more involved hack Zelda Redux uses it too. It is also worth trying out, if you still find the original Legend of Zelda to be a bit too hardcore for you.

Zelda Automap Plus, by snarfblam (romhacking.net)

Zelda Podcasts

Ryan Veeder has made (and continues to make) podcasts about playing various Zelda games.

The Hero’s Path is about replaying Breath of the Wild. 54 episodes, about 42 hours in total. Here’s the RSS link.

The Complete Guide to Koholint was his first Zelda podcast, and it discusses each of the 256 overworld screens of Link’s Awakening. 256(!) episodes. They vary in length between one minute and 47, with most being just a few minutes long. RSS.

The Complete Guide to Termina covers various elements of Majora’s Mask. It’s at 21 episodes, and is ongoing. RSS.

Apple Kracker’s Guide

Back in the days of the Apple II, there was a thriving scene in trading copies of commercial software. Means to prevent this, through copy protection schemes, were just as rampant, as publishers sought to protect their work from those who would use it without paying. The process of figuring out a disk’s copy protection and making it so it could be copied and run by others was called cracking, or sometimes, kracking.

Cracking was, and still is, a black art. There are many ways to protect a disk from being copied, and just as many to deprotect that data. Some disks remain uncracked to this day. It is the work of Apple II cracker 4am (Mastodon) to try to unlock the data on these rapidly aging pieces of media so they can be preserved. (On 4am, jump to the bottom.)

The Apple II Kracker’s Guide seems to have been written by a anonymous user known as The Disk Jockey. It’s a good overview of basic forms of copy protection and ways to defeat them. A copy is at the Internet Archive, but I encountered it in the collection at bitsavers.org, here. It’s like candy to someone of the right frame of mind. Like me!

Aside: If the name 4am sounds familiar, and you find yourself thinking “Didn’t he used to be on Twitter?” He was. He’s not anymore. This happened several months before the Age of Musk. Twitter’s automated processes decided somehow that a video he tweeted of Apple II software Super Print booting was revenge porn and banned him, even rejecting an appeal. He moved to Mastodon. Now that Twitter is missing half of its employees, situations like this will probably become more common. 4am is not the subject of this post, but if you want to read more about Apple II protection and its breaking, you should follow him on Mastodon. He has about one tenth of the followers there that he had on Twitter, which is a shame.