I have a lead on a small-ish project for anyone interested in taking it up!

[ClarityZero]

Basically, the project would just be reworking the "Doro Network" skin mod for Battle Network 6 to be compatible with the English translated version of the original Japanese GBA rom. Currently, it's only usable on the US region releases of each version, and the author has no interest in doing additional work to change that. (Absolutely no shade to them for that, of course!)

That being said, the author told me that they're willing to give the stuff they already have to anyone who is interested so they can do it themselves. I lack the ability to do so myself, but I figured I'd ask around a bit to see if anyone with the necessary skills might take it up.

The author, Miol, can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@Miolnely and the release video for the hack is here.

P.S.
I'm actually not too familiar with the etiquette about this sort of thing, so I apologize if I've breached some unspoken rule with this post. XD

 

[Graw]

Sounds like a great opportunity for you to dive into the world of learning romhacking.

 

[ClarityZero]

Sounds like a great opportunity for you to dive into the world of learning romhacking.

Heh, nah... I've been down that road before. It's too much for me. On the bright side, the attempt helped me develop an even deeper appreciation for what folks go through to make these things!

 

[Graw]

Heh, nah... I've been down that road before. It's too much for me. On the bright side, the attempt helped me develop an even deeper appreciation for what folks go through to make these things!

Right. I find these kinds of posts frustrating. They pop up a lot on rom hacking forums. 'Oh hey guys, can someone do this for me? I don't want to do it but surely someone else will do it for me? I'm not going to help or provide any motivation for anyone to do this other than I want this.' In your case it has the added bonus of 'oh yeah the original author doesn't want to do it. Can you guys take someone else's work and do it for me because I can't be bothered to do it. I won't even provide the patch in the thread.'

 

[ClarityZero]

Right. I find these kinds of posts frustrating. They pop up a lot on rom hacking forums. 'Oh hey guys, can someone do this for me? I don't want to do it but surely someone else will do it for me? I'm not going to help or provide any motivation for anyone to do this other than I want this.' In your case it has the added bonus of 'oh yeah the original author doesn't want to do it. Can you guys take someone else's work and do it for me because I can't be bothered to do it. I won't even provide the patch in the thread.'

I mean, that definitely wasn't my intention. While speaking with the author, I asked them if they had any plans to do what I described, and they, themselves, said that they didn't, but would be willing to share their already completed work with anyone who wanted to do so. As such, I decided to ask around to see if anyone was interested, as I know my abilities, or lack thereof, in this area leave me unable to do what would be required.

Additionally, and setting aside the matter of the time and energy required to learn the skills, I actually don't have any significant desire to see it happen to begin with. The US version of these games is the version I grew up with, so I'm perfectly content with what's already there. Having the complete versions of the games, without missing content, would be even better, but it's hardly a deal-breaker for me.

All that is to say that I don't actually mind much either way. That's why I described it as a lead rather than a request. It was intended as a sort of "heads-up" to any potential interested parties. Maybe that was poor form on my part, but I already apologized in advance for such a case. There's not much else I can do about that now, is there?

Lastly, I didn't provide the patch because I assumed anyone interested would want to speak with the author directly, rather than through me serving as some sort of awkward intermediary. If that's also a problem, it's one that is easily rectified. I can provide the Google Drive link for the files, if need be.

Hopefully, I've explained myself a little more clearly now. That's not always as easy to do as I'd like it to be.

 

[Graw]

Sorry if my response came across as rude. Other people's work is a touchy subject matter in the romhacking world. Some people get quite protective over it and it's led to a lot of drama in the past and posts asking for other people to do things for them are a dime a dozen. It always looks better when the person asking shows they've at least done some initial work. You describe the project as smallish. This is also a common thing a lot of people asking these types of things say.

Without actually knowing how everything is stored in memory it could range from trivial to needlessly finicky and complex. Some good initial work would have been speaking with the original dev and maybe determining the actual scope of the work involved rather than just guessing. The original author having no desire to do this leads me to think it's leans towards needlessly complex and finicky rather than trivial and small.

Presenting this project in such a way where a person could come to this thread and quickly gather information about the project they would need to make a decision and start working on it would go a long way from making this look like a request to trying to present an interesting project people may want to work on.

As it stands now, just trying to figure out what would be involved seems like a lot of work in and of itself which isn't really all that appealing.

 

[ClarityZero]

Sorry if my response came across as rude. Other people's work is a touchy subject matter in the romhacking world. Some people get quite protective over it and it's led to a lot of drama in the past and posts asking for other people to do things for them are a dime a dozen. It always looks better when the person asking shows they've at least done some initial work. You describe the project as smallish. This is also a common thing a lot of people asking these types of things say.

Without actually knowing how everything is stored in memory it could range from trivial to needlessly finicky and complex. Some good initial work would have been speaking with the original dev and maybe determining the actual scope of the work involved rather than just guessing. The original author having no desire to do this leads me to think it's leans towards needlessly complex and finicky rather than trivial and small.

Presenting this project in such a way where a person could come to this thread and quickly gather information about the project they would need to make a decision and start working on it would go a long way from making this look like a request to trying to present an interesting project people may want to work on.

As it stands now, just trying to figure out what would be involved seems like a lot of work in and of itself which isn't really all that appealing.

Yeah, I can see how that might cause problems, and that was my bad, for sure. I made a lot of assumptions, and left out some initial details that would've been helpful to start with.

For my part, the reason I described it as small-ish at first is because, well, I hadn't actually given it a whole lot of thought. In retrospect, it's probably a lot more work than I made it sound like. I hadn't actually considered the issue of how things like the different regions might impact the scope of the project. In my carelessness, I forgot that this kind of thing can actually get pretty complicated, especially with the sort of thing I'm talking about here... It's nowhere near as simple as just sticking the two things together and calling them good, after all.

To clarify as to what the ultimate goal would be, it's basically just to take the patches contained here and make them compatible with the English-translation patches for the Japanese releases of the GBA games. available here and here. Which, again, is probably not as simple as it sounded to me in my head.

Ah, and if it helps at all, the author's specific statement was that "if anyone is willing to do it, I'll give them all the .DMP files I used." I didn't ask for those myself, but I suppose I should have, so I could have provided them upfront. I'm just not familiar enough with the ins and outs, not that that's an excuse.

That's all I can think of for right now, but if there are any more specific details that you think I should provide, by all means, let me know, and I'll do my best to do so. I'm feeling more invested now, heh.

 

[Graw]

I hadn't actually considered the issue of how things like the different regions might impact the scope of the project

A lot of it comes down to the differences in Japanese and English. Japanese takes up more space because it has a lot more characters and potentially two different kinds of characters as well as possibly western characters. Usually to accommodate this, stuff is shuffled around in memory when ported outside Japan. This can be not a big deal if things weren't moved around too much or a very big deal if things were moved around a lot. At the very least it's going to involve a lot of tedious tracking down values in memory and comparing them.

It looks like you'd also be dealing with whatever changes the author of the English patch made as well making things even more complicated. Even if you made it work on the Japanese rom it might not work without more work on the English patched version of that rom. They look like the same patch just updated but it's hard to say what kinds of updates there are between the two versions.

It's starting to make sense why the author of the original patch maybe didn't have much interest in doing this.

 

[ClarityZero]

A lot of it comes down to the differences in Japanese and English. Japanese takes up more space because it has a lot more characters and potentially two different kinds of characters as well as possibly western characters. Usually to accommodate this, stuff is shuffled around in memory when ported outside Japan. This can be not a big deal if things weren't moved around too much or a very big deal if things were moved around a lot. At the very least it's going to involve a lot of tedious tracking down values in memory and comparing them.

It looks like you'd also be dealing with whatever changes the author of the English patch made as well making things even more complicated. Even if you made it work on the Japanese rom it might not work without more work on the English patched version of that rom. They look like the same patch just updated but it's hard to say what kinds of updates there are between the two versions.

It's starting to make sense why the author of the original patch maybe didn't have much interest in doing this.

Yeah, I can see that now. Still, at least the info is out there, I guess...?