Major breakthrough coming? (July 21, 2007)

[Cless]

I received an extremely promising email from Habilain. What I consider the biggest hurdle the project has encountered, could very soon be a thing of the past.

No, not the script translation. That's in good hands. But rather the technical issue that's preventing presentable dialogue screenshots-- the one that only allowed us 16 characters per dialogue line.

Assuming all goes well, a release of some sort this year is truly in the realm of possibility. Though if it is, I can't guarantee skits, or full compatibility with real consoles. The dialogue itself might not even be polished optimally. But regardless, I'm sure it would make a lot of people happy.

Stay tuned...

[Cless]

Well, here's the first result, even if it's just a menu screen:



Initially, this screen had more large text than could fit in the VRAM rendering buffer, so once the cap was hit, the overflowing characters wouldn't be rendered. An extensive hack was done to  eliminate the total character count cap.

I still haven't seen the results this has hack has had on the dialogue windows, but maybe we'll see later today, if not tomorrow...

And uh...  as much as I'm sure you want to nitpick it, the small text at the bottom is the result of a DTE bug that hasn't been worked out yet.

[Leiw]

It's good to hear this kind of news for ToP, it sounds very promising.
I thank all the people who are working on this project for their good work.


I would test the patch on my real ps1 hardware when it becomes available (well depending on compability I guess)
I also have an Xploder Cartridge + Xlink program so I can easily take screenshots if I encounter anything special ^^

[Cless]

As the day edges on, I'm really not positive I'll have this hack in my hands today. Hope Habilain didn't hit an unexpected last minute bug. You guys have no idea how much I'm personally anticipating this. You could say I still have the same passion for this project the day I started it years ago. It's gonna be like Christmas as a young kid all over again when this dialogue hack is ready.

[throughhim413]

Awesome news that this is forthcoming.  It's really great to see this project moving forward like this, and I'm sure that more than anyone, Cless, you want to see it through to completion.  Once the patch is out, I'll be interested to try running it on both my PSP (using the built in PSX emulation) and on my modded PS2.  Hopefully the patch will be compatible, but for now, just having things moving is enough to get me excited.  Keep up the great work!

By the way, Cless, do you have any interest in having a pair of eyes to look over the menu stuff?  I mean, you said you imported the values from ToP GBA, but given the S.D. thing and other elements, it might not hurt to have someone (or a few people) check it over.  Obviously I'm volunteering myself if you're interested, but this might not be a major concern right now.  I just thought I'd throw it out there.

[Frogacuda]

Yeah, I might not hang around here or check updates as often as I once did, but this release would still mean as much to me as ever. Still my favorite RPG of all time.

[Cless]

By the way, Cless, do you have any interest in having a pair of eyes to look over the menu stuff?  I mean, you said you imported the values from ToP GBA, but given the S.D. thing and other elements, it might not hurt to have someone (or a few people) check it over.  Obviously I'm volunteering myself if you're interested, but this might not be a major concern right now.  I just thought I'd throw it out there.

Maybe later. I'm not done touching everything up. Although I've finished the item descriptions, there's still some older stuff that needs to be brought up to speed.

Yeah, I might not hang around here or check updates as often as I once did, but this release would still mean as much to me as ever. Still my favorite RPG of all time.

Well, despite this taking so friggin long to complete, it's turning out far better than I would have thought five years ago. Though I'm sure you'd hope so...


vs.


hehe

[Cless]

Okay, I've just received word that he did indeed hit an unexpected last minute bug when it comes to dialogue, but he has an idea of what's going on. So we'll be waiting just a bit longer.