I pulled up the AstroBoy game for the GBA, and it turns out it turns on EVERY SINGLE SPRITE (at least during dialogue) and just positions them slightly offscreen.
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I pulled up the AstroBoy game for the GBA, and it turns out it turns on EVERY SINGLE SPRITE (at least during dialogue) and just positions them slightly offscreen.
Also, it devotes an entire sprite just to Doctor O'Shay's nose.
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oh right, I hate hacking GBA games, I forgot
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they're at the right era where they love to do shit like dynamically composing text as background tiles out of decompressed binary fonts, and they also don't tend to use ascii/unicode to encode their text. So hacking them is a PAIN
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but life is short (and the days are long) so I must
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oh god it's got some ad-hoc compression for english text
The line I'm looking for is "I'm here on behalf of your father"
But I see "I am behalf of"They've got some special character that means, like, "insert the word from N words back"
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but I can inject into the non-compressed parts, so I'm gonna do that and pretend the compression doesn't exist.
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So I injected into the second letter of "behalf", and check out what 0xD2 was:
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note that it's not "bultimatehalf". I think it used the "h" as an offset. I bet if I change it too, I'll get different words.
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@foone how much text could Astroboy for the GBA possibly have such that a convoluted custom compression scheme was called for
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@0xabad1dea it's also an 8mb rom with 200k unused at the end. They definitely didn't need this.
I'm guessing the company made other GBA games and they just reused some code?
