(insert elite ascii graphic here) The Mysterious Murasame Castle 1.1 (27 January 2011) Official Readme File! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I. Introduction II. Project IIa. Project Members IIb. Tools IIc. History III. End-User Information IV. Thx V. Legal stuff that would never hold up in court ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introduction The Mysterious Murasame Castle was one of the first games made for Nintendo's Famicom Disk System add-on. It would have been released at the product's launch, alongside The Legend of Zelda, but development issues forced the game to be delayed to seven weeks later. This no doubt contributed to its lack of popularity, especially compared to Zelda, and despite re-releases on the Game Boy Advance and the Wii's Virtual Console, Murasame Castle has never been officially released outside of Japan. So now we've translated it! It certainly didn't need much in the way of translating (most of the Japanese text can be easily inferred), but now it's in English and all of you should play it. All of you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Project The word "nazo" in Japanese is somewhat ambiguous (I guess), and for years it always bugged me that I translated the "nazo" in "Nazo no Murasame Jou" to "riddle" instead of "mysterious", which is the much more correct translation. Several months ago I decided to fix it, so I asked InVerse if he could re-design the title screen, which he very graciously agreed to. Once that was done and sent to me, finishing the rest took only a couple days. I took the opportunity to expand the available text in the file menus, and since there wasn't enough space on the disk to put in the full castle names, I ended up partially re-coding the castle name assembly routine to get it all in there and pretty. Then, while putting the finishing touches on this readme, I realized that I once again incorrectly translated the title as "Mystery of Murasame Castle", which meant putting off the release and humbly asking InVerse to re-redesign the title screen, which he again accepted. What a great guy! Now everything is beautiful and good to go, and we are both glad to present the definitive English version of The Mysterious Murasame Castle. Members: -------- Spinner 8 (http://suprise.oddigytitanium.com) - text hacking/translation InVerse (http://www.suicidaltranslations.com) - title screen design/insertion Tools used: ----------- FCEUX 2.1.4a by zeromus, adelikat, et al. (http://fceux.com) HxD 1.7.7.0 by Maël Hörz (http://mh-nexus.de) FDS Explorer 1.6 by Morgan Johansson (http://www.anes.se/NESTools/) YY-CHR 0.98 beta02 by Yy Lunar IPS 1.02 by FuSoYa, Defender of Relm (http://fusoya.eludevisibility.org) Patch history! -------------- Version 1.1 - All hacking redone from scratch, except the ending and a couple of graphics. Saved games are untouched, so those of you with soft-patching that kept having your saves over-written can play without fear. Version 1.0 - Everything's been translated and playtested, and the savegames have been deleted. Stupid savegames! Screw you, savegames! Known Issues ------------ - It may just be my settings, but this game does not properly save under FCEUX. For the time being, you may want to use other emulators such as Mednafen or Nestopia. - Some bugs or untranslated strings may still remain. Please, please contact me at spinner_8@parodius.com with any bug reports! A detailed explanation of how to reproduce the bug, and/or an emulator save state, would be much appreciated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ End-User Most people have realized nowadays that the 16-byte header on most old Famicom Disk System images is redundant, since the only information stored there is how many sides the disk has, and anyone can figure that out on their own with some simple arithmetic. Because of that, along with the fact that emulators don't really need it anyways, FDS images today typically do not have this header at all. Therefore, this patch requires a disk image WITHOUT a header. Make sure your image is exactly 131,000 bytes in size, or it will NOT WORK. If you own the disk yourself and have no way to dump it to an image that's playable on emulators, and you'd like to find the image on less-than-reputable websites, you can usually find it under the No-Intro name of "Nazo no Murasame Jou (Japan)". Patching games is very easy at this point, so an IPS tutorial isn't really necessary. Again, make sure that your file is exactly 131,000 bytes in size before patching. An explanation of the game itself isn't really very necessary, either. Swing your sword with A, use your special powers with B. You can use your sword to block incoming projectiles, and if there's no enemies around you'll throw a projectile weapon instead of swing your sword. Super sweet, man. There's a great explanation of the gameplay, as well as a walkthrough, over at strategywiki.org if you're interested. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thanks! This translation is still entirely dedicated to the FeFeA (pronounced: feefee) organization, now at their home on lostlevels.org. Next time you play your fancy Bio Force Ape or California Raisins prototype ROMs, please think of them and all of their hard (and expensive) work. Huge thanks to InVerse for thrice agreeing to design the title screen, and also for thrice inserting it, which saved me the trouble (I hate inserting title screens). I know that not much was changed, but I think this new title is much improved from the old one. Big thanks to the FCEUX team for that lovely example of emulation perfection. Hacking this game was a breeze thanks to this emulator, and it would've taken much MUCH longer without it. Thanks to Drakee and Sardius for their long exhausting hours of extensive testing. Cool dudes. Thanks to Beckey for feigning interest when I excitedly showed her the lengthened castle names that I hacked in. Thanks to Ryusui for pointing out like a year ago that "nazo" wasn't properly translated in the previous version of this translation, which provided the necessary shame to get me to fix this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Legal Made-up Stuff Let's keep this simple! This translation was made with care and love for the game, and is being released as a gift to all its fans at no charge. Please respect the wishes of the authors and do not use this translation for profit of any kind. Please do not distribute this translation patch with the original game, either patched or unpatched. Facilitating piracy is not the intent of the authors. Feel free to use this translation as a base for your own (non-profit) work, but please do me the kindness of notifying me at spinner_8@parodius.com. It's not necessary, but I just like to hear about it.