Mississippi Satsujin Jiken English Translation Patch by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com) v1.00 (Created July 20, 2017) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *TABLE OF CONTENTS* ----------------- I. VERSION HISTORY II. INTRODUCTION III. INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE IV. KNOWN BUGS V. CREDITS VI. TECHNICAL NOTES VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CLOSING WORDS ******************** I. VERSION HISTORY ******************** v1.00 (07-20-17): First release. ****************** II. INTRODUCTION ****************** This is an English translation patch for Mississippi Satsujin Jiken, the Famicom port of a Western 8-bit computer game named Murder on the Mississippi. The original game was released on the Apple ][ and Commodore 64/128 by Activision while the port was released by Jaleco, all in 1986. It is a Western-style adventure game wherein the main character is an accomplished British detective who investigates a murder aboard a Mississippi riverboat that he coincidentally happens to be on. The game uses a fairly simple interface to interact with the various objects and suspects on the boat, and is pretty short once you know what to do, though getting to that point is not an easy matter. The port is rather slapdash and is missing a fair chunk of gameplay as well as an entire character, and unlike the computer version, the port forces you down a much more linear path with frustratingly little hint that it's doing so. However, it still makes an interesting exercise in hacking and the game itself is still text-heavy by 1986 console standards. The fact that Mississippi Satsujin Jiken was originally a Western game makes it ideal for translation by someone with rudimentary Japanese skills. As such, I have translated the game using the original script, though the Japanese script was technically different in some ways, most notably the names of the characters. The already-written script combined with some other factors made this a relatively easy hack which took me about two weeks to make. Please enjoy. *************************** III. INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE *************************** 1. Download and install Lunar IPS or a similar IPS patcher if you haven't already. 2. Get a copy of the Mississippi Satsujin Jiken ROM. No, I don't know where. The correct ROM is identified by GoodNES 3.23b as the verified good dump. 3. Apply the desired patch to the ROM using the aforementioned IPS patcher. **************** IV. KNOWN BUGS **************** There are a couple of minor bugs introduced by this patch. First of all, the attract mode stalls at the dialogue in Sir Charles' cabin due to the text now taking up more than one page. You're not missing anything, though, and you can still return to the title screen by pressing a button. The other bug is the occassional issue with text that seems to be oddly formatted, particularly with the saved conversations in the notebook. As usual, I have left the title screen as-is, and anyone inclined to hack it should do so. With this game in particular, the existence of an original English version should provide ample support for such an endeavor. There are also bugs that were in the port originally. The most obvious one is graphical glitching during text output; this may have been exacerbated slightly by the patch. Nothing should interfere with gameplay very much. *********** V. CREDITS *********** Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, editor/tester Rob Swigart: Original script ******************** VI. TECHNICAL NOTES ******************** Aside from the original English script, there were a number of circumstances which made hacking Mississippi Satsujin Jiken a lot simpler than it could've been. Firstly, the developers wasted a lot of space, not only in terms of empty space but also in terms of space taken up by unnecessary data. It appears that the porters had originally planned to make a game much closer to the computer version, but for whatever reason were incapable of doing so. Because of this, they put in a lot of text translated straight from the original game, most of which never got used. Getting rid of this text resulted in a great deal of savings. Secondly, while the game uses multiple PRG banks for code and text, the text routine works in such a way that it's a relatively simple matter to hack it without worrying about which bank the text is in or which bank the Famicom is currently running code in. Lastly, the developers implemented a nifty auto-pagination routine which allows for arbitrarily long passages of text to be put under only one pointer. Therefore, I wasn't constrained by the window size and only had to worry about line length. The main hack was a DTE/dictionary routine. However, I did not make use of dictionary compression because it didn't add much and that part of the routine is too slow to play well with the bankswitching that the game uses, causing really nasty audiovisual glitches. Thankfully, DTE by itself was plenty enough to get the script in without any real changes aside from what was removed by the porters. Other hacks included giving the text routine the ability to handle more than 256 characters at a time as well as fixing a bug in the original port that caused duplicated text in the 32nd column on occasion. (Incidentally, I decided to use the entire 32-column space of the screen for text, though this wasn't strictly necessary. I made that decision early on and changing it back to the original port's two-space padding would be a lot of work for questionable benefit.) While I removed a lot of text without 100% certainty that it was all dummied out, I playtested the game pretty thoroughly and am fairly confident that there are no issues and that what is there matches up as closely as possible with the original game. If you run into a place where it seems like there should be text but isn't, please let me know. **************************************** VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CLOSING WORDS **************************************** Thanks to: Activision, for developing and publishing the original game. Jaleco, for publishing the port. Nintendo, for making the system this game runs on. Psyklax, for working on translation hacks of early Famicom games and inspiring me to do this one. KingMike, for providing a generic DTE/dictionary routine for 6502 processors. Klarth and RedComet, for creating Atlas, Cartographer, and ScriptCrunch, three script utilities that made editing the main block of text very much less tedious. The developers of FCEUX, the very useful debugging emulator which I used for this entire project. Romhacking.net, for hosting this hack and many others like it, as well as providing useful hacking information. The NESDev Wiki, the premier resource for NES hacking information. And, of course, you for reading and playing. Questions, comments, criticisms, and bug reports can be sent to pluvius3 @ gmail.com (without the spaces obviously). Please put "Mississippi Satsujin Jiken" or something similar in the subject line so I will know what the email is about. If you alert me to a bug, I will fix it in a future update and give you credit. Copyright 2017 GAFF Translations, all rights reserved.