Law of the West English Translation Patch by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com) v1.00 (Created August 27, 2020) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *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 (08-27-20): First release. ****************** II. INTRODUCTION ****************** This is an English translation patch for Law of the West, published for the Famicom in 1987 by Pony Canyon and developed by the prolific "ghostwriting" studio Tose. It is a port of the eponymous game published for the Commodore 64 in 1985 and the Apple ][ in 1986 by the American developer Accolade. The original game is a short, complex dialogue-driven adventure game in which the protagonist is a sheriff of an Old West town who has to deal with its assorted cast of residents and visitors--preferably without getting shot. While the port keeps the original's complicated dialogue trees (64 possible outcomes for each of 11 NPCs), much of the scoring complexity (where you could get points for handling situations and enforcing the law peacefully and lose them for needless violence, among other things) has been lost. As poor recompense, a number of pointless and sometimes-irritating arcade elements have been added. I honestly can't recommend this port to anyone except to get an idea of whether or not playing the original game would be worthwhile; even what scoring elements the port has don't correspond well with the scoring in the original. As with a number of my previous hacks, this patch was created for Psyklax's translation project for early Famicom games. As with the Mississippi Satsujin Jiken patch specifically, this patch uses the original game's English script in lieu of retranslating the essentially identical Japanese script. *************************** III. INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE *************************** 1. Download and install Floating IPS or a similar BPS patcher if you haven't already. 2. Get a copy of the Law of the West ROM. No, I don't know where. The correct ROM is identified by GoodNES 3.23b as the standard Japanese dump. 3. Apply the desired patch to the ROM using the aforementioned BPS patcher. **************** IV. KNOWN BUGS **************** None at this time. This patch actually fixes some scripting bugs introduced by the port where some dialogues that should have caused you to get shot did not, and vice versa. Please note that versions of FCEUX earlier than 2.2.3 do not support this patch. It has been confirmed to work with the most recent versions of both Nestopia and Mesen. Hardware support for the patch is unknown at this time. *********** V. CREDITS *********** Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, editor/tester Alan Miller: Original script ******************** VI. TECHNICAL NOTES ******************** As this game uses the same mapper as Outlanders, the difficulty of expanding it was largely the same. Where Law of the West stands out is in how it does its text. Due to the heavily branching nature of the dialogue, Law of the West uses nonstandard pointers that mostly consist of pointers to other pointers representing the four possible outcomes of any given dialogue instance. This necessitated writing a custom dumper for the text. Surprisingly, once I realized that I could use a stack implementation to write a recursive program, I had a perfectly working solution for what I thought would be the hardest part of the hack almost on my first try. It was actually more difficult to get the script from the original game; the C64 version uses a 5-bit FBLE and the text is scattered all over the disk in a way which I never did figure out, while the A][ version is obfuscated by the insane video output engineering that Steve Wozniak implemented in that syatem. I ended up having to copy-paste each line of dialogue individually as it was outputted to the C64's video memory. Outside of the above, the only other difficulty was changing Law of the West's dakuten handling into a line break. This port has a strange way of handling text output; first, it prints the line of text without dakutens, then, on the next frame, it prints the dakutens. Because of this split between frames, changing the subroutine to print a second line was tricky and represented most of the time spent on hacking the game itself. Beyond that and the expansion, things were pretty simple; the game already contains a full English font that just needed to be inserted into the appropriate place, very little text outside of the main dialogue block needed translation, and the final testing only required a couple of hours. **************************************** VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CLOSING WORDS **************************************** Thanks to: Tose, for developing this game. Pony Canyon, for publishing this game. 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. abw, for developing abcde, a script utility that made editing the main blocks of text very much less tedious. KingMike, for creating Nflate, the utility that automated the grunt work of ROM expansion. The developers of FCEUX, the very useful debugging emulator which the hacker 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 "Law of the West" 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. This work is licensed by GAFF Translations under the CC BY-NC 4.0 License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)