(insert elite ascii graphic here) Die Hard 1.0 (3 February 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 I wasn't even aware that there was a version of Die Hard for the TurboGrafx/PC Engine until about a month ago. Not even that supreme tome of knowledge, Wikipedia, had so much as a mention! It's by Pack-In-Video, the same developers as the NES Die Hard, but the two games are very different. This one is much more action-focused, playing like a top-down shooter in the style of Commando or Ikari Warriors and such. You don't even start out in the Nakatomi Building, where the entirety of the movie takes place - the first level is in a jungle area (the game calls it a "garden"), and the second level is a huge swamp kind of place (the game calls this a "pond"). It's pretty weird, but you should still check it out sometime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Project Things went pretty smoothly once I figured out that the font was stored as four large bitplanes, one after the other, along with an incredibly simple compression scheme. It was weird to figure out and even weirder to hack, so I wrote a cute little program to calculate what each of the layers should be. The hardest part was taking the incredibly dry Japanese script and turning it into something that John McClane, the lead character of the Die Hard franchise, would actually say. Hopefully it all worked out okay. Members: -------- Spinner 8 (spinner_8@parodius.com) - hacking DarknessSavior (DarknessSavior@gmail.com) - translation You can visit our respective websites at suprise.oddigytitanium.com and dsrh.dedtech.com if you want! Except that coincidentally, neither website is currently up. Whoops! Visit them later! Tools used: ----------- Mednafen 0.9.015-WIP by Mednafen Team (http://mednafen.sourceforge.net) WindHex32 EX 0.99.14 by Bongo` (http://stealth.romhack.net) HxD 1.7.7.0 by Maël Hörz (http://mh-nexus.de) Atlas 1.06 by Klarth Tile Layer Pro 1.1 by Kent Hansen Relative Searcher 2.5 by Jair Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express 10.0.30319.1 by Microsoft Corp. (http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/) Patch history! -------------- Version 1.0 - All pre-level monologue scenes translated. A typo in the debug menu was corrected. That's pretty much it. Known Issues ------------ - With a quick hack like this, there shouldn't be any problems, although there may be some errors that I somehow repeatedly glossed over. Please please email me at spinner_8@parodius.com with any issues, so that I may fix them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ End-User In this age where emulation is much more common than playing games on the original hardware with game copiers, the completely unnecessary headers on TG16/PCE games are slowly being phased out. This means that this translation patch is only usable on ROMs that do NOT have this header. Those of you with a ROM compatible with No-Intro standards should be fine, but everyone else should bear in mind that your ROM absolutely must be 524,288 bytes in size or this patch will NOT work. For the extra-cautious, the CRC should be 1B5B1CB1. If your ROM is 524,800 bytes in size, never fear! Simply open the ROM in your favorite hex editor and delete the first 512 bytes. In other words, everything from 0 to 1FF (mostly zeroes) should be deleted. Then you'll be able to patch your ROM with no problems. And don't worry, your ROM will still run in every modern TG16/PCE emulator, including Magic Engine, Ootake, Hu-Go!, and Mednafen. The game's controls are as simple as simple can be. The II button punches and shoots, the I button jumps. Just like you think it would. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thanks! This translation is entirely dedicated to Drakee, since I did it all for him as a (very) late Christmas present. Merry Christmas, bro, and thanks for all the used UMDs. Big thanks to DarknessSavior, who handed me a translated script in less than twenty-four hours. He was also always there when I needed corrections or re-wordings, so his input in this project was invaluable. Hurray! Thanks once again to Sardius for testing the game and making sure everything wasn't too terribly written. Thanks also to Colonel Buttons for his assistance with testing. Thanks to Beckey and Emily for their attempts at helping me write the script. Your help is appreciated, but in the end I decided to have McClane say things other than simply "where the fuck am I fuck this shit fuck!!". Thanks once again to oddigy for the webspace. This year, I promise. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Legal Made-up Stuff This is a free translation, and is not for profit. Please respect the spirit of this project and do not sell or otherwise profit from this translation. Please do not distribute this translation patch with the original Japanese ROM, either pre-patched or otherwise. By itself, however, you are welcome to re-distribute this translation, so long as this readme file is included. Feel free to use this translation as a base for your own (non-profit) work, but please do me the courtesy of letting me know about it. It's not absolutely necessary, of course, but I just like to hear about such things.