If you join the Discord, I hope you join with the intention of playing a decent chunk of the game and provide feedback of what you think.
@manimani
Great news! Pretty pleeeease also add support for turbo machines in the patch, since this game is so slow.
As for quality of life patches (faster scrolling, faster play speed, etc), I don't know how to approach this. While I may appear to be an MSX expert for translating a game many people failed to do so, I have to state the contrary. However, rest assured: all the tools created to make this translation possible will be open source as will the translation project itself to help with said quality of life patches.
@manimani
Great news! Pretty pleeeease also add support for turbo machines in the patch, since this game is so slow.
I have turbo patch for this laying down somewhere. Will find it shortly and share it.
EDIT: here it is:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1kyb4fqWeQ9azU5MnY4d2FyWnc...
It 100% supports Turbo-R. Not sure if MSX2+/Gradiente turbo support there too (was too long ago)...
And I believe back then it was an optional patch meaning you need to hold [SELECT] while booting to enable turbo mode. If you don't hold [SELECT], the game will start in normal mode.
What does this turbo patch do?
There's a frame rate limiter which waits until 10 vblanks have occurred, so the game runs at 6FPS. If I remove this frame rate limiter, the scrolling is about 30% faster but when standing still all NPC's are moving very fast. Waiting for 7 vblanks instead of 10 is probably acceptable. Set the value at address DEF5 in the diskimage (CRC32: 4CFD3A9E) to 7 to update the number of vblanks the game has to wait.
Best solution would be to remove the frame rate limiter and implement some routine to only update NPC locations every 10 vblanks.
What does this turbo patch do?
There's a frame rate limiter which waits until 10 vblanks have occurred, so the game runs at 6FPS. If I remove this frame rate limiter, the scrolling is about 30% faster but when standing still all NPC's are moving very fast. Waiting for 7 vblanks instead of 10 is probably acceptable. Set the value at address DEF5 in the diskimage (CRC32: 4CFD3A9E) to 7 to update the number of vblanks the game has to wait.
Best solution would be to remove the frame rate limiter and implement some routine to only update NPC locations every 10 vblanks.
The turbo patch just enables turbo r turbo mode if you press SELECT at boot up. I looked into game long ago and code for moving map not that great. In order to make it perfect, big chunk of the game needs to be updated. Similar to what we did in Ashguine 2 translation where whole game was moved to VBLANK in order to properly work with turbo mode. It means all delays in FF that just delay based at regular MSX speed needs to be updated to use VBLANK and be unaffected by CPU clock.
Thanks for your works and time. There a possibility for download in file hunter?
Best wishes.
Thanks for your works and time. There a possibility for download in file hunter?
Best wishes.
Not for the moment. Hopefully when it's finished. For the moment the download is available on the aforementioned discord server. Mainly for bug hunting.
File hunting will come at a later stage
If you join the Discord, I hope you join with the intention of playing a decent chunk of the game and provide feedback of what you think.
I'm trying, but some idiot registered my e-mail on discord. I took over that account and requested the deletion, but the process will take 14 days to finish.
Nice work on the translation, will pick it up on the upcoming MSX streams on Twitch, they were down for a few months, due to hardware changes, but after some upgrades, no more composite capture, now using an OSSC to capture MSX, everything is up and running again So this translation will be definately on my todo list.
https://www.twitch.tv/mrhydragon is where you can find the live MSX streams.
The turbo patch just enables turbo r turbo mode if you press SELECT at boot up. I looked into game long ago and code for moving map not that great. In order to make it perfect, big chunk of the game needs to be updated. Similar to what we did in Ashguine 2 translation where whole game was moved to VBLANK in order to properly work with turbo mode. It means all delays in FF that just delay based at regular MSX speed needs to be updated to use VBLANK and be unaffected by CPU clock.
Ah ok, enabling R800 will help a lot indeed!
I made a patch to improve the scrolling speed, it can be downloaded from https://github.com/abekermsx/Final-Fantasy-MSX-Performance-P...
@Arjan does it include enabling R800 on turbo R?