Leaving a thought here... if someone loves this game (or Jäästä) and wanted to translate it to their language, I could help. Alas, I speak only Finnish and English fluently.
At its easiest, I'd expect the process to be taking a CFG file like this for Jäästä and translating the values stored under the section "text" while paying attention to length limits (X chars for item names, Y chars for textwindow text after wordwrapping). And the compressed translated text hopefully not causing the game to not fit in the ROM file. At least with Spanish, the accents and whatnot would need some extra work from me, since they're not in the current defined charset.
And probably also updating the title card (another PNG file).
Oh, the directions and commands are in the Python file... those would need changing as well...
I think I've finally managed to update my game engine to allow for chapters/games larger than 16KB (Step's three chapters were basically independent games on separate pages, but with a shared Huffman decoding tree on the shared code page.)
However -- scanning for items currently on the player's location means flipping the memory page hundreds of times in quick succession. It works on emulators (BlueMSX, OpenMSX 0.15.0). I have no clue how real hardware would react. Does anyone dare to do that at their own risk?
As a slight change from the MSXdev entry, the opened probe now has its own picture, but there's very little more done on the outside to differentiate this from the contest entry. I may edit the graphics a bit for added detail now that I don't have to worry about space, but I don't see the game itself getting extra content.
Flipping memory banks frequently is not a problem on real hardware and matches the emulators. It’s an instant operation because it just rewires the address lines, no data is copied around.
I can confirm what Grauw said. Freedom Fighter physical release uses frequently page switch (fir example, during prologue and epilogue sequences pages are switched inside the isr) and during the game action whenever you pick up a power up pages are switched to execute the powerup routine and then switch back to actual bank on use (digferent fro each level).
So don't worry about it
I think some 64KB cartridges also constantly switch non-stop to transfer data from the upper 16KB of ROM into RAM by transfering a few bytes via registers, switching again, etc. and I think those work fine on real hardware too.