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Not quite done yet, but really, really, really close.







Coming soon~

Cool! I've been wanting to play that game for quite some time.

That reminds me of the NeonGenesis, I think, translation of the game that could never be completed. Wasn't there a technical reason that it couldn't be made, in that the Englis text couldn't be compressed to fit on the VRC7 cart? If so, how did you manage that?

This is that translation.

There were a lot of things that needed to be taken into consideration, yes. Rom space was one of those. Menu expansion was another. Font compression, crashes, inconsistencies in the translation. More stuff I probably shouldn't talk about. But I've been doing this long enough to know what the best solution was for most of the problems. This is the result. It was an awful lot of work though.

Oh wow, amazing. So once it's done, would it be possible for someone to burn the final translation on some EPROMs and solder it on a LP cart? Or would this only work with something like the PowerPak, since you might need to create a VRC7 'variant' to handle the game's size?

That said, I wish you the best of luck!

I don't see why not - of course, it would only be properly playable on a Famicom (or a sound-modded NES) due to the game's extensive use of VRC7 audio (i.e. 6-channel FM synth).


If that were the case, it would probably fail to work in a whole bunch of emulators as well, since restricting bank counts to what the chip itself supports is a thing that emulators actually do.

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Quietust, QMT Productions
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.

Hey! Someone's finally translating Lagrange Point! Cool!


It would probably be unsatisfying to play on the PowerPak, since it has never had VRC7 audio support. I would suspect that the FPGA is not even powerful enough to do so, FM synthesis is considerably more complex than audio used in other expansions. If that's to much for it, perhaps a wavetable based approximation good enough for Lagrange Point could be cooked up? I dunno.

It's awesome to see a translation of this game. Good job.

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Download STREEMERZ for NES from fauxgame.com! — Some other stuff I've done: fo.aspekt.fi

Many years ago, I played all the way through this game in Japanese, probably not understanding everything that was going on. It'll be fun to finally play through it again and actually know what I'm doing.

_________________
Quietust, QMT Productions
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.

It's actually not that hard, just a couple of lookup tables. (the decapped OPL2 and OPL3 only show two lookup tables: log(sin(x)) and exp(x), so you just chain lookups and addition to get FM synthesis.)

Someone's implemented a YM2612 for a Genesis-on-an-FPGA here. They didn't finish it, so I'm not clear if there are some subtle bugs left.


That said, I'm excited to be able to play LP and understand it...

Plus enough state for 12 ADSR envelopes and everything else each oscillator needs, plus one instrument and 15 preset patches (128 bits each), state for all 6 channels, and the memory interface to all of it. There's a lot going on here compared to any of the other expansion audio devices.

I dunno, maybe it's doable, I don't know the limits of the PowerPak's FPGA, but I think it could be out of scope. What's the reason it was never implemented? Everdrive N8 doesn't have a VRC7 emulation either.

If I recall correctly the Mega Everdrive can provide the YM2413 for Master System games (and the VRC7 happens to use similar hardware for sound), so it seems to be feasible for a FPGA.

The biggest problem would be where to connect it honestly. Like, doesn't the NES have the audio lines in the expansion port instead of the cartridge port? Making a companion hardware for the PowerPak (i.e. a separate thing altogether) that connects there would be easier and make more sense I think (although probably more expensive since you'd need to get two things instead of one, but hey at least it's optional if you don't care about it).

Where do you recall that from? I can't find any information to that effect. I would expect that if Krikzz already had a working FPGA YM-2413 he would have reused that code for the Everdrive N8's VRC7 already...

Connecting the audio isn't a problem. There is a now-standard expansion port mod that a lot of PowerPak or Everdrive N8 users have already made for this purpose.

In practice ... I bet the reason it was never implemented is the only game that used it doesn't yet have an english translation, and just adding it for NSF support wasn't sufficiently compelling.

It doesn't matter if it can be implemented in a FPGA, it matters if there is room to implement it into the PowerPAK's FPGA. Maybe it is not large enough to fit it all. It would certainly be nice if full VRC7 was possible on the PowerPAK and was implemented.