i got into emulation in the summer of '96, through
some NES and GB roms off of a local BBS and the
emulators Pasowing and VGB-DOS. I was hooked, and I
spent the entire year discovering sites like the
password-protected pre-Node99, Archaic Ruins and other
random ROM sites. i first saw translation-related
stuff on Archaic Ruins' Pina Colada section, where it
mentioned the Multiple Demiforce FF2j translation.
anyway, in around august of '97 Akilla mailed me and
asked if i wanted to try out rom hacking or something.
i'm not sure if i'd already read demi's rom hacking
doc at that point, but i figured out how to edit text.
so i started out helping akilla with his ff3j
translation. at first he was just guessing on the
translation, trying out editing text and creating
squished tiles. i think akilla was mostly trying to
surpass the trans. corp. project, his main 'rival'. i
kinda took that early 'ff3j translation wars' thing
just as an ego contest. neither project was going very
far, and it was just two kids who created webpages who
wanted to be better than the other one. eventually,
akilla found a translator that would just play through
the game and give us his translations of the text. we
both did our stuff in a hex editor. i would suggest to
akilla, why not just team up with translation
corporation to avoid redundancy and to combine
efforts, and he wouldn't answer me.
So, after I fit in all the text in the first town of
ff3j, and started to do more, akilla told me he didn't
want me working on it anymore, because he could do the
text himself. he told me to go work on ff2j, which i
did, and which the same translator was gonna start
doing stuff on as well. I continued creating my own
FF3j patch and asked the translator to continue
sending me the translations. I actually kept up with
the translator's pace but i never told anyone about my
in-house patch, and didn't care. Akilla wanted me to
work on the old 'Multiple Demiforce' ff2j patch, which
i did at first, but then i started on a 'clean' rom,
so i wouldn't steal work from someone else. i recall
akilla's ff3j patch was originally based off of some
/firebug/'s patch or something.
anyway, at one point i saw that the Demiforce patch
fit in two letters at the end of a string or
something, and i tried the same thing on a clean rom
but it wouldn't work. i later found out this was the
preliminary DTE experiment done by Landy i think.
anyway, it confused me, but i thought that if it was
possible why not see if i could use it, so i sent
SoM2freak an email asking if i could use the old FF2j
patch as a base for the new effort. he mailed me back
saying 'no, you can't.' this discouraged me, but i
then sent a mail to demi, who hadn't worked on the
'multiple demiforce' patch with som2 since like
February or so. i got a quick reply, and he said that
he was gonna revive the translation soon anyway, and
he'd like my help. it was soon after that time that
demi launched the 'neo demiforce' site, if i recall.
i'm not quite sure what happened next, but Akilla got
the impression that Demi and Bigwierd were joining his
translation group or something in the ff2 'division',
and put their names in the members' list, and stuff,
then demi naturally got pissed and set him straight,
and they had a little war, and before i knew it, demi
told me that he didn't need me as a rom hacker on his
project because him and bigwierd were enough. so i
said fine, and met up with this guy named
Blasted2(stovetop) who was doing a FF4j translation,
and showed him this program i had made for my FF2j and
FF3j hacking to automate the editing of text
(basically Thingy without table file support). he
loved it, and it really gave us an advantage over the
other people who were attempting ff4j hacks. So for
about a month of bad rewordings and squished tiles
(nobody even knew what pointers were back then, or
those who did know didn't tell anyone), me and Blasted
were just translating FF4j by putting in text from
FF2US at about the same pace as 'hellstorm
translations' (anus P) was. So one day we took a step
back, looked at our work, and said 'this sucks.' For a
little bit there, me and blasted2 were releasing
patches every time our ips file size became bigger
than anus p's! ;> i remember it as friendly
competition though, which is why we ended up joining
in the end. Luckily, anus P had just discovered
pointers. So we mailed him, he told us how pointers
worked, and the three of us created J2E. soon after,
we assimilated Pfunk (silicon travelers) who was
working on a ff4j translation of his own, and between
the four of us we had pointer knowledge, a rom hacking
program, rom expansion knowledge, and a translator or
two, i think (the nick Rydia comes to mind). It was
around that time that demi created his wwwboard, which
for the first time centralized the hobby known as rom
hacking. That's all as far as the FF translation
'wars' go. While fretting over the huge FF4j script
(we finally released our beta sometime in June), one
day demi posted something on his wwwboard about
bigwierd needing lots of time to code his script
inserter titled 'xcode', and because he didn't have
the time it was delaying the ff2j translation because
the scripts were translated and the DTE fix thing had
already been handled by AWJ. I replied it probably
wouldn't be too hard, i could probably do it in
qbasic, and he sent me an email asking if i could make
one for FF2j. From then on, I was handed the
responsibility of inserting the FF2j text into the
ROM, updating the pointers, and making sure everything
was nice and clean. Demi and I kept in very close
contact over a month or so, in fact he was really
great to work with. The translation didn't really have
any spectacular ASM mods besides the DTE fix, but it
was the first full NES rpg translation, pointers and
stuff was still a new concept to romhacking, and i had
to code the script inserter to support full DTE
insertion. Maybe if the RPGe folks would have shared
their knowledge of pointers and inserter programs and
stuff with the public, things might have moved along a
bit faster, but they were real secretive about
everything they did. So the FF2 translation wasn't
extremely easy, but most of the hard work was spent
creating the tools and programs and routines and
understanding pointers which people take for granted
in translations today. STED was probably a much harder
job technically with its layered pointers, table file
switching and substring compression.

i warned you, it would be a ramble. i wasn't really
sure what i was talking about specificall in that
anyway ;> if there are any real specifics you want me
to go into more detail about, let me know.
i checked on my old hard drive, i didn't find any of
the REAL old emails, those must've been deleted. but i
have a few, like the one where demi asked me to write
an inserter for FF2j, and a few to Akilla regarding
AWJ's ff3j translation. i also have a few old betas or
'clean' (just the translation, unedited) scripts of
ff4j and ff2j. nothing much though. know what, if i
wanted to i probably could squeeze more text into
ff2j. after the translation was finished i found a bug
in the dte compressor routine that could have given us
thousands of extra bytes ;<

-necrosaro

> What ever you feel most comfortable with. If you've
> got everything sorted in
> your mind like you think you do, you'd probably be
> better off rambling on to
> me in an email because I haven't even really
> scratched the surface of the
> entire FF2 thing. Most of my information has been
> related to FF3. The only
> info I have concerning FF2 is what toma's told me of
> his experiences with
> demi, and since he really didn't have home internet
> access during most of
> it, he really couldn't fill me in on all the little
> intricacies of exactly
> what was going on.=) As for those emails, if it
> wouldn't be too much
> trouble, I'd love to have a copy of them. ^_^
> Thanks very much for your time.
> -Neil_
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