Okay, lets get things on track again.
Why this cookie-cutter operation is taking more than 15 minutes
There's a technical problem to take care of. Two really, and they're sort of related. Don't worry, it isn't a hard fix by any right, just a little time-consuming on my part. (it doesn't help I just finished cleaning out a worm...)
Okay, what's being done is most of the text from Animal Crossing is being dropped into Animal Forest. There's two parts to it, and the first is easy. There's a binary with all the text in it, and another that indicates where each line of text is in the binary. If you build up the table with the correct entries, the game 'sees' the strings and can recall them. That part took all of 15 minutes to do.
Reinserting it into the game isn't much more difficult. The tables are all the same size since only the original entries from the game will ever be refered to. The text binaries on the other hand are much larger, so instead of moving everything in the game around to accomidate them, they just get tacked at the end of the normal rom file. To allow them to be recalled, you change the rom address it draws the text from. Boom! Like magic, the binary works.
Here's where the fun starts.
See, there's another little aspect of this whole rom recall bit. In order to recall the text they use a 4-byte code. There's a table with the start and end codes for each binary (compressed and uncompressed) which then refers to the main rom table, so that way it knows which entry to pull. What it does is it compares the codeword to the start entry, then the end entry. If it fits within, then it converts it to an offset in the rom.
The trouble lies in how the text is recovered. Although the table indicates where in the binary the text lies, instead of directly adding this value to the rom address they convert it to a codeword, then do a lookup. That usually wouldn't be a problem, except that the text bank is vastly larger. The endpoint of the text binary would be larger than the start of the table bank value, so you'd get an exception and Pbbbt... the game screws up.
To make a long story short(ish), I'll have to trace the thing that forms the codeword and hack it so it instead directly recalls the binaries needed. Not hard, but time consuming.
The other trick, and it's a little more annoying, is that all character names in AF are 6 bytes long, not 8 like in AC. We'll either need to rename a few characters, hack it so it refers to a table instead of directly to the character name, or change every callword for their name in the game... Table is easiest -probably...
Oh, I'm thinking about making a few more minor changes as well. There are a few of those 7F/80 controls that could be hacked back in - most notably the one that decides AM or PM in a line of text. At the moment, 24hour military time is used throughout. It also would save the trouble of clipping al these command calls out. All that is after handling this textual mess.
Sorry it's taking so long... It'll get done.
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