Back in action for the most part

June 15, 2009

Welcome back to the site. If you visit the site regularily you’ll have noticed that it was completely unreachable for about a week. This was caused by a complete data loss on the romhacking.net server were this page is also hosted. You can read a bit about what happened at this news site. To summarize it briefly, the webhosting company hosting that server and thousands of others was attacked by hackers. We’re back in action again now at least after Nightcrawler, RHDN’s site admin took care of the most imporant underlying technical issues. Some things still aren’t working, such as E-mails being sent from the server, so I disabled comments on this site for now to be on the safe side. I’ll let you know when comments are enabled again.

The last backup of RHDN and this site was from early April, so every post and comment since then has been lost and they can’t be recovered. I salvaged the FAQ post at least from google’s cache and turned it into a page, which you can access through the navigation bar.

This incident was only related to the website, rest assured that it didn’t affect any hacking work. We all have our files stored locally. I hope you didn’t thought we were all hit by meteors. Although at our current luck level it might not be so unlikely…

Update: Comments are enabled again for this post and from now on. I decided against opening them up again for all the old posts, they are old news anyway.

Posted by KaioShin at 2:46pm
62 Comments »

Merry Christmas

December 25, 2008

The Romhacking Aerie wishes every loyal fan and casual visitor a Merry Christmas!

Unfortunately we can’t offer you any surprise releases, but at least we have some news for you.

The Devil Children project got a huge progress boost - The preliminary formatting has been officially finished as of yesterday! I’ve played through the whole game and formatted the text along the way. We now have a very clear picture of what work is left to be done and we’ll get right to it. Beta testing for this project will start soon!

In other news, Super Robot Wars J is now translated up to Mission 45 (of 52). We’re very close indeed. Don’t forget there is still lot’s of editing to be done before it’s ready for beta though.

Last but not least, be sure to check out Absolute Zero’s blog today for a surprise on the Tales of Innocence project.

We’d like to thank everyone who commented on our site so far for the continued support. Our work wouldn’t be possible without you guys! Stay with us and you won’t be disappointed.

Now, go celebrate Christmas with your family and enjoy the holidays.

Until next year,
KaioShin

Posted by KaioShin at 1:46pm
48 Comments »

The Aerie grows

May 25, 2008

dds from the Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei translation project joined our ranks at the Aerie!

His project fits perfectly into our translations line-up and his work is absolutely top-notch. When he read about the founding of our group he immediately asked to join and we gladly accepted. Of course we adopted his project and together we’ll make sure to see it to a completion that can easily hold up to professional standards.

The game is a SNES remake of the first two Megami Tensei games, originally released for the NES. The script of part one is already roughly translated, but could use a proof-read from a Japanese expert. The script for MT2 is still in need of translation. If you want to help out - head over to the Help Wanted page and grab a sample. The remaining text is about 600kb.

On the hacking side, as I mentioned before, the work dds already did is most impressive. Two vwfs and several menu hacks are already implemented.

We proudly welcome dds into our little group!

Here is what he has to say about the join:

“I’m honored that KaioShin and Kingcom have allowed me to join them in the Romhacking Aerie. The only project I have is Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei, but after seeing their desire to translate more Megami Tensei games, it seemed like a good idea to bring them all together. I will do my best to provide a top-quality translation, and to be as much help as I can.”

The future for the Aerie is definitely looking bright. Look forward to news from dds about the Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei translation.

Btw: We also added a script sample for Xenosaga 1+2 (NDS) to the Help Wanted Page. If you’re a Japanese to English translator and you’d like to see this game in English, contact us!

Posted by KaioShin at 7:36pm
5 Comments »

Happy New Year

January 03, 2008

I hope you started nicely into the new year. For me the end of the last year was pure hell on earth, so it couldn’t get any worse. Considering that, I’m sure 2008 will be a nice year. Propably.

Anyway, above you’ll see the official English title screen of Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart. I was a colaboration effort of many people from Romhacking.net, and I’m really happy with the result. I hope you like it too.

Thanks to:

Ryusui,
ReBirFh,
Killa B,
FlashPV and
Crysta!

It isn’t inserted into the ROM yet, that’ll be pretty tricky. And currently I’m not in the mood for tricky stuff. On the contrary I’m pretty burned out on working on the game. I spend the whole day fixing up menu screens, which is really stupid and bothersome work. Well, at least there has been quite a bit of progress. KC also contributed quite a few little hacks and a tool that saved me a few days of work to the bunch, so be sure to include him in your evening prayers too.

Posted by KaioShin at 9:10pm
8 Comments »

Merry Christmas

December 24, 2007

Merry Christmas everyone!

I hope you’ll all find lot’s of presents under your Christmas trees.

As a little Christmas present I have some really awesome news for you:

Formatting is finally complete!

Thanks to the efforts of KC and myself the whole 2MB beast is now formatted and already inserted into the game too. I’m currently working on the numerous menu screens of the game. There is a ton of them, so it’ll take a while. After that there will be an internal testing phase to purge the worst formatting problems.

As a bonus, there is now also a project thread on Romhacking.net, with many screenshots and general information. Be sure to pay it a visit and keep an eye on it in the future. Updates I consider too small for this site I’ll most likely post there first.

Official Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart Project Thread

Posted by KaioShin at 6:43pm
6 Comments »

Good news

December 05, 2007

I have some good news for you, the project just got a good boost in the right direction.

KC from SoR-GTs translations will be joining me with the remaining formatting and most likely later on with the testing. This means that together we can progress with the formatting twice as fast as if I’d do it alone. Since he is a fellow romhacker I also don’t have to spend most of my time with teaching him how to do it, like I had to the last time I asked others for help with the formatting. Our cooperation already led to some interesting technical discussions. He made me aware of a flaw in my formatting style so far. I’ll have to go back through the files I already formatted and redo a few things, but the translation will look much nicer in the end.

It looks like it’ll be a busy december.

On other news, I currently have a cold and university sucks >_> I’m already spending so much time at home again instead of going to university I wonder if I’ll make any finals this year T_T

Posted by KaioShin at 11:36am
6 Comments »

Finally beat Joker

November 17, 2007

I just finally finished the game. My winning team:
Night Clubber S+8
Black Dragon S+6
Zoma X+11

It was quite an enjoyable ride, although the game wasn’t without flaws. What annoyed me the most were the long traveling times between islands. If I had to go from Fern Isle to the city and back, one could go mad. Other games have teleport spells for this sort of stuff, I wished the developers had thought about that too. Well, otherwise it was quite good. The monster synthesizing was cool and the graphics were impressive for a DS game.

I’ll pass on post-endgame content, I just don’t have time for that. I guess I should get back to hacking Caravan Heart instead. Although currently there are still Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War (PC), … this is surely the coolest time of the year for a game addict like me.

Posted by KaioShin at 5:30pm
13 Comments »

Joker addiction

November 11, 2007

Ok, I admit it. I was wrong not to be excited about Joker.

I’m totally addicted now x_X I’m currently on the zombie island, and spend the whole day leveling my various monsters to level 10, synth them and repeat. I want to see how far I can go without continuing with the game. Somehow it sometimes feels as if there is a limit to what monsters I can create, then I suddenly have the next monster stage open. I guess I just had the wrong monsters when I started.

My current party for those interested:

Gryphon C+5
Dragon Slime C+2
Green Dragon D+4

All freshly hatched at Lv1. Let’s see if I can create a B grade monster now.

Anyone else playing like crazy already?

Last but not least, thanks for the wonderful feedback on my last post. I’m glad there is still so much love for Caravan Heart.

Posted by KaioShin at 5:21pm
16 Comments »

Not dead yet

August 12, 2007

Wow, I really haven’t updated since May? Never fully realized that up to now, I guess I was too occupied with self-pity. Well, let’s get to the point, I guess.

The project is on a temporary standstill. It is NOT dead or abandoned. It’s been like this for quite some time, which is the reason there weren’t any updates. I’ll let you know when I’ll resume work. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on having this lying around for another half year. I really want to have this finished by the end of the year after all. Just don’t expect any updates in the immediate future. And I thought it was time I said this, as the requests for status updates kind of began to pile up.

Posted by KaioShin at 2:08pm
12 Comments »

Internet Blackout

May 25, 2007

Ah, you can’t imagine how good it feels to be back. 4 weeks ago my internet connection suddenly stopped working. It took the incompetent idiots of my ISP 4 damn weeks to fix it.

During that time I couldn’t respond to e-mails, comments or IM calls, sorry everyone who tried to contact me. If you posted a comment for the first time in the last weeks it wouldn’t appear on the site, again, sorry. All comments from that period should be displayed now that I’m back and I took care of things.

I haven’t worked on any of my projects either for various reasons. Among other reasons I couldn’t access some important tech docs and I didn’t feel like sitting in front of my PC at all without internet. I wasted most of my time with playing PS2 games. You can’t imagine what you miss out without internet once you’re used to it. It feels like the stone age.

Well, I’m back online now. Hopefully I have some more good news for you guys soon.

Posted by KaioShin at 7:41pm
14 Comments »