

                       (insert elite ascii graphic here)


             The Mysterious Murasame Castle 1.1 (27 January 2011)
                             Official Readme File!

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I. Introduction
II. Project
IIa. Project Members
IIb. Tools
IIc. History
III. End-User Information
IV. Thx
V. Legal stuff that would never hold up in court

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                             Introduction

The Mysterious Murasame Castle was one of the first games made for Nintendo's
Famicom Disk System add-on. It would have been released at the product's
launch, alongside The Legend of Zelda, but development issues forced the game
to be delayed to seven weeks later. This no doubt contributed to its lack of
popularity, especially compared to Zelda, and despite re-releases on the Game
Boy Advance and the Wii's Virtual Console, Murasame Castle has never been
officially released outside of Japan.

So now we've translated it! It certainly didn't need much in the way of
translating (most of the Japanese text can be easily inferred), but now it's
in English and all of you should play it. All of you.


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                               Project

The word "nazo" in Japanese is somewhat ambiguous (I guess), and for years it
always bugged me that I translated the "nazo" in "Nazo no Murasame Jou" to
"riddle" instead of "mysterious", which is the much more correct translation.
Several months ago I decided to fix it, so I asked InVerse if he could
re-design the title screen, which he very graciously agreed to. Once that was
done and sent to me, finishing the rest took only a couple days. I took the
opportunity to expand the available text in the file menus, and since there
wasn't enough space on the disk to put in the full castle names, I ended up
partially re-coding the castle name assembly routine to get it all in there
and pretty.

Then, while putting the finishing touches on this readme, I realized that I
once again incorrectly translated the title as "Mystery of Murasame Castle",
which meant putting off the release and humbly asking InVerse to re-redesign
the title screen, which he again accepted. What a great guy! Now everything is
beautiful and good to go, and we are both glad to present the definitive
English version of The Mysterious Murasame Castle.


Members:
--------
Spinner 8 (http://suprise.oddigytitanium.com)
  - text hacking/translation
InVerse (http://www.suicidaltranslations.com)
  - title screen design/insertion
  

Tools used:
-----------
FCEUX 2.1.4a by zeromus, adelikat, et al.
  (http://fceux.com)
HxD 1.7.7.0 by Maël Hörz
  (http://mh-nexus.de)
FDS Explorer 1.6 by Morgan Johansson
  (http://www.anes.se/NESTools/)
YY-CHR 0.98 beta02 by Yy
Lunar IPS 1.02 by FuSoYa, Defender of Relm
  (http://fusoya.eludevisibility.org)
  

Patch history!
--------------
Version 1.1 - All hacking redone from scratch, except the ending and a couple
              of graphics. Saved games are untouched, so those of you with
              soft-patching that kept having your saves over-written can play
              without fear.
Version 1.0 - Everything's been translated and playtested, and the savegames
              have been deleted. Stupid savegames! Screw you, savegames!
              
              
Known Issues
------------
- It may just be my settings, but this game does not properly save under
  FCEUX. For the time being, you may want to use other emulators such as
  Mednafen or Nestopia.
  
- Some bugs or untranslated strings may still remain. Please, please contact
  me at spinner_8@parodius.com with any bug reports! A detailed explanation of
  how to reproduce the bug, and/or an emulator save state, would be much
  appreciated.


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                               End-User

Most people have realized nowadays that the 16-byte header on most old Famicom
Disk System images is redundant, since the only information stored there is
how many sides the disk has, and anyone can figure that out on their own with
some simple arithmetic. Because of that, along with the fact that emulators
don't really need it anyways, FDS images today typically do not have this
header at all. Therefore, this patch requires a disk image WITHOUT a header.
Make sure your image is exactly 131,000 bytes in size, or it will NOT WORK.

If you own the disk yourself and have no way to dump it to an image that's
playable on emulators, and you'd like to find the image on less-than-reputable
websites, you can usually find it under the No-Intro name of "Nazo no Murasame
Jou (Japan)".

Patching games is very easy at this point, so an IPS tutorial isn't really
necessary. Again, make sure that your file is exactly 131,000 bytes in size
before patching.

An explanation of the game itself isn't really very necessary, either. Swing
your sword with A, use your special powers with B. You can use your sword to
block incoming projectiles, and if there's no enemies around you'll throw a
projectile weapon instead of swing your sword. Super sweet, man. There's a
great explanation of the gameplay, as well as a walkthrough, over at
strategywiki.org if you're interested.


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                               Thanks!

This translation is still entirely dedicated to the FeFeA (pronounced: feefee)
  organization, now at their home on lostlevels.org. Next time you play your
  fancy Bio Force Ape or California Raisins prototype ROMs, please think of
  them and all of their hard (and expensive) work.
  
Huge thanks to InVerse for thrice agreeing to design the title screen, and
  also for thrice inserting it, which saved me the trouble (I hate inserting
  title screens). I know that not much was changed, but I think this new title
  is much improved from the old one.
  
Big thanks to the FCEUX team for that lovely example of emulation perfection.
  Hacking this game was a breeze thanks to this emulator, and it would've
  taken much MUCH longer without it.

Thanks to Drakee and Sardius for their long exhausting hours of extensive
  testing. Cool dudes.

Thanks to Beckey for feigning interest when I excitedly showed her the
  lengthened castle names that I hacked in.
  
Thanks to Ryusui for pointing out like a year ago that "nazo" wasn't properly
  translated in the previous version of this translation, which provided the
  necessary shame to get me to fix this.

   
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                         Legal Made-up Stuff

Let's keep this simple!

This translation was made with care and love for the game, and is being
released as a gift to all its fans at no charge. Please respect the wishes of
the authors and do not use this translation for profit of any kind.

Please do not distribute this translation patch with the original game, either
patched or unpatched. Facilitating piracy is not the intent of the authors.

Feel free to use this translation as a base for your own (non-profit) work,
but please do me the kindness of notifying me at spinner_8@parodius.com. It's
not necessary, but I just like to hear about it.