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ReadMe-DvD_Translations-Puzzle_Boys-revA.txt

This file should be viewed using a mono-spaced font like "Courier".
Use a font size where 79 columns are visible.

Please don't distribute the FDS file in patched form.
Please don't distribute the DvDPzlBy.IPS file without this file.
Thanks.

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                                  PUZZLE BOYS

                      for the Nintendo Famicom Disk System
                            Copyright 1990 by Atlus

             English Translation Copyright 2011 by DvD Translations
             Patch Version: Rev A   Release Date: November 28, 2011    

                                DvD Translations
                      dvdtranslations.eludevisibility.org

                   Code & Graphics Editing by: DvD
                               Translation by: DvD & aishsha

                              Beta Testing by: DvD
                                    ReadMe by: DvD

----------------------------------- CONTENTS ----------------------------------

THE MANUAL

(1)  Puzzle Boy Game Series
(2)  Game Modes
(3)  Game Description & Controls

USING THE PATCH

(4)  Patching the Disk Image file
(5)  Playing the game on an emulator or flash cart

TRANSLATION DETAILS

(6)  Why DvD chose to translate THIS game
(7)  Why YOU should bother playing THIS game
(8)  DvD's Hacking & Translating Comments
(9)  Project Timeline
(10) Software Used In This Translation

---------------------------------- THE MANUAL ---------------------------------

(1)--------------------------- Puzzle Boy Series ------------------------------

The Puzzle Boy series consists of the following 5 games.  The four unique games
were all made by Atlus.  "Puzzle Boy" for the PC Engine, is a port of "Puzzle
Boys" ported by Telenet Japan with some levels changed:

Puzzle Boy           - Game Boy            - November 24, 1989
Puzzle Boys          - Famicom Disk System - November 16, 1990
Totsugeki! Valetions - Game Boy            - January  25, 1991
Puzzle Boy           - PC Engine           - February 22, 1991
Puzzle Boy II        - Game Boy            - August    2, 1991

"Puzzle Boy" for the Game Boy was released in North America by Acclaim as
"Kwirk."  Acclaim changed the graphics and story to make Poterin/Spud into a
tomato called Kwirk, but otherwise left the game intact.  It'a a very common
game to find.

"Totsugeki! Valetions" was released by Atlus in North America as "Spud's
Adventure."  Unlike the other four games, it is an action game, with level
passwords, RPG elements, and a few Puzzle Boy type levels thrown in.  "Spud's
Adventure" is one of the rarest to find for the Gameboy, currently going for
as much as $27 for a loose cart and over $70 for a complete used game.

"Puzzle Boy" for the PC Engine has been translated by King Mike.  King Mike's
translation is good, but I feel Telenet did an poor job porting it to the PC
Engine.
On the plus side:
- It has some nice music.
- No load times.
On the minus side:
- There is no BACK function in the PUZZLE CHALLENGE game! Ouch!
- You cannot select the number of rooms in the 1 PLAYER game.
- You cannot select the number of rooms for each player nor the number of
  battles in in the VS. MODE.  This is a real shame since this prevents you
  from handicapping the better player.
- It's a password save, instead of file save
- Spud is the only character on all the floors in the PUZZLE CHALLENGE game.
  All the floors that required the use of multiple friends were replaced by
  floors that only required Spud.
- Floors that were too big for one screen and needed to scroll were replaced
  by smaller levels that fit on one screen.  Some might consider this a plus.
- The large graphics are not isometric.  Some might consider this a plus.
- It doesn't indicate to the player when they can play the last 4 floors of
  the PUZZLE CHALLENGE game.

"Puzzle Boy II" was released by Atlus in North America as "Amazing Tater."
It is even rarer than "Spud's Adventure" going for as much as $45 for a loose
cart and over $100 for a complete used game.

(2)------------------------------- Game Modes ---------------------------------

Except for Spud's Adventure, all the games in the series play exactly the same.
In fact, although most of the floors are new in this game, some are direct
copies of floors from Puzzle Boy.

The main character is Spud the potato who is trying to rescue Mato the tomato.
His friends are: Arnie the eggplant, Pete the green bell pepper, and Gerrit the
carrot.

PUZZLE CHALLENGE

In Puzzle Boys, there are 3 games. The goal of the first game, PUZZLE
CHALLENGE, is to get all your characters (most levels only have one, but there
can be as many as four) from the start position to the stairs of each floor.
There are four classes of difficulty with 20 floors per class, making a total
of 80 floors.

Spud   is the main player of the Easy    class floors.
Arnie  is the main player of the Average class floors.
Pete   is the main player of the Hard    class floors.
Gerrit is the main player of the Pro     class floors.

After selecting the class, you select which floor you want to play.  For each
floor you pass, a happy face mark will be shown next to it on the floor
selection screen.  You can play the first 16 floors of any class in any order.  
Once you have passed all 16, you unlock the last 4 floors of that class.  Once
you have passed all 80 floors, you win the game and you get to see the
ending... one time, so it's a good idea not to save the game after seeing the
ending, as all it does is prevent you from seeing it again!  It is possible to
save the game after passing the last floor but before seeing the ending. 

Speaking of saving, you have up to 3 save files to save which of the PUZZLE
CHALLENGE floors you have passed.  You are only given the opportunity to save
after passing or quitting a PUZZLE CHALLENGE floor, but can always do a save
as and save to a different file OR erase any of the files.  Save files do not
save anything from the other 2 games.

In PUZZLE CHALLENGE, pressing A, allows the player to bring up a menu at any
time to RETRY the floor, QUIT to go to another menu, or go BACK one move that
moved a block or turnstile.  You can go BACK for up to 8 moves.  Selecting QUIT
brings you to a menu where you can choose to return the game OR to go to a menu
where you can choose a different game, choose a different class, choose a
different floor, save your game OR erase a saved game.

1 PLAYER

The goal of the 2nd game, 1 PLAYER, is to get Spud from the left side of the
screen to the right side as fast as possible.  You do not change rooms, as
there are no stairs, only rooms which scroll into view each time you begin a
new one, no load times.  After choosing the class, you choose the number of
rooms you will play, from 1 to 30.  When playing, Puzzle Boys randomly selects
rooms of the class you selected to play.  They can come in any order.
Unfortunately, even the same floor can be played twice in one game, and since
there are MORE than 30 rooms of each of the classes, the only way to know if
you have played them all is to keep track of which ones you've played.
Otherwise, the goal of the game is to get the highest score by passing the
screens as fast as possible.

VS. MODE

The rooms are identical to those of the 1 PLAYER game, but now player 1
controls Spud on the top of the screen and player 2 controls Arnie on the
bottom and it's a race to see who can finish first.  Besides picking the number
of rooms that each character must pass, 1 to 30, you choose how many different
battles must be won, (1 of) 1, (2 of) 3, (3 of) 5, or (4 of) 7.  I find this
mode to be the best thing about this particular game in the Puzzle Boy series.
I find it a lot more fun than the two player mode in Kwirk where each person
plays the game on a different screen, and the PC Engine port of the game
doesn't allow you to select the number of rooms for each player or number of
battles.

(3)---------------------- Game Description & Controls -------------------------

Each floor or room, consists of dark blue floors, grey walls, black holes, blue
rectangle blocks of any size, and aqua turnstiles of 1, 2 (line or l-shaped),
3, or 4 spokes.  Floors and rooms are normally displayed at an angleto show
depth with large bold characters and objects shown on screen.

For PUZZLE CHALLENGE only, sometimes the screen will need to scroll around for
larger floors. Pressing START will toggle the display to show the entire floor
on the screen at once, with the colors changed to show orange and light green
walls, light green blocks and orange turnstiles.  Press START to toggle back.
When more than one character exists on a floor, press SELECT to switch which
character you want to control.

Turnstiles can be pushed by the character you are currently controlling
clockwise or counter-clockwise, as long as no wall, block, other turnstile
center or spoke, or other character are preventing it from turning.  Turnstiles
can rotate above holes, but not if turning the turnstile would push the
character into a hole.

Blocks can be pushed as long as they will not collide with a wall, other block,
turnstile, or other character.  Blocks pushed above a hole where the entire
block is above a hole will fall into the hole and turn it into dark blue floor.
If you can't push a block, even though it doesn't seem to be colliding with
anything, it must be that your character is attempting to walk on a hole that
is smaller than the block being pushed.  RARELY does a level start with a block
over a hole, but it can happen, especially on the 6 similar rooms of EASY mode
1 PLAYER or VS. MODE.

Control Pad           - Move the menu pointer
                      - Move player up/down/left/right

Start                 - Load Game
                        Toggle Standard and Small view in PUZZLE CHALLENGE
				
Select                - Choose which character you control in PUZZLE CHALLENGE

B                     - Go back one menu
                        Cancel the pop up menu in PUZZLE CHALLENGE

A                     - Make a menu selection
                        Show pop up menu in PUZZLE CHALLENGE
				RETRY the room in 1 PLAYER or VS. MODE

------------------------------- USING THE PATCH -------------------------------

(4)---------------------- Patching the Disk Image file ------------------------

Game file size: One 2 sided disk
                65500 bytes on each side (36 bytes less than 64k)
		  = 131000 bytes
              = 72 bytes less than 128kBytes

Unfortunately, the game does not take advantage of the extra sound channel of
the FDS hardware.

How to patch the FDS (Famicom Disk Image) file:

You need:

1) A FDS file.  The file needs to include the standard 16 byte iNES header
   followed by the program disk image data.  With header, the FDS file is
   131016 bytes in size.

   The header should be as follows:

       46 44 53 1A  02 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00

   I'm not telling you how to get the FDS file, but once you do, call it
   Puzzle Boys.fds.

2) (optional)   
   If you have a FDS file without a header, and don't know how to add the
   header with a hex editor, no worries.  You can use the included
   ROM Expander Pro.txt file with the generic ROM expander like
   "ROM Expander Pro" from DvD Translations to give the game a header.  You'll
   need to name the game Puzzle Boys j.fds before doing this.

3) Patch File: DvDPzlBy.IPS

4) An IPS patching program

   Recommended patching program for IBM PC:

    Snes-Tool.exe by The M.C.A./Elite

   Recommended patching program for Mac:

    UIPS

   Using SNES-Tool:

   a) If you haven't already, make a copy of the un-patched FDS.
      You always want to keep the un-patched FDS around for later
      revisions of the patch.
   b) Place an un-patched but expanded FDS file
      (I'll call it PuzlBoys.fds), DvDPzlBy.IPS, and
      Snes-Tool.exe in the same directory.
   c) Run Snes-Tool.exe
   d) Press 'U' for "Use IPS"
   e) Press the down arrow key until DVDPZLBY.IPS is highlighted.
   f) Press Enter.
   g) Press the down arrow key until PUZLBOYS.FDS is highlighted.
   h) Press Enter.
   i) Press 'Q' to quit.

(5)------------- Playing the game on an emulator or flash cart ----------------

All emulators and flash carts that can play the original FDS file can play the
translation.

It turns out that Atlus made a mistake when they made the game.  Even though
the save file is file 10 on the 2nd side, they told it that is was file 11.
So, the original disk image doesn't have the save file.  Of course, the actual
FDS hardware could handle this.  It simply created the missing file.  Nestopia
is able to do this.  FCEUX does create the file properly (it forgets to add
two maker bytes), so it can't save.  Also, the PowerPak flash cart has similar,
but different problems.  Fortunately, our patch fixes this issue so now the
game can be played and saved with both emulators and, ideally, using the
PowerPak on an actual NES.

----------------------------- TRANSLATION DETAILS -----------------------------

(6)------------------ Why DvD chose to translate THIS game --------------------

After 20 years, I finally passed Kwirk w/o cheating.  I then found out about
Amazing Tater, then the PC Engine port and this game.  Since this is the 2nd
oldest game, this was the next one for me to play.  When I played the 2 player
version of the game, I really liked it, plus the graphics, and colors were much
nicer than the GB cart in my Super Game Boy.

I was going to play it in Japanese, but some of the menus, like the pop up menu
are really important to make sure you pick the right thing in the heat of the
game, so I thought, hey, it might be fun.  I only learned about Spud's
Adventure after I had started working on this game.

Also, the other FDS game I'm working on won't play on the PowerPak because it
is 2 disks, and the project is stalled waiting for my translator to finish.

The is a medium sized project that I could do almost entirely on my own.

(7)---------------- Why YOU should bother playing THIS game -------------------

The two player mode is a blast.  If you have a PowerPak, definitely try it out
on the real thing.  This game plays and looks so much better on my NES than it
does in Nestopia.

If you like Kwirk or Amazing Tater, you get a lot more levels here with much
nicer graphics.

(8)------------------ DvD's Hacking & Translating Comments --------------------

Due to the way the game stores the dakuten marks of the text, which are
unneeded in English, the English text just barely fits into the same space that
the Japanese text occupied, so no file expansion was necessary.  The only file
that would have needed expansion was the title screen, so I decided to do a
graphics hack instead.

Besides text and position text, some code was changed to handle cursor
positions and attributes used as highlights.

As I don't have the manual for the official Atlus English translations of the
games in the series, I had to play them to see what Atlus did.  I played
Amazing Tater and passed Spud's Adventure to learn the official names of Spud,
Arnie, and Gerrit.  Warning!  The final boss of Spud's Adventure is
ridiculously hard even when using save states and otherwise the game is just
ok.  When given two different translations for a menu, I went with Atlus's
translation, usually from Amazing Tater, so all you Kwirk only players might
not recognize some of this.

The game was 99.9% finished months before it was released, but then as I played
it on the PowerPak I noticed it wouldn't save properly.  I was really pissed.
I had to get this working, as this was the system I wanted to play it on.  But,
at that time my job was getting crazy busy, and I thought this would take a ton
of time to figure out.  It turned out to be easy.  I started by analyzing what
Nestopia did.  I figured out that if Nestopia modified the game, then it could
be saved in FCEUX and the PowerPak.  But then I realized, why not instead see
if I could get it to save to the save file that was already there.  This ended
up being very easy to do, literally changing one bit, changing a byte from 11
to 10 and it worked.

Table Dumper Pro's disassembly was useful, as always.  But, of course, so was
the new feature of the FDS file splitter.  What I also added to TDP, which
REALLY helped with this game, were improvements to the file compare function.
These improvements which show (a) what the text is, using tbl files, and (b)
different separators for different gaps in the differing code, were EXTREMELY
useful when trying to track down the issue with the saving.

I wanted to play the whole game myself, and I am on my way to doing so.  That
was the reason I wanted the game to be translated!  But, I haven't passed it
yet.  Considering it took me 20 years to pass Kwirk, I'm not going to hold up
the patch for that!  So, after figuring out the save file format, I edited the
file and did a lot of testing to make sure the ending was translated correctly.
It was ;)

A tiny spoiler about the ending...

The ending, although better than Kwirk, is still underwhelming.  The fact that
it has no sound at all seemed odd to me when I saw it.  So, I spent time going
through the code, and proved nothing is wrong, it's just not supposed to play
any sounds.

(9)---------------------- Project Timeline Highlights -------------------------

Apr  4 2011 - Final push for DvD to finally pass Kwirk w/o cheating
Sep  2 2011 - DvD passed Kwirk Hard - Going Up
Sep  3 2011 - DvD started playing Amazing Tater

Sep  5 2011 - DvD passed Kwirk Hard - Heading Out, Puzzle Boys project started
Sep 14 2011 - DvD started playing Spud's Adventure
Sep 24 2011 - DvD passed Spud's Adventure
Sep 28 2011 - All code tables defined
Sep 29 2011 - Translated game complete but will not save on the PowerPak
		  
              Project on hold to deal with real life
		  
Nov 23 2011 - Project restarted
              Nestopia save method determined
		  Atlus save issue noticed and fixed
		  Rev A translated game completed
              Rest of save format determined	
              Testing started
Nov 27 2011 - Ending proved to be translated
              exactly when ending is shown determined
		  IPS patch created
		  readme started  
Nov 28 2011 - Readme completed
              ROM Expander Pro file created
              patch released

(10)------------------ Software Used In This Translation ----------------------

* Emulators

  FCEUX 2.1.2
  
  Nestopia 1.3.7

* Disassembler, Table Dumper, FDS File Splitter, File Comparator

  Table Dumper Pro (ver 11.8.27)
   by DvD

* Hex Editors

  WindHex32 2005.4.20
   by Genecyst East Software
   
  FCEUX 2.1.2

* Tile Editor
  
  Tile Layer Pro 1.0
   by Kent Hansen
  
* Readme Creation & Disassembled code manipulation

  Notepad++ (Windows XP)
   by Don Ho and the rest of the Notepad++ team
   (This program is AWESOME!)

* IPS Patch File Creator

  Snes-Tool Version 1.2
   by The M.C.A./Elite

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