                         Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu
                           English Translation Fix
                 by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com)
                        v1.00 (Created July 5, 2015)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


*TABLE OF CONTENTS*
 -----------------

I.    VERSION HISTORY
II.   INTRODUCTION
III.  INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE
IV.   KNOWN BUGS
V.    CREDITS
VI.   TECHNICAL NOTES
VII.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CLOSING WORDS


********************
I.  VERSION HISTORY
********************

v1.00 (07-05-15):  First release.


******************
II.  INTRODUCTION
******************

Around 15 years ago, an English translation for Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu
(Go Go! Nekketsu Hockey Club), the Famicom hockey game that was part of the
venerable Nekketsu/Kunio franchise and was originally meant to have been
released as Crash 'n' The Boys Ice Challenge in the West, was created by the
group Disconnected Translations.  Unfortunately, for most of that time,
contemporary Famicom emulators have been unable to play it due to a 
game-breaking bug that was introduced by the patch; namely, once a goal is
scored, the game freezes while trying to display the scoreboard.  My patch fixes
that bug, among others, making the game 100% playable on current emulators (or
at least FCEUX, which is what I tested it on).

Apparently a member of the NintendoAge forums already created a fix for this
patch a few years ago.  However, it was never submitted to RHDN (probably
because it inappropriately included all of the original work), and it doesn't
seem to be available anywhere any more.  So unless that ever comes up again,
my patch will have to do.


***************************
III.  INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE
***************************

1.  Download and install Lunar IPS or a similar IPS patcher if you haven't
    already.
	
2.  Get a copy of the Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu ROM.  No, I don't know where.
    The correct ROM is identified by GoodNES 3.23 as the verified good dump.
	
3.	Apply Disconnected's patch to the ROM using the aforementioned IPS patcher.
	You can find this patch at http://www.romhacking.net/translations/224/
	
4.  Apply this patch to the ROM you just patched.  This will fix the errors
	in the original patch.


****************
IV.  KNOWN BUGS
****************

None at this time.


***********
V.  CREDITS
***********

Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, translator, tester


********************
VI.  TECHNICAL NOTES
********************

The game-breaking bug centers around this bit of code:

 04:8699:A2 09     LDX #$09
 04:869B:A9 00     LDA #$00
 
I don't actually know what this code does (presumably it's not vitally necessary
to the game's functioning), but that's not relevant.  In the Disconnected patch,
this code looks like this:

 04:8699:FF        UNDEFINED
 04:869A:09 A9     ORA #$A9
 04:869C:00        BRK

As you can see, the game breaker is just a change in one byte, from $A2 to $FF.
The $FF is an illegal opcode that does nothing important, but the $00 causes
the program to call the NMI routine, which spoils the game's functionality
irretrievably.  Changing the $00 to an $EA (a NOP) seems to return the game to
normal, but for safety's sake I just restored address $04:8699 back to $A2.

What caused this to happen?  Well, the block of ROM space right before it is
used for team names.  Disconnected accidentally used one byte too many ($FF is
the byte used to represent spaces) to render the name "Daisetsu."  I fixed this
by changing the name to "Daisetu."  In hindsight, it occurs to me that simply
changing the $FF to $A2 would've probably sufficed (team names are fixed-length
strings AFAICT), but this way the Romanization matches the "Nekketu"
romanization used throughout the game.

Why did the patch work in old emulators such as NESTicle?  Most likely, these
emulators didn't recognize many of the 6502 opcodes including the BRK opcode, so
instead of grinding to a halt like modern emulators, these old emulators just
treated it as a NOP or ignored it altogether.

My repair patch also fixes the following things:

- As shown on the RHDN page for the original patch, the scoreboard during the
  intermissions incorrectly displayed the team names.  For whatever reason,
  the hacker tried and failed to translate the first few names without any
  bugs then gave up on the rest.
- The dialogue in the last cutscene (before the Inter-High tournament) was left
  untranslated, though bizarrely, the characters' names were translated.  I can
  only guess that the patch that was submitted to RHDN was an old patch
  submitted by mistake, or that this text was somehow overlooked after the fact.
- A couple of other minor bugs involving text in inappropriate places were
  fixed.

  
****************************************
VII.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CLOSING WORDS
****************************************

Thanks to:

Technos Japan, for developing and publishing this game.

Nintendo, for making the system this game runs on.

Disconnected Translations, for creating the original patch and thus doing the
bulk of the work.

Klarth and RedComet, for creating Atlas and Cartographer, two script utilities
that made editing the untranslated text very much less tedious.

The developers of FCEUX, the very useful debugging emulator which I used for
this entire project.

Romhacking.net, for hosting this hack and many others like it, as well as
providing useful hacking information.

The NESDev Wiki, the premier resource for NES hacking information.

And, of course, you for reading and playing.

Questions, comments, criticisms, and bug reports can be sent to
pluvius3 @ gmail.com (without the spaces obviously).  Please put "Ike Ike!
Nekketsu Hockey-bu" or something similar in the subject line so I will know what
the email is about.  If you alert me to a bug, I will fix it in a future update
and give you credit.

Copyright 2015 GAFF Translations, all rights reserved.