                              The Black Bass (J)
                          English Translation Patch
                 by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com)
                       v1.00 (Created August 16, 2017)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


*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 (08-16-17):  First release.


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

This is an English translation patch for The Black Bass, published for the
Famicom in 1987 (as a port of an MSX version) by HOT-B.  This should not be
confused with the game of the same name that Westerners got (also known as The
Black Bass USA), which was actually a localization of the sequel, The Black Bass
II.  As you might expect, this is a fishing game where the object is to catch as
many bass as possible within a day on each of the five maps which are based on
real Japanese locations.  There are other fish that can be caught as well,
including a mermaid, though this only counts for bragging rights.  This first
game is inferior to its sequel in most respects, but it is also quite a bit
easier as you are only judged on total weight caught rather than the average
weight, and big fish don't seem much harder to catch than small fish.  Despite
the niche value of this game, its sequel was something of a cult classic in
certain circles, so there might be some interest in this one out there.

As with the previous patch for Mississippi Satsujin Jiken, this patch was made
as part of Psyklax's project to translate early Famicom games.  While The Black
Bass has much less text than the previous game, the hacking was somewhat more
complicated for various reasons mentioned below and even gave me the opportunity
to do some novice C coding.  Therefore, I spent about the same amount of time
making this patch as I did the previous one.


***************************
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 Black Bass (J) ROM.  No, I don't know where.
    The correct ROM is identified by GoodNES 3.23b as the verified good dump.
	
3.  Apply the desired patch to the ROM using the aforementioned IPS patcher.


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

None at this time.  The numerous bizarre graphical glitches during the fishing
segments are all original to the game AFAIK.


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

Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, translator, editor/tester
Special thanks to filler for help with a place name.


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

There isn't a whole lot to say about this one, even though it was more time-
consuming than you'd expect from the amount of text.  The most notable oddity
is that the pointers are six bytes long: the first byte gives the length of a
line, the second gives the number of lines, the next two give the PPU address
where the text is printed to the screen, and the last two are the actual pointer
to the text.  Some pointers also had padding bytes between them, making the
spacing unpredictable.  This required me to write a custom dumper in C to get
the main script.  I had already written a dumper for another Famicom game a long
time ago, so doing this was relatively quick but still educational.  I also used
Cartographer for the fish names and weather types since they were listed in
their own simple tables.  I did not write an inserter since that seemed to be a
more difficult endeavor and Atlas was robust enough to handle the game's
eccentricities without too much trouble.

The main hack as usual was a DTE routine, which in some ways was overkill but
was absolutely necessary at least for the fish names.  The most troublesome part
of the hack was tying it into the text routines, since there were mutliple ones
that sometimes behaved differently from each other.  The way that the main
routine counted characters in a line and handled multiple lines also had to be
taken into account.  On the bright side, translation and playtesting were pretty
quick due to the game's simplicity.


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

Thanks to:

HOT-B, for developing and publishing this game.

Nintendo, for making the system this game runs on.

Psyklax, for working on translation hacks of early Famicom games and inspiring
me to do this one.

Klarth and RedComet, for creating Atlas, Cartographer, and ScriptCrunch, three
script utilities that made editing the main block of 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 "The Black Bass
(J)" 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 2017 GAFF Translations, all rights reserved.