HEBEREKE
English Translation v1.0 (2/27/13)
(C) 2012-13 rusted logic
http://bmf.rustedlogic.net

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ToC
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1. About Hebereke
2. Project Notes
3. Known Issues (or: Bugs That Are Not Bugs)
4. Patching Instructions
5. Patch Credits
6. ...?

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1. About Hebereke
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Hebereke is a wacky nonlinear platformer released by Sunsoft in 1991.
It's... completely off its rocker, and plays like Blaster Master's estranged cousin who likes to huff paint.
It was localized in Europe as "Ufouria: The Saga", with redesigned characters and a rewritten story (though there is
substantial evidence that both versions were actually developed simultaneously!).
Now, let's hear from our friend Hebe about the story...

"There's some weird stuff about a great war beginning in the Japanese manual, but you're not interested in that, 'kay?
All you need to know is that to beat enemies, you've gotta jump on their heads. But you can't just jump on 'em like some
kind of fat Italian plumber! You've gotta hold DOWN on the D-Pad in order to seal the deal! Occasionally, enemies drop
Popoons. These weird things make a pretty good throwing weapon. Just huck 'em at someone's head and deal some damage! Yeah!
...oh yeah, the story. Um... We'll... get back you on that. I, uh... I've gotta go now."

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2. Project Notes
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From BMF!
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I don't really have much to say here. The hacking work went off (mostly) without a hitch; the hardest parts were reverse-
engineering the whacked-out screen drawing routine used during the end credits, and fixing a few stupid bugs and
limitations present in Sunsoft's original code. Most of these fixes were done several hectic months ago and I've forgotten
most of the details, but here's what I remember:

- The triangle channel was missing entirely from the game's title theme. Sunsoft forgot to set some parameter at the start
of the song, so you'd have to go into the password screen and back out (or get a game over) to hear it. Rather than
dissect the hopelessly complex sound code, I decided to just shove the correct parameter into RAM before the song starts.

- Character dialogues were limited to 256 characters total. Sunsoft used a single byte to keep track of the current
position in the script, and when this value overflowed, the dialogue would start over again from the beginning.
Fortunately, this was an easy fix.

- There was a really awful bug in the aforementioned screen drawing routine used during the end credits that caused the
game to crash HARD if I moved the text pointers. As soon as the "AND PLAYERS" text reached the center of the screen and
the scrolling stopped, all hell broke loose. Carefully stepping through the tangled mess of code revealed that it was
reading an invalid pointer beyond the end of the table, and subsequently fetching garbage data from some random address
in the no-man's land between RAM and ROM. Moving the pointer table changed this address, and caused the game to fetch
different, somehow unpalatable garbage data. Sunsoft got lucky -- the original routine worked ENTIRELY BY CHANCE.
Fortunately, this was another easy fix.

- The game uses Sunsoft's FME7 mapper, but it seems to have been coded with the MMC3 in mind (as used in the European
version). This means the switchable RAM/ROM at $6000-$7FFF was entirely unused. I used this to my advantage and put the
entire script in there, which gave us 8,192 glorious bytes of free space to work with. :D (Note that this means an MMC3
repro cart is out of the question -- at least without some extensive hacking -- but I'm not interested in making things
easy for repro sellers. Buy a PowerPak instead!)

From Rahan!
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Hey, guys. I'm Rahan, and I translated this game. BMF asked me if I could put together some translator's notes, and here
we are. :x This game's dialogue is really, really interesting, and I'd like to take a minute to talk about the main
characters.

Hebe uses (pupipi) a lot of little birdie noises (popipyo) in the original Japanese (pyorooon) that you will notice are
not present in this translation. Purists may be horrified by this decision, but the space for text in this game is -very-
limited. Each text box is a mere 20 characters by 4 lines. The decision we had was "include verbal tics at the expense of
dialogue," or "make Hebe have a distinct voice in the space we've got, verbal tics be damned." This wound up requiring
"rewriting" several of Hebe's lines. For example, when he says "...oh dear." near the beginning, that was just a
nondistinct "popipyo". Instead of just having him tweet nervously, we added lines that try their best to convey the
emotion of our little birdie hero.

Japanese pronoun tidbit for Hebe's section: the pronoun he uses is "wachi," which is a bit of a childish slurring of
"watashi." It's a bit harder to convey in English than the other characters' pronoun choices (which I explain below), but
I think we made him a cool little penguin-like kid.

O-chan speaks -very- formal Japanese. Her word choices and pronouns are all in very respectful language, and she's also
very bossy. But, she refers to Hebe as "Hebe-sama" (rendered here as Lord Hebe). I hope in the limited space that we're
allowed, her high-handedness shows through in my translation choices.

Japanese pronoun tidbit for O-chan's section: O-chan's pronoun is "watakushi," a first-person pronoun reserved for formal
occasions. It gives her a very haughty air sometimes.

Sukezaemon is my favorite, hands-down. He talks like a samurai, down to the antiquated pronouns and extremely humble
sentence ending particles. So, he went from samurai to knight. I know this is a bit of a cliche translation choice, but he
speaks in an incredibly cliche manner as it is, so we decided to roll with it. Make sure you lose to him when you fight
him!

Japanese pronoun tidbit for Sukezaemon's section: "Sessha" is an incredibly antiquated first-person pronoun typically used
by samurai. Combine that with the particle "de gozaru" at the end of -every sentence Sukezaemon says- and he is the most
stereotypical samurai archetype ever.

Jennifer is another fun character. He's (that's right, he) a badass, brash frogman who doesn't take crap from anyone. So
we decided to try to really work hard to make his badassitude evident from the get-go. Make sure you lose to him, too --
I'm really proud of his winquote.

Japanese pronoun tidbit for Jennifer's section: Jennifer uses "ore," which is a generally male-only pronoun that can give
a very rough-and-tumble image for a character.

Other little bits and blobs that I can think of offhand:
The special attacks were generally "something something ATTACK" in Japanese. For example, Sukezaemon's "mendama tobide
ata-ku," or "flying eyeball attack." This is boring. Instead, we gave them some flavorful names that fit the spirit of the
game and made us chuckle. Hopefully, they'll make you chuckle, too.

Also, Sukezaemon and Hebe's special attack descriptions were just "Hold B to charge energy," without actually explaining
what the attacks -do-. Small rewrites have been made accordingly that, while not being in the original script, are a
little more helpful.

During a few lines in the Japanese version, certain characters dialogue would be followed by a parenthetical comment
describing the sentence's tone. It looked really awkward. (annoyed) So, we wrote around them to keep the implications
without resorting to drawing the result out onscreen like that.

Also, I hear that if you hold ???, ???, and ??? while you... (the message ends here, popipyo.)

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3. Known Issues (or: Bugs That Are Not Bugs)
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In some areas, the game will render dialogue using a seemingly incorrect palette (in front of the giant door, for
example). This is not a bug, but rather a bit of carelessness on Sunsoft's part: all dialogue boxes use the same
background palette, and some areas overwrite this palette with odd colors. I didn't consider it a serious enough issue to
bother coding a fix.

The character portraits in dialogue boxes often change color depending on what character you currently have selected.
Again, this is a limitation present in the original game.

In at least one area, the dialogue box overlaps a door, causing momentary graphical glitching due to CHR bankswitching.
Yet another original design flaw, and not something I could easily fix.

Jennifer's Belch Bomber cannot harm enemies. Is this a bug, an oversight, or an intentional design choice? YOU DECIDE.

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4. Patching Instructions
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Due to the fact that the ROM was expanded and data moved around, the provided patch is in beat (.bps) format, as IPS was
not designed to effectively handle files modified in this manner. To apply .bps patches, you'll need to download beat:

http://byuu.org/programming/beat/
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/893/

To apply the patch:

- Run beat.exe.
- Click "Apply Patch".
- In the first Open dialog, locate the patch file (Hebereke English v1.0.bps) and click "Open".
- In the second Open dialog, locate the ORIGINAL Hebereke NES ROM and click "Open".
- In the Save As dialog, choose a filename and location for the modified ROM, and click "Save".

If you encounter any errors, make sure your original ROM file is a good dump with the following checksum (including iNES
header):

CRC-32: 2a137974
   MD4: 62dcd3676ccdc253a9f8ea6fa3a58d9c
   MD5: 1efdab0641c6d72c54bf5a57e23250bb
 SHA-1: 5ce5daab012ae6a49b2fe18e162343d3ea705eac

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5. Patch Credits
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BMF54123 - Hacking, editing, and all-around good guy
RahanAkero - Readme, translation, and terrible references

Special Thanks:
CaH4e3 - for creating the Automatic Translation Script Parser used to insert the game's script
Xkeeper - ,')
Aeon Genesis - for translating Assault Suits Valken, which I stole the readme format from. -R

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6. ...? This message looks like it's in a weird language from another world...
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P o dra fyo...
Y mdruikr ed fych'd ehlmitat eh dra unekehym kysa, drana'c y calnad fa yttat.
Nekrd, ed'c y calnad, yht ed'c rettah naymmo famm. Ed'c y cemmo meddma zuga vnus dra dnyhcmydeuh days.

Zicd ced yd dra Dedma clnaah yht drehg ypuid ruf oui'mm hajan veht dra calnad.
Oui'mm ryja Caluht druikrdc ypuid ed, oui'na hu Bmyoan. Tuh'd ku muugehk vun rehdc eh dra naytsa, aedran!

-- END OF README --