SWAT - SPECIAL WEAPONS AND TACTICS
Translation by Filler & Psyklax
v1.0 (20180316)

CONTENTS
1. Intro
2. ROM Information
3. Background
4. Gameplay
5. Final Thoughts

INTRO
This is a 100% English translation of SWAT - Special Weapons
and Tactics for the Famicom (NES). All Japanese text has
been translated into English, including passwords. As such,
passwords found in walkthroughs will not work on this
translation.

ROM INFORMATION
GoodNES name: SWAT - Special Weapons and Tactics (J) [!].nes
CRC32: 4F34FD97

BACKGROUND
Released on 11 September 1987 by Toei Animation, SWAT is an
RPG where you take the role of a SWAT team leader commanding
four other SWAT members. Toei also published other Famicom
games based on their anime properties, however there is
little evidence that SWAT existed as an anime itself.

GAMEPLAY
The object of the game is to make it to Floor 8 of a
building and save Vice Chairman Frank, although you cannot
pass to the next floor until all enemies have been
neutralised (either by death or serious injury). Once they
are all dealth with, you can use your communicator to move
on. It is possible to interrogate injured enemies and talk
to hostages, but the primary focus is on neutralising every
enemy.

Due to technical reasons, the game uses a maximum of five
characters for the names of you and the other team members.
Therefore, they have been adjusted from the original
Japanese. Here is a comparison:

Original	Modified
Harris		Harry
Sakata		Akira
Lionel		Leon
Max		Max

FINAL THOUGHTS
 Filler
I dumped the script for SWAT after taking a look at games
from 1987 in an effort to support Psyklax's translations of
early Famicom games. I'm not sure if I would have made as
much progress on it as I did if the first of two main blocks
of text wasn't so dead easy to translate. The other main
block was a bit trickier, with a handful of terms and
references I was unfamiliar with. They are summarized below.

Oppekepe (おっぺけぺー): This is a song from 1889.
(https://youtu.be/y-B77o0pp3U)

Abeshi (あべしっ): A reference to Fist of the North Star.
This is the last word/sound a particular enemy makes before
his head explodes. I was comforted by the fact that a
Japanese person also had to ask what this meant
(https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1214953122)

まったりとしてそれでいてしつこさがなく
This seems to be a known phrase with a meme-like quality
that is, possibly erroneously attributed to the cooking
manga "Oishinbo". It means something like "It's rich in
flavor, but not TOO rich."

SWAT is interesting to me for its adventure/rpg style take
on a military action game. It's also based on a manga/anime
which I'd never heard of. It seems to be rather notorious
for bugs in the original game making it difficult to
progress properly, but if the text speed were a bit faster,
I think it would be a fun little game with a unique setting.
Due to what I assume are limitations of the mappers used in
Famicom games in 1987, it doesn't exactly show off what the
Famicom is capable of, but it's an interesting footnote in
the first-person adventure/RPG genre, notable for your
ability to interrogate/torture enemies.

 Psyklax
This was certainly a lot easier than I anticipated. The
slowly-appearing text that appears in the bottom-left window
is all stored in one bank, so I just doubled the ROM size
(since the mapper supports it) and put it all in a new empty
bank. Of course, this means there's tons on unused space,
but it was much easier than trying to squeeze the new text
into the existing bank.

All the other text, however, is stored differently: the ROM
features the screen location for the beginning of the text,
then has the text after it. The dakuten (ba, ga etc) aren't
supported in this mode, so they're drawn manually on the
screen, which gave me lots more space to work with. I was
able to get all the English text in there, with space to
spare.

I couldn't be bothered hacking in six-character names,
because the game uses five specific bytes to refer to names.
Changing the names was easier than an extensive hack.
Incidentally, why Akira? Because I searched Wikipedia for
'Sakata' and saw a somewhat famous musician called Akira
Sakata, so that was that. :D

I wanted to speed up the super slow text, but doing it
properly would require a big hack. However, there is a one-
byte change that doubles the speed - but it doesn't look
aesthetically pleasing, as half the text window doesn't work
properly as a result. Nevertheless, it IS nice to play it
with fast text, so if you want to do it, use the Game Genie
code LEKNEGTA. Don't blame me if it looks weird, though.

Apparently the game is full of bugs, but I haven't
experienced any in my limited playing experience. If anyone
can show actual bugs occurring, however, I might consider
making a 'bugfix' patch in future. If there's interest, of
course. In the meantime, have fun with this interesting
little game!

Tools I used for this translation:
FCEUX (best NES emulator for debugging and hacking)
HxD (general hex editing)
Tile Molester (graphics)
WindHex32 EX (checking/touching up text)
Pointer Tables (dumping/inserting text)

Filler
http://projects.mattsmessyroom.com/
Psyklax
http://s346165667.websitehome.co.uk/psyktrans/
