                               Musashi no Ken
                          English Translation Patch
                 by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com)
                      v1.00 (Created October 11, 2015)
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*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


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

v1.00 (10-11-15):  First release.


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

This is an English translation patch for Musashi no Ken: Tadaima Shugyou Chuu
("Musashi's Sword: Now in Training"), a platformer for the Nintendo Famicom
released by Taito in 1986.  It is based on the anime adaptation of Musashi no
Ken, an '80s coming-of-age shounen manga about the son of two kendo masters and
his trials and exploits through his childhood and high-school years.  This game
takes place in his early life and has you racing your pet dog through three
platforming levels while dispatching various creatures and obstacles with your
kendo sword.  After powering yourself up in these levels, you move on to a kendo
tournament where you compete against your rivals in a simplistic fighting-game
format.  Like most platformers that came out immediately after Super Mario
Bros., Musashi no Ken is a pretty rough game, with floaty controls and
ceaselessly spawning enemies.

I decided to translate this game after discovering Chrontendo, an Internet
gaming show where the narrator aims to play through every legitimate NES and
Famicom game in chronological order of release.  This gave me the idea that
older games would likely be easier to translate than newer ones, and indeed this
(the oldest yet-untranslated game that isn't a classic Japanese board game)
was without a doubt my easiest translation job yet.


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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 Musashi no Ken ROM.  No, I don't know where.  The correct
    ROM is identified by GoodNES 3.23 as the verified good dump.
	
3.  Apply the desired patch to the ROM using the aforementioned IPS patcher.


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

On the character listing for the two-player mode, Ranko's coloring is wrong.
It would take a lot more trouble than it's worth to fix it, so I left it.  (I
think the look suits her anyway.)


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

Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, translator/editor, tester


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

As I said above, this translation was mostly really easy.  There was very little
text, and even though most of it was in kanji form, it turns out that the game
doesn't actually have a special kanji-printing routine, just using the same 8x8
text-printing routine that the rest of the game uses.  This led to the possibly
unique occurrence of the English translation actually taking up less space than
the original Japanese did.  I edited everything by hand since most of it didn't
even use pointer tables anyway.  The game already had an English font which in
most cases was already mapped to ASCII encoding, making things even easier.

The hardest part of the hack was actually in a part of the game that most people
aren't even going to look at--the two-player mode.  In that particular place, 
Musashi no Ken actually does use a special routine to print characters' names
on the select screen, and even hacking that routine wouldn't have given me
enough space for the longer characters' names without a lot of work.  Therefore,
I decided to just replace the names with the characters' faces, which looks a
lot nicer anyway (despite the aforementioned bug).


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

Thanks to:

Taito, for developing and publishing this game.

Nintendo, for making the system this game runs on.

Chrontendo, for being an informative show about the 8-bit era and giving me the
idea to do this hack.

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 "Musashi no
Ken" 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.