                                  Outlanders
                          English Translation Patch
                 by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com)
                       v1.01 (Created December 9, 2019)
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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 (09-26-18):  First release.

v1.01 (12-09-19):  Fixed typo on intro screen (thanks filler).

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

This is an English translation patch for Outlanders, published for the Famicom
in 1987 by Victor Musical Industries and developed by the notorious contract
studio Micronics.  It is based on the eponymous manga by Johji Manabe, which was
an example of the zany alien romance stories inspired by Urusei Yatsura that
were popular at the time.  It is an action-RPG, and in true Micronics style, it
has extremely fiddly combat, a difficulty curve that looks more like a cliff,
bad graphics and sound, and obnoxious loading times.  But it also provided a
good opportunity to do an expansion hack for the first time.  Best of all, any
bugs that arise due to the patch will just blend into the bugs that are already
there!

As with previous patches, this patch was made as part of Psyklax's project to
translate early Famicom games.  The hacker spent a grand total of 25-30 hours
over a few weeks on it, most of that time being used in making and testing
simple and tedious text output manipulations.


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

1.  Download and install Floating IPS or a similar BPS patcher if you haven't
    already.
	
2.  Get a copy of the Outlanders ROM.  No, I don't know where.  The correct ROM
    is identified by GoodNES 3.23b as the standard Japanese dump.
	
3.  Apply the desired patch to the ROM using the aforementioned BPS patcher.


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

The only notable bugs that seem to be introduced by the patch are some
irregularities in text output at certain spots on the overworld in certain
situations.  These do not affect gameplay very much.  There's also a bug that
you'll run into if you go into a dark place without a lamp--the game glitches
out, but this can be fixed just by backtracking a little.  Besides those bugs,
the way the game outputs text fairly often results in weird-looking dialogues.
Usually the spacing is just weird, but there is a case where the text window
clears without pressing a button and another case where text appears in the
wrong order.  Neither of these cases are in important dialogues.

There's also a notable bug that I'm pretty sure wasn't introduced by the patch.
If you try to transition between areas on the overworld (marked by the squares
that cause the map to change) at the exact same time that you eat a piece of
bread (that's what that annoying dinging sound is telling you), the transition
fails and you have to backtrack to fix the map.

Please note that versions of FCEUX earlier than 2.2.3 do not support this patch.
Any reasonably up-to-date version of Nestopia should work fine, though this has
not been thoroughly tested.  Hardware support for the patch is unknown at this
time.


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

Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, editor/tester, misc. translations
Eien Ni Hen: Translator
Filler: Original script dump, intro translation


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

(Pluvius)

My first expansion hack proves the idea that ROM expansion for the NES has an
unfairly negative reputation true, at least in this case.  Once I realized that
I could use the space formerly occupied by the text for the code needed to
support the expansion, getting the script in and working was one of the quickest
parts of the hack.  Far more time-consuming was the need to get each string of
text in a suitable spot within the output window.  The text is arranged within
the ROM in a silly way which forces the game to print each string separately so
that it's impossible without a lot of code rewriting and/or script editing to
arrange things generally in an aesthetically pleasing manner.  But while it
looks pretty ugly in a lot of cases, it works and I had to do very little
negative editing to Eien's work.

Other hacks done include expanding the menus and rearranging the text and cursor
within them (which also took a good amount of time), changing the dakuten-
handling routine into a line break, and making the password system work without
dakuten.  Speaking of passwords, you can get a well-equipped Tetsuya near the
start of the game by inputting a single lowercase 'g'.  However, since the
character has an impossible set of items, allies, and magic, this will probably
break the game and is not recommended for a serious playthrough.


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

Thanks to:

Micronics, for developing this game.

Victor Musical Industries, for publishing this game.

Nintendo, for making the system this game runs on.

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

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

KingMike, for creating Nflate, the utility that automated the grunt work of
ROM expansion.

The developers of FCEUX, the very useful debugging emulator which the hacker
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 "Outlanders" 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.

This work is licensed by GAFF Translations and its contributors under the
CC BY-NC 4.0 License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)