                          Mississippi Satsujin Jiken
                          English Translation Patch
                 by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com)
                         v1.00 (Created July 20, 2017)
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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 (07-20-17):  First release.


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

This is an English translation patch for Mississippi Satsujin Jiken, the Famicom
port of a Western 8-bit computer game named Murder on the Mississippi.  The
original game was released on the Apple ][ and Commodore 64/128 by Activision
while the port was released by Jaleco, all in 1986.  It is a Western-style
adventure game wherein the main character is an accomplished British detective
who investigates a murder aboard a Mississippi riverboat that he coincidentally
happens to be on.  The game uses a fairly simple interface to interact with the
various objects and suspects on the boat, and is pretty short once you know what
to do, though getting to that point is not an easy matter.  The port is rather
slapdash and is missing a fair chunk of gameplay as well as an entire character,
and unlike the computer version, the port forces you down a much more linear
path with frustratingly little hint that it's doing so.  However, it still makes
an interesting exercise in hacking and the game itself is still text-heavy by
1986 console standards.

The fact that Mississippi Satsujin Jiken was originally a Western game makes it
ideal for translation by someone with rudimentary Japanese skills.  As such, I
have translated the game using the original script, though the Japanese script
was technically different in some ways, most notably the names of the
characters.  The already-written script combined with some other factors made
this a relatively easy hack which took me about two weeks to make.  Please
enjoy.


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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 Mississippi Satsujin Jiken 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.


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

There are a couple of minor bugs introduced by this patch.  First of all, the
attract mode stalls at the dialogue in Sir Charles' cabin due to the text now
taking up more than one page.  You're not missing anything, though, and you can
still return to the title screen by pressing a button.  The other bug is the
occassional issue with text that seems to be oddly formatted, particularly with
the saved conversations in the notebook.  As usual, I have left the title screen
as-is, and anyone inclined to hack it should do so.  With this game in
particular, the existence of an original English version should provide ample
support for such an endeavor.

There are also bugs that were in the port originally.  The most obvious one is
graphical glitching during text output; this may have been exacerbated slightly
by the patch.  Nothing should interfere with gameplay very much.


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

Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, editor/tester
Rob Swigart: Original script


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

Aside from the original English script, there were a number of circumstances
which made hacking Mississippi Satsujin Jiken a lot simpler than it could've
been.  Firstly, the developers wasted a lot of space, not only in terms of empty
space but also in terms of space taken up by unnecessary data.  It appears that
the porters had originally planned to make a game much closer to the computer
version, but for whatever reason were incapable of doing so.  Because of this,
they put in a lot of text translated straight from the original game, most of
which never got used.  Getting rid of this text resulted in a great deal of
savings.  Secondly, while the game uses multiple PRG banks for code and text,
the text routine works in such a way that it's a relatively simple matter to
hack it without worrying about which bank the text is in or which bank the
Famicom is currently running code in.  Lastly, the developers implemented a
nifty auto-pagination routine which allows for arbitrarily long passages of text
to be put under only one pointer.  Therefore, I wasn't constrained by the window
size and only had to worry about line length.

The main hack was a DTE/dictionary routine.  However, I did not make use of
dictionary compression because it didn't add much and that part of the routine
is too slow to play well with the bankswitching that the game uses, causing
really nasty audiovisual glitches.  Thankfully, DTE by itself was plenty enough
to get the script in without any real changes aside from what was removed by the
porters.  Other hacks included giving the text routine the ability to handle
more than 256 characters at a time as well as fixing a bug in the original port
that caused duplicated text in the 32nd column on occasion.  (Incidentally, I
decided to use the entire 32-column space of the screen for text, though this
wasn't strictly necessary.  I made that decision early on and changing it back
to the original port's two-space padding would be a lot of work for questionable
benefit.)

While I removed a lot of text without 100% certainty that it was all dummied
out, I playtested the game pretty thoroughly and am fairly confident that there
are no issues and that what is there matches up as closely as possible with the
original game.  If you run into a place where it seems like there should be text
but isn't, please let me know.


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

Thanks to:

Activision, for developing and publishing the original game.

Jaleco, for publishing the port.

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.

KingMike, for providing a generic DTE/dictionary routine for 6502 processors.

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 "Mississippi
Satsujin Jiken" 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.