                             Hana no Star Kaidou
                          English Translation Patch
                 by GAFF Translations (pluvius3 @ gmail.com)
                        v1.00 (Created July 1, 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 (07-01-15):  First release.


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

This is an English translation patch for Hana no Star Kaidou ("Flowering Star
Highway"), a game released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1987 by Victor Music
Industries (now known as Victor Entertainment).  As might be expected from a
music company, this game is about two teenaged Japanese performers trying to
make it big in the music industry.  As might also be expected from a music
company, this game isn't very good.  It's brutally difficult with cheap deaths
galore, which is compounded by the fact that you're controlling two people at
once (which, needless to say, is not easy using a controller with only one
D-Pad).  It's also really tedious, since each level consists of the same walking
around and finding various objects, then going into a building and walking
around a boring and confusing maze.

So why did I translate this game?  Well, not only is it pretty infamous in the
community of Famicom fans, but it also has very little Japanese in it.  Indeed,
the only actual Japanese is in the intro and on one of the building signs.  The
rest of the game's text is in hilarious Engrish.  (A sample: "Show up you gays.
You gonna be famous.")  I have thus created two patches: one for purists that
only changes the Japanese into English, and one that also edits the Engrish into
something that makes sense.

Including playtime, I estimate that these patches took me around 10-15 hours
over the course of a few months of limited free time to complete.  I hope you
enjoy them--well, as much as you can enjoy this game, anyway.


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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 Hana no Star Kaidou 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.
    The patcher should automatically expand the ROM for you if it's anything
	like Lunar IPS.


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

None at this time.  I didn't bother hacking the title graphics due to my lack
of artistic ability and the compression mentioned below; anyone who is good
at Famicom art hacking should feel free to do so.


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

Rob "Pluvius" Browning: Hacker, translator/editor, tester
Ivan Rorick: Spot-checking of the intro translation


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

Most of the work of translating this game was pretty easy.  The most difficult
part was hacking the graphics in the intro.  Even though the game already has a
functional English font for the title screen, all of the graphics in this part
of the game are compressed using RLE.  This made replacing the Japanese font, as
well as hacking the signs in the train station, a bit of a chore to do without
screwing things up.  Beyond that, the most technically challenging part was
hacking the 16x16 kanji displaying routine (used for the "dream" line in the
intro) so that it would display 8x8 text instead.  I couldn't simply use the
normal text routine since the kanji routine had the benefit of allowing me to
display that line of text anywhere on the screen.  The normal text routine uses
spaces to align text, and I didn't have enough room in the ROM to add that many
spaces.

The bulk of the game's text is in a bog-standard format, a block of text with
positioning information at the beginning of every line and a pointer table at
the beginning of the block.  It even uses ASCII encoding.  Editing was simple
and I barely even had to fiddle with the pointers (I didn't even realize they
were there at first).  I had to hack in a question mark to replace the
unnecessary hyphen, but the graphics aren't compressed here so that wasn't a
problem.  The only other text was in the "true" ending, which was strangely
formatted as top-to-bottom then left-to-right instead of the other way around.
For example, the first words of each line are "WELCOME," "ROAD," and "HERE," so
this is encoded something like "WRHEOELAR..."  Considering what this bonus
ending is like (I haven't seen an ending so insultingly and sloppily
implemented since The Krion Conquest), it's not too surprising that this bit
of text was an odd-ball.


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

Thanks to:

Victor Entertainment, for developing and publishing this game.

Nintendo, for making the system this game runs on.

Klarth and RedComet, for creating Atlas and Cartographer, two 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 "Hana no Star
Kaidou" 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.