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1. Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 11:57:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   I pulled up the AstroBoy game for the GBA, and it turns out it turns on EVERY SINGLE SPRITE (at least during dialogue) and just positions them slightly offscreen.

   Also, it devotes and entire sprite just to Doctor O'Shay's nose.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 12:09:17 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh right, I hate hacking GBA games, I forgot

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 12:10:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     but life is short (and the days are long) so I must

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 12:10:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they're at the right era where they love to do shit like dynamically composing text as background tiles out of decompressed binary fonts, and they also don't tend to use ascii/unicode to encode their text. So hacking them is a PAIN

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 12:14:33 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh god it's got some ad-hoc compression for english text
     The line I'm looking for is "I'm here on behalf of your father"
     But I see "I am behalf of"

     They've got some special character that means, like, "insert the word from N words back"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 12:19:23 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     but I can inject into the non-compressed parts, so I'm gonna do that and pretend the compression doesn't exist.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 16:10:53 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     So I injected into the second letter of "behalf", and check out what 0xD2 was:

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 16:11:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     note that it's not "bultimatehalf". I think it used the "h" as an offset. I bet if I change it too, I'll get different words.

   • abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 16:29:56 JST abadidea

     in reply to

     @foone how much text could Astroboy for the GBA possibly have such that a convoluted custom compression scheme was called for

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 16:29:56 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • abadidea

     @0xabad1dea it's also an 8mb rom with 200k unused at the end. They definitely didn't need this.

     I'm guessing the company made other GBA games and they just reused some code?