MOTHER 2 Translation for the GBA

This is a work-in-progress translation patch for MOTHER 2 on the GBA.

Discord

Our Discord server is pretty active: https://discord.gg/ADXS5Ub

Hasn't it been done?

There are at least two other projects that translate the MOTHER 2 side of the game:

• Mato's menu text translation: here
• TheZunar123's full translation (in progress): here and here

Why start another project?

Neither of the above projects use a true variable-width-font (VWF) to render text. A VWF would look much better and would make the game more enjoyable.

Adding a VWF is hard, however. Mato explains here why it's generally a very difficult task to fully translate the game, let alone to insert a VWF.

A long time ago (before the release of the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation), I started working on a proof-of-concept VWF for MOTHER 2 on the GBA. It worked, but it quickly became apparent that the amount of hacking required would be huge; window-rendering functions contain a ton of repeated code and some of it is downright non-sensical.

A few years after that, I tried it again from scratch with the intent of having a more organized codebase. It went much better, but I was soon limited by not having any translated dialogue, rather than not having a VWF; I couldn't test much of my VWF code without any English text inserted into the ROM.

Now what?

This project aims to both complete the VWF codebase and to provide a tool for translating the game's dialogue. My new intent is to bring the hack to a state where I can just sit down and translate text efficiently in my spare time with a graphical tool. Not only that, but having such a tool means that other people can contribute!

Screenshots

Building

Dependencies

• .NET Core 2.1 or later
• PowerShell Core 6.0 or later
• GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain
• armips
• Unmodified MOTHER 1+2 ROM (SHA-1 F27336B9...)
• Unmodified, unheadered EarthBound ROM (SHA-1 D67A8EF3...)
• (Optional) For building the GUI script tool: .NET Core 3.0 or later

1. One-time setup
   1. Install .NET Core 2.1, PowerShell Core, and GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain. Make sure the Arm toolchain's bin folder is in your PATH.
   2. Create a bin folder in the root of the repo.
   3. Copy MOTHER 1+2 ROM to bin/m12fresh.gba.
   4. Copy EarthBound ROM to bin/eb.smc.
   5. Run build-tools.ps1.
      • Windows: .\build-tools.ps1 in a PowerShell prompt
      • Linux: pwsh build-tools.ps1
   6. Copy/build armips to bin.
      • Windows: grab the latest release here and copy the executable to bin/armips.exe.
      • Linux: follow the README to build armips and copy the executable to bin/armips.
2. Building the ROM
   1. Run build.ps1 (like in Step 4).
   2. The default compiled ROM is copied to bin/m12.gba.
3. (Optional) Build the GUI script tool:
   1. dotnet build tools/ScriptTool (don't set the output directory)
   2. dotnet build tools/ScriptToolGui -o bin/ScriptToolGui
   3. Run with dotnet bin/ScriptToolGui/ScriptToolGui.dll (or just run the EXE file directly).