You should do Lufia 1 as well.
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
-----Original Message-----
From: Zachary Kline
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2014 10:47 PM
To: Gamers Discussion list
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] A little demo of my Super Nintendo project
withChrono Trigger and Lufia 2
Hi Ian,
I just want to reiterate how awesome this is. I heard a ton about
ChronoTrigger at least for years. I realize you’ve still got a lot to do,
but I wish you every success.
As a related question, have you considered handing out the workload to some
of the existing SNES hobbyists and so forth? I’d hate for you to lose steam
at some point if it becomes too much of a grind.
All the best,
Zack.
On Oct 1, 2014, at 9:26 PM, Ian Reed <supp...@blindaudiogames.com> wrote:
Hi Willem,
Nope, I did not wrap the function that renders the text, but that's a good
guess.
The Super Nintendo actually has no concept of text and games work pretty
close to the hardware.
It does have a concept of tiles and many games use a 1 character per tile
system for rendering text.
In those cases the character tiles just need to be identified once so my
tool can recognize them in the future.
Chrono Trigger uses this method for the party menus.
The other way games render text is by taking a block of tiles and custom
rendering text to them.
This is done by changing bits in video ram between clock cycles.
In Chrono Trigger and Lufia 2 the NPC dialog text is drawn this way.
So I have to identify the block of tiles used to custom draw text, the
order in which those tiles are laid out, and then do a little bit of work
to tear lines apart, and then individual characters apart while
identifying spaces.
Once I have characters split apart, they can be identified, and then my
app can read them for the future.
Regarding other emulators and a function that speaks all text rendered to
the screen:
It's my guess that emulators for systems that do 3D rendering would have
such a function.
So probably Playstation and successors, Dreamcast, XBox and successors,
and probably N64 and successors.
You still run into a problem where reading all text rendered at all times
doesn't make sense.
For instance, in the Chrono Trigger party menus there is a lot of text
rendered in one character per tile form at all times, but it's important
to know where the menu pointer is so you can instead speak only the text
that corresponds to what is currently selected.
I do plan on having a hot key for getting all the text currently visible
in the party menu to be displayed in a textbox in another window.
That would let me continue to be brief with what I'm announcing on the
party menus, but still let you have an option to hear all the text.
It would also be nice if I could make this player configurable via
scripting, so you could add hot keys to announce Chrono's HP, MP, and
other stats displayed when he is selected.
I will probably add these myself until I reach a point where scripting
extensions are possible.
I've also looked at Nintendo, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, and briefly
Nintendo DS.
These 4 seem to render the game in a similar way to what the Super
Nintendo does.
But the GBA and DS have a higher number of direct drawing modes than the
others, so there's a higher chance that a game on them would be rendering
itself pixel by pixel and it would be more difficult to identify text.
Or at least have a higher performance cost to doing so.
And direct drawn games also make it more difficult to identify parts of
the background map, which would hinder creating tools for navigation.
So it's unfortunately already more complex than just announcing all text
currently being rendered.
Thanks for the words of encouragement.
~ Ian Reed
Try my free games at http://BlindAudioGames.com
On 10/1/2014 2:38 AM, Willem Venter wrote:
Hi Ian.
Well done on finding a very interesting solution to the problem of
reading text out loud from the snes emulator.
Did you wrap the function that renders the text in the emulator
window? I think the technique can also be used for any other
open-source emulator or game which has a function to "print text on
screen at location x". Something I think you should add is the ability
for excluding certain regions of the screen, or even prioritizing
reading of others based on some trigger (e.g color or wording).
Good luck with the rest of your project. Please keep us updated.
On 10/1/14, Ian Reed <supp...@blindaudiogames.com> wrote:
Hi all,
A while ago I started a project to see if I could make Chrono Trigger,
and possibly other games, accessible when played through the Snes9x
emulator.
I hadn't worked on this project for a while but was looking at starting
it up again and thought I'd make a quick demo to show people how far it
got.
http://blindaudiogames.com/Downloads/ChronoLufiaDemo.mp3
It shows Chrono Trigger and Lufia 2.
I'm calling the project SNAP, short for Super Nintendo Accessibility
Project.
Enjoy!
Ian Reed
Try my free games at http://BlindAudioGames.com
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