you said it, big guy

I assume this is exactly how this guy talks in the anime

yay, I finally managed to inject ONE ENTIRE BIT of changed text.
I converted the "I" to an "A"

That's from:
01001001
to
01000001

making this sort of change automated is proving to be really annoying. computers are hard, let's go shopping

yeah, I know what you mean, man!

I'm getting tired of this guy saying gibberish at me

rb b b pb
nb b b b b b
b b b nb b
b b pb b b b

what did you just call me?

look, I know from experience, if the game gives you options, ALWAYS select "no goo"

I mean.... no? but at least it's not heavy gibberish.

O ldiire your enthusiasi!

ugh. I'm not gonna be able to make this easy. So I'm just gonna have to do it the Hard Way with all this gibberish.

the hard way to uppercase.

I wonder if it's even worth it to submit a bug report that the emulator seems to get slower and crash after opening 256 roms in one session? :)

ugh. it turns out there's a metadata character: \\x08, which sets the color based on the next character.
Why's that a problem? Because I can't control two characters in a row!

I'm gonna have to build a full version of this compression just to get metadata working right

it has some other metadata characters:
0x33 puts the dialog on the top of the screen
0x64 puts it in the middle

err, not 0x. that's 33 and 64, or ! and @.

0x would be weird, because 0x64 is 'd'

the good news is that it turns out there's a python library that implements the kind of compression I need
the bad news is that it's for a different version of python
and it doesn't work

someday I want to have problems that are just problems, and aren't fractal problems

"So, Foone, what are you doing?"
"Well, I'm fixing someone's python 3 module because it turns out they didn't package the dependencies properly so it won't work. I need the module because it implements a unique open source compression algorithm used in some webfoot GBA games"

"and I need to be able to compress text to correctly inject it into this game, because my previous literal-overwriting method won't let me get two characters next to each other, which I need for some of the metadata characters, so I can get all the font colors"

"and this is all so I can extract the font to build a death generator for Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury"

"foone, you know it's 3am on a friday, right? have you considered SLEEPING?"

"sleep? at a time like this?"

Also @_pixeI_ noticed something about this game engine: https://twitter.com/_pixeI_/status/1297073290343841794

the fact that there's a dragonball z RPG and a hello kitty adventure on the same engine is just perfect.

it reminds me of one of the WTF things a coworker once told me, back when I worked for the government.
He came into the cafeteria, sat down, and the first words out of his mouth were this:

"You know, when we were kids, I watched Dragonball Z, and my brother watched Sailor Moon...

I think that's why he's gay now, and I'm not."

there are a lot of weird stories I could tell involving this strange man, but I think this one in particular kinda gives you the feel for how they all go, in a little nutshell.

although there's a fun bit where we were at a weird christmas dinner function with some other coworkers and I got sat at the "young guys" table and another coworker asked everyone "who their ideal woman was" which is a questionable question in a mixed-gender WORK context...

and it got around to him and he answers confidently and immediately:

BATMAN

it turns out he had slightly misheard and thought the question was "who was your ideal person", like "who would you most like to be?"

anyway he's married now.
I never met his wife (we'd had a falling out by the time he got engaged, for obvious-in-retrospect reasons), and I hope I never meet her, because it would ruin my perfect mental image of him, sitting in his little car, next to Batman in a wedding gown.

also I knew the internet wouldn't fail me if I googled that, and it didn't.
https://www.deviantart.com/saetje/art/Batman-in-a-wedding-dress-85423526

@Zowayix alerted me that there might be a my little pony game using the same engine and YEP

now here's the question: if I put this game in the generator, do I just do it as one big megagame so you can select from Rarity, my favorite Sanrio character Big Challenges, or Vegeta?

I'm currently looking through their other games to see if they used the same engine.
Tonka On The Job doesn't, but it probably is gonna be headed for a generator soon anyway

and they didn't carry it over to their first DS game, American Girl: Julie Finds a Way

or My Little Pony: Pinkie Pie's Party.

or their urban-kart-racer Homie Rollerz.

wow, they made a thrifting game

they also made the Legend of Korra 3DS game, which appears to be a Fire Emblem inspired turn based strategy

it's not great, and I don't think I yet have a good way to emulate and extract from 3DS games, but it does have dialog, so I could maybe look at it for the generator

Webfoot, btw, has been around so long their first game was a lemmings-inspired falling-sand game for MS-DOS

And you can play it in your browser here:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_H20_1996

oh hey! I forgot they were the ones who did the legendary puzzle game DROD.

well, they did the commercial release if it.
It was developed by Erik Hermansen, who later got permissions from Webfoot to open-source that version, and then he rewrote it from scratch, rereleasing it as "Caravel" DROD in 2002.

Then a commercial remake of the original DROD, but in the new engine, was released in 2005, called King Dugan's Dungeon.

And there's been... 6? 5? sequels as well, most recently in 2016.
DROD has a long and complex history.