Compression in Rusty (FolkuLore, part 3)
While we were finishing up the E.V.O. translation, we weren’t sure whether we wanted to work on more translations together. Our group didn’t even have a name yet. But we were starting to test the waters a little bit. Kuoushi was looking at Libros de Chilam Balam, and I was hearing about some other games in the PC-98 Discord server. I came across a tweet from another PC-98 romhacker, Nana, who had this to say about Rusty:
Rusty is the primary reason this little collage got out two days later than I had intended, haha. Game's code is a nightmare.
— Nana (@Nana_VS_Nana) September 1, 2016
I had at least heard of the game before from its HG101 article, and for some reason I wanted a challenge.
Rusty was kind of a weird project in retrospect – it’s in a genre we usually ignore (hard action platformer), it looks an awful lot like it’d be a hentai game (which we just claimed we wouldn’t work on), and it doesn’t even have that much text. But it was where I started to develop some proper romhacking skills, like assembly modification and handling data compression