46 OkuMen

Now that CRW’s out, it’s time to introduce our new patcher – Pachy98!

So if you downloaded our recent release of CRW Metal Jacket, you’ll notice that the patching process is a little different from what you may be used to. It doesn’t even resemble the patching process we ended up making for E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution or Rusty either. Well, that’s because we decided to strip it down and make it as lean as possible to pass the savings onto you. But mostly just to make it compatible with as many computers as we could. The other thing we did was make the executable itself generic and take a configuration file as an input so that we wouldn’t have to build a new patcher for every single release.

Since this tool is helping us with our releases, we figured it might help others interested in the PC-98 to release their patches as well, so we cleaned it up and slapped a name on it, written some documentation for it, and now it’s available for you guys as an early beta version.

Oh, and we’re calling it Pachy98.

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Time to visit Neo Japan and quell those insurrections. CRW’s English translation patch is now released!

Happy Canada 150 to all those Canadians out there. What better way to spend the 150th anniversary of a nice friendly mom and pop country than killing insurgents and terrorists in future Japan? Our translation patch for CRW Metal Jacket is now available!

CRW Metal Jacket Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.0.3 – zip – 23056 download(s) – 21 MB
CRW Metal Jacket Lite (Patcher Only) v1.0.3 – zip – 2916 download(s) – 5 MB
CRW Metal Jacket Mac/Linux Patches v1.0.2 – zip – 2487 download(s) – 626 KB
CRW Metal Jacket Manual v1.0.0 – zip – 2606 download(s) – 15 MB

Head on over to the Project page if you want to read more.

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Rusty around the web! Also a small update to the patcher

It’s been a few days since we released Rusty, and the response has been pretty great! You never really know what to expect while you work on these sorts of projects, but suffice to say all of our expectations were pretty much shattered by all of the positive reactions we’ve seen from press and individuals alike. Before we talk about that, let’s talk a bit about a few of the issues people faced while trying to use our patching process for Rusty.

First up, we accidentally included the x64 version of xdelta in our executable so anyone running the patcher on a 32-bit machine was unable to patch any of the files our patcher extracted from the Rusty disk images. Our bad. That’s been fixed. Another issue that we got a bunch of reports on was a bit more difficult for us to track down, but we did end up figuring out that a common build of the game is set to read-only. Whoops! We’ve included a better error message for that. Finally, we made the GDC Clock error message a little more clear (it’s translated in the game’s files now) so that people would know exactly what to check and where to look to get the game running. Not a huge amount for us to fix for this release, thankfully. Hopefully with this newer update to the patcher and the game’s files it’ll be even easier for you guys to patch and get the English version of Rusty up and running. You can get your hands on the new version over at the Rusty project page, or here:

Rusty Lite (Patcher Only) v1.0.1 – zip – 1365 download(s) – 9 MB

Onto the fun part of this post, let’s take a look at all of the things people have been saying around the web. The first responses to the release are usually found on Twitter, and there were certainly a bunch of people who retweeted our initial tweet about the release, and it was picked up soon after by @RPGSite and @Suprise_News. After that, a number of articles started popping up starting off with Indie Retro News, Siliconera, and even our friends down under at Kotaku AU wrote a nice article about it. Those are just the English publications. There were also a number of foreign articles written by Otaku Freaks (Spanish), RetroGaming History (Italian), and RetroVillage (Italian). There have also been a few videos posted on YouTube that have the patch applied already as well (Svati and Hengki).

All in all, it’s been a fun release and we’re glad that you guys seem to have been enjoying it as well. We’ll hopefully have some more things for you guys to mess with coming soon!

Rustea Sprincul has arrived. Our translation patch for Rusty is out!

So it’s been a few months since we released E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution and announced a whole slew of new projects that we’d start working on. Well, we’ve got something to show off for all of our work. Here, have a translation patch for Rusty!

Rusty Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.0.0 – zip – 2938 download(s) – 15 MB Rusty Lite (Patcher Only) v1.0.0 – zip – 1310 download(s) – 7 MB Rusty Mac/Linux Patches v1.0.0 – zip – 1022 download(s) – 471 KB Rusty Manual v1.0.0 – zip – 3875 download(s) – 7 MB

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Free this weekend and in Georgia? Check out the Vintage Computer Festival SouthEast!

The first day has already wrapped up, but there’s still another day to go. Our very own SkyeWelse has a booth setup showcasing a bunch of retro Japanese PCs, and that includes a special setup to play E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution in English on real PC-98 hardware.

E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution on a PC-9801DO

That’s not all he has at his setup, but that’s probably the one you’re most interested in if you’re reading our page at the moment. He also has an MSX and x68000 setup alongside his multiple PC-98s, so it’s a pretty neat gathering of retro Japanese computers all in all. Check his Twitter account for some more pictures and information about everything he’s brought.

For more information about Vintage Computer Festival Southeast (VCFSE), such as where to find it, tickets and all that mess, check out their website. There’s a ton of cool stuff for Retro PC enthusiasts there, so chances are you’ll find some other things that you’re interested in addition to SkyeWelse’s booth. Definitely worth it to check it out.

If you do make it and find the booth, tell SkyeWelse we sent you!

And before we sign off for this post, have another quick picture from the booth.

Hey, you! Check out this trailer for Rusty!

Fresh off the presses, here’s our trailer for our translation patch for Rusty!

We haven’t started proper playtesting just yet, but keep your eyes open for possible streams popping up soon. We’ve also just tested the patch on actual hardware and it appears to work just fine. Everything’s coming together quite nicely.

Our E.V.O. (PC-98) translation gets an update and an easier patching process!

We’ve updated our translation of E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution! If you had trouble patching your copy of the game before, try it again with our new patching program, which works on many more builds of the game.

E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.1.0 – zip – 1981 download(s) – 25 MB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Lite (Patcher Only) v1.1.0 – zip – 1295 download(s) – 6 MB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Mac/Linux Patches v1.1.0 – zip – 990 download(s) – 507 KB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Manual v1.0.0 – zip – 3930 download(s) – 16 MB
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The Response to E.V.O. and Progress Updates

It’s been a little over a week since we released our translation patch for E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution out into the world, and response from you guys has been nothing short of wonderful. When you spend a lot of time with a project you tend to start having doubts that anyone will play it. We were expecting maybe a couple hundred people to take an interest at the most, but our expectations have been exceeded by a fair amount. Before getting into that though, let’s get a few news items from us out of the way.

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