Last time, we looked at a problem that turned out to be far easier for hacking a PC game than a console one. Today, we’re looking at a problem that is really only an issue for PC games.

These older game consoles tend to have specialized graphical hardware that works in terms of sprites and tiles, so their graphics are stored in a similar way from game to game. The PC-98 is a business computer that’s really good at displaying high-resolution text, but graphics-wise, programmers had to roll their own solutions for everything. As a result, pretty much every developer created and used their own proprietary format for storing graphics. E.V.O.’s developer, Almanic, used a format called .GDT.

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Hi! This is hollowaytape, the hacker/developer for 46 OkuMen. Today marks three years since we formed this group. We’re hard at work on some non-technical parts of our current and future projects, so I thought I would take this chance to write a little series about my prouder moments from our first handful of translation hacks.

First, I will describe the process of random flailing, blind luck, and help from others that led to the key breakthroughs of our first few projects. Then, I’ll step through a few of the more impressive technical things I could accomplish once I had a firmer grounding in x86 assembly. Finally, I’ll talk about some of the absurd technical hurdles I’ve found in games we haven’t picked up as projects, which I haven’t been able to solve.

They aren’t tutorials or rigorous technical documents. Instead, I’m hoping just to give you a taste of what PC-98 romhacking is like, give some advice if you’re tackling a similar problem, and share some amusing and dumb things I thought along the way.

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