German Build

[Dermahn]

Based on VC roms.

Code banks are a bit ugly. I tried to keep it readable but suggestions for improvement are welcome.
Text files should probably all be stored in "text/" like they used to be, rather than having them divided between "text/" and various folders inside "data/".

[Rangi42]

Instead of separate en and de subdirectories, this could use a single top-level version/ directory, with subdirectories for each translation containing alternative files. See https://github.com/mid-kid/pokecrystal/tree/i18n for an example.

This should also update roms.sha1 and the README's "builds the following ROMs" list to indicate exactly what German ROM it's recreating. These are the correct hashes:

• Pokemon Rote Edition (G) [S][!].gb sha1: 87d523fe1a0c548db7c5477b451ddec1eb083c06
• Pokemon Blaue Edition (G) [S][!].gb sha1: 20e72dc6f41493eee1fdd0cef54214e6c3389688

Then verify with make compare that it's building correctly.

[Dermahn]

@Rangi42 that is a much better system but it seems to require some heavy restructuring. Is there any work being done on this already? For now, I guess I can keep it as it is but organize the language specific files into a similar folder structure.

[Rangi42]

@mid-kid started those i18n disassemblies; you may want to collaborate on a good structure for both pokered and pokecrystal.

[mid-kid]

The structural differences in the i18n branch are "big" (see pret/pokecrystal#631) but they can be summed up by the following points:

• Splitting all of the code into sections that can be freely moved around the ROM without breaking
• Distinguishing .asm from .inc to automatically discover object files to build and improving incremental builds
• Rewriting the Makefile to abuse VPATH and rgbasm's -i option to effectively create seamless "overlay" directories

You could port the last point to pokered without much of a struggle, you would just have to manually specify the .o files to build like is being done in the current makefile.

However, this change is exactly the reason it hasn't been merged yet. There's multiple problems I haven't yet completely figured out how to solve:

• The setup causes the entire repo to be rebuilt for each version of the game, even if only two files change (like with crystal-au). That takes a ton of time in make compare, which is ran often enough by contributors to this repo. This can be partially remedied by having a way to only build the assets once, but that'd require a way to get the makefile to distinguish localized assets from the "default" assets without relying on VPATH, maybe by abusing the vpath directive and an external tool? It's even harder to tell which .o files have to be rebuilt for a localization without specifying them manually, though that'd be less of a problem here since I don't think a "splitting" is going to happen anytime soon
• .d dependency files aren't rebuilt when any of the included files is updated. This can be fixed by having scan_includes distinguish between INCLUDE and INCBIN in the output, and generating a rule that causes the .d to depend on every INCLUDEd file, I just haven't done this yet.

So yeah, the system is far from perfect and I'm not really comfortable telling people to use it in its current state, but I'm not sure if it can ever "properly" be fixed, but if anything, a version/ directory alongside the occasional if DEF is the best of both worlds for both maintainers and users, I feel, so if we can figure anything out, that'd be amazing.

If you have any suggestions or ideas or just need help implementing this or understanding what I did, feel free to put a message up on the Discord. It'd be great to figure out a method.

[Rangi42]

Also,https://github.com/einstein95/pokered-de/ exists, for whatever strings or text graphics are still left. (See #271)

[Rangi42]

Even without splitting everything into freely movable sections, I think the version/ directory would work for alternative files.

So instead of:

• text/text_en/*.asm and text/text_de/* → text/* and version/german/text/*
• gfx/tilesets/overworld.png and gfx/tilesets/overworld_de.png → gfx/tilesets/overworld.png and version/german/gfx/tilesets/overworld.png
• etc

[Dermahn]

I ended up going with the system that @Rangi42 suggested.
All conflicting files are now stored in "version/pokerot/". I wasn't sure where to put the graphic files. I kept them in the main folder since that's where all the green version graphics are stored but I can move them if that's preferable.

[dannye]

I don't think this comment is accurate. The ED tile is only corrupt on bad emulators that do not correctly mimic MBC behavior. AFAIK, it's never corrupt on real hardware. I am curious why they chose to rewrite this bit though.

[Dermahn]

I couldn't test it on real hardware but I did test it on BGB. The US ROM displays the ED tile just fine but the german ROM has a garbled mess in place of the ED tile. Rewriting the function fixes this.

[Rangi42]

@Dermahn You could put the gfx in the same version/pokerot/ folder as everything else, keeping the same structure as top-level English pokered. So gfx/title/rote_edition.png would become version/pokerot/red_version.png, gfx/tilesets/overworld_de.png would become version/pokerot/gfx/tilesets/overworld.png, etc. (Also, from those version strings it's "rote" and "blaue", so please make that consistent in all such names, e.g. version/pokerote/.)

[Dermahn]

@Rangi42 I'll move the graphics.
As for the name, as a native speaker I can assure you that "pokerot" is correct. The colours themselves are "rot" and "blau". In the context of "Red Version" you are right, it should be "rote Edition" but in the context of "Pokemon Red", "Pokemon Rot" is correct.

[Rangi42]

Interesting, thanks! So Rot and Blau are the plain nouns Red and Blue, but can get declined as Rote or Blaue (or apparently Roten and Blauen sometimes too, from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Rote_und_Blaue_Edition). I still can't tell what gender "Edition" is supposed to be. :P

[jendrikw]

For reference, the word "Edition" is feminine. That means that, depending on how it's used in a sentence, the word "rot" can have the forms "rot", "rote", "roter", or "roten". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rot#Declension

[Rangi42]

This is now superseded by the more up-to-date https://github.com/einstein95/pokered-de. We may end up having an i18n branch with all translations (as a possible first step before making that be the master branch).