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*          Chou Soujuu Mecha MG - English "Essentials" Translation            *
*                                    v0.1                                     *
*                     by Supper (suppertails66@gmail.com)                     *
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This is a partial translation patch for Chou Soujuu Mecha MG that I've been 
working on for a while now. It translates all of the "essential" gameplay text, 
like menus, mission objectives, and mecha instructions, with the goal of 
allowing you to play through to the ending without knowing any Japanese. I'm 
very interested in making a full translation patch, and I've done all the 
necessary hacking work for it, but I don't have the skill to do the translation 
myself. If anyone knows Japanese and is interested in lending a hand, please get 
in touch!

In any case, this needs more testing, so if you try it, let me know if you run 
into issues or have other feedback (complaints about fonts, my crappy redraws, 
etc.).

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*                                  Overview                                   *
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If you haven't heard of it, Chou Soujuu Mecha MG (Super Control Mecha MG) is a 
2006 DS game developed by Sandlot, who are best known for their Earth Defense 
Force series, and published by Nintendo. It's a mecha action game with what I 
consider some of the most effective touch-screen controls on the system. Aside 
from standard D-Pad movement, each of the 100+ mecha you can obtain has its own 
lower-screen "cockpit" with a unique set of controls: some mechs have a lever to 
swing their sword, others have buttons to fire missiles, many have switches to 
transform into a vehicle, and so on. It's gimmicky, it's unique, and it's more 
than fun enough to be worth a playthrough, whether you're a mecha fan or not.

I'm kind of surprised the game never made it to the west, since it's quite solid 
and shows off the touch screen really well (well enough for Nintendo itself to 
publish it in Japan), but the most we ever got of it were a few cameos in Smash 
Bros. Brawl. Though the game is decently playable without knowing Japanese, it 
takes a lot of messing around and consulting FAQs, so I made this patch to try 
to eliminate the hassle.

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*                                  Features                                   *
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This patch translates:
* All menus
* Mecha names and usage instructions
* Item names and effect descriptions
* Mission names
* Mission objectives (pause during a mission)
* Character names in the Character Album
* Dialogue branches (all five of them)
* A few scraps of helpful tutorial text in Missions 0 and 2
* Text for Mission 49, which explains how to complete Mission 50
* The title screen
* The stylized kanji insignias for each Workshop, which are replaced with more 
recognizable icons. (I won't try to sell you on my artistic skills, but I think 
these will suffice -- if anyone out there is willing to draw something better, 
I'd welcome the help!)

It does _not_ translate:
* Scenario text other than the above mentioned
* Mecha descriptions
* Item flavor text
* Character profiles
* The credits (though I did shove my name in at the end)

Basically, you miss out on the plot, which is nothing revolutionary but nicely 
and surprisingly detailed.

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*                           Patching Instructions                             *
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This is an xdelta3 patch. Use an xdelta3 patcher, such as Delta Patcher 
(https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/704/), to apply the .xdelta3 file to a 
clean, untrimmed Chou Soujuu Mecha MG ROM (which, before patching, should be 64 
megabytes in size and have an MD5 sum of ccd7052931e3ae09cb4505d19d16c738).

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*                                Known Issues                                 *
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I've completed the game with this patch, both in an emulator and on real 
hardware (with my increasingly ancient but still functional R4), so you 
shouldn't run into any major problems. Here are the issues I know about:

* In dynamically-sized text boxes, there's an issue with how the characters are 
drawn that causes the rightmost column of each character's outline to get 
overwritten by the next character's leftmost column. This is because the new 
English font uses tighter spacing than the original. Due to the shapes and 
colors involved, this is very difficult to notice (it took me several weeks to 
spot it), so it shouldn't trouble you too much.
* In instances where dynamically-generated numbers are inserted into dialogue, 
like the cost shown when building a mech from blueprints, the digits are one 
pixel too far to the left compared to the letters. This was a quick fix for a 
last-minute issue; if I'm feeling more ambitious, I'll solve the root problem.
* Due to changing from a hardcoded monospace font to VWF, as well as other 
tweaks, some of the untranslated Japanese text doesn't display quite as intended 
-- characters may be too tightly spaced, or incorrectly centered.
* On the character naming screen, the English letters are not quite centered 
under the selection cursor due to the font's bearing being adjusted to squeeze 
out a few extra pixels of space.
* If you run the game in DeSmuME from the console, you'll notice occasional 
"Reading beyond end of cart!" warnings. These are harmless, and occur because I 
repacked the game using an ancient Windows binary of ndstool due to an issue I 
encountered with the newer/*nix versions producing ROMs that didn't boot on real 
hardware. My guess is it's something to do with *nix-style alphabetization of 
the file name table combined with inaccuracies in DeSmuME's BIOS 
reimplementation, but I haven't really checked; maybe someone else has run into 
this issue and knows what's up?
* Not a "real" issue: On DeSmuME only, the text on the loading screen and 
Character Album has a single duplicate pixel column. This also happens with the 
original game, and doesn't happen on real hardware.
* Also not a "real" issue, but the English text has been auto-word-wrapped 
without hyphen-breaking across lines, which sometimes looks a bit awkward or 
results in inefficient space usage. Improving this will take manual tinkering 
and/or hooking up my utilities to a dictionary, and I haven't bothered yet.
* Item trading via wireless may or may not actually work. Wireless connectivity 
isn't emulated, and I have only one DS and one flash card, so I can't test it. I 
translated all the relevant resources, so if you try it, please tell me if it 
works or not.

Let me know if you run into any problems not on this list.
