Flammie

Flammie A Pirinen on github pages

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Finnish translation of Super Mario Brothers 1 (NES)

Yes, this is undoubtedly my first console translation, dating back to around 2000 or so. As most of you are aware, this game contains very little text to translate, so it might be good place to start. However small amount of text does always pose the problem, that the text in the game is constant sized, so if message says “GAME OVER”, you must translate it using 9 characters and not more. And of course Finnish language does not bend to such trickery. The solution I used back then was quite an idea, the translation is not in written Finnish, rather, it’s written in spoken Finnish, and that turned out to be quite humorous.

But enough with the ranting, the actual translation process was very straight forward. The text data was encoded with following table (which is very common in Nintendo’s own products):

24=
28=-
2B=!
00=0
01=1
02=2
...
10=G
11=H
12=I
13=J
...
23=Z

Using that key with any hex editor you can quickly find the two text areas in the game rom at 0x755h and 0xD57h. (If you wonder about the last message, it actually shows up when you have truly finished the game, that is, played it through half a dozen successive times in row, can’t remember the exact value, but it’s somewhere around there.)

Then you could hack the graphics as well, those are stored near the end of the rom. The only hack I did was changing character W to Ä.

Anyways, the result is here: Super Mario Bros. 1 in Finnish (not archived). It’s copyrighted to Nintendo, so you know your rights anyways, no? I do know mine, but if someone has a problem with this catastrophic unauthorized distribution of free translation, then, by all means, do contact me via email.

Some screenshots (also not archived):