Metal Gear Remix v1.995

Just tried it out and, for those wondering, it works perfectly with the loader by max_iwamoto ( https://www.msx.org/comment/reply/9821/37083 ) which is the only way I got Metal Gear to work properly by loading it from disk with 128Kb of RAM.

Chow time! :D

In terms of display space, yes. The area where that information is stored in memory is very small, however. That area in the current version has a total of 3 bytes of spare space left to it for all the equipment. We can lengthen one name by 3 bytes, but still doesn't result in "Binoculars," in which case we still have to abbreviate. We're left back with the same choices. Haha this is why this is so hard sometimes. I feel for Jeremy Blaustein. His problems were far greater than these in terms of scale, but he faced the same dilemmas.

This is a good point, that could be used. The display space is now the limiting factor. If it were possible to have the items skip a row in the column after the "Binoculars" we could display it as such. The code would have to be specific to that item, since the game lists the items as the player gets them.

Thanks for sharing the disassembly! It's much better organized than anything I'd looked at working with in the past. I think I had used a disassembler at one point. In the beginning phases of the project I originally wanted to add a bank (or set of banks) and use that for all the script information, giving us as much space as we'd like.

Your disassembly has me more interested in re-enabling the four disabled messages in the game. Any message put in there would be entirely creative, unless someone from the game development has ever put out information about the cancelled messages. Knowing which rooms the messages were in would give us some information as to what the NPCs might be commenting on. That is definitely something I've wanted to do over the years, but I never got serious about looking into it.

That is an interesting thought. The messages are placed in the script just before or around when he is moved, so it is definitely possible.

It's even more interesting that the id was used for the last message. What if the cancellation of these messages is the result of a story change during or just after development? What if Pettrovich was intended to be a secret villain originally, and would have given the epilogue message? He's just avoiding Snake for the first half of the game. He doesn't expect Snake to actually get to Grey Fox, then he thinks the decoy will kill him. Pettrovich keeps trying to throw Snake off until he can't avoid Snake anymore, pretends to be rescued and then purposely omits the last part of Metal Gear's bomb sequence. Haha it's definitely convoluted enough to be a Metal Gear plot.

I could suggest 2 possibilities to fit Binoculars into available space:

1) If you use variable width font, you can easily fit whole word into space that already available. In latest version I believe similar font is used, but there is still extra spaces between characters like "i" and "l". If you can assign different width for every character, "Binoculars" will fit nicely. And some other names can be translated better as well.

2) Move items X/Y coordinates and their names around the item screen, I believe this will create extra space and may allow to fit it without use of variable with font (even I would prefer variable width font to make it look nicer).

3) Possibly solution (1) + (2) required to achieve desired result.