May 2019 Patch Update

Hey everyone! I've got some slightly bad news for this months patch. I've hit the size limit for files that are stored in the GameCube's secondary RAM area. I'm going to talk a bit about it in depth below. For those of you who just want to know when this month's patch will release, I'll get to the point. I'm not sure. I had quite a bit more free time this month to work on the patch, so I was able to translate another 2,000 dialogs or so. We've passed the 75% completion margin. This also caused the size of the message file to increase by a decent bit. I'm doing my best to try and figure out a solution on how to mitigate the size limitation. Please look in the #translation-discussion channel in the Discord server for updates!

Now, for the technical info. The GameCube has two portions of RAM. Main RAM which is 24 Megabytes, and Auxiliary RAM (also called Audio RAM sometimes) which is 8 Megabytes. Since the message data files are loaded into the Auxiliary RAM (we're going to call it ARAM from now on), we've got 8 Megabytes of space to work with. The message data file is currently around 3.9 Megabytes in size. That leaves us with 4.1 Megabytes of "unaccounted" ARAM. The audio buffer takes another 1 Megabyte, and other files loaded into ARAM take about the remaining 3 Megabytes. With this current patch, the NES ROM images fail to load into ARAM due to lack of space. The error is during the "famicom_archive_mount" subroutine. Due to how the game is programmed, it doesn't account for ARAM running out of space, and just straight up crashes due to stack corruption. It's quite the task to fix the problem. This is an in-game screenshot of the crash debugger:

Knowing what the problem is, I have two solutions:

1) Figure out a way to free up space in ARAM.

2) Completely reprogram how the message files are retrieved.

I'd like to go with solution #1 because it's a lot less work (although still a massive undertaking), but we'll see what I can do.

I apologize for this unforeseen problem, but as I said I'm working as fast as I can to fix the problem. I can't give a good ETA on when the patch will be released, but I'll be posting updates on the Discord server! Thank you all for your support, and please feel free to ask any questions you may have!