![]() ![]() Their contributions to the community completely changed how we approach these hacks and translations, making the impossible now possible. Not just from their own emulators, tools and projects, but even in countless fan projects and hacks. Movie Extended Cut also reflected on Near’s achievements, saying “I spoke to Near about emulation at one point, and had nothing but respect for the outside-the-box genius they brought to everything they did.”Īlthough Near may no longer be with us, their achievements and legacy lives through everything they’ve left behind. Besides, you’ll need someone like that to even handle, against all odds, one of the first public emulators with a goal of accuracy.”įilmmaker and editor Garrett Gilchrist, fellow retro game enthusiast who worked on the Super Mario Bros. “(Near was) a pretty stubborn person about emulation and ROM hacking to say the least,” LuigiBlood said, “but nearly everything they worked on paid off. It’s through these patchers we are allowed to experience our favourite games in new ways, including playing games like MOTHER 3 or Bahamut Lagoon (which Near headed the translation for) in English. Later down the road, Near would also create the BPS file format as well, which is used today to resolve a lot of the issues and limitations of both IPS and UPS before it. Thus, Near created the UPS file format in order to make the English patch even possible. Since MOTHER 3 is double the size at 32MB, it wouldn’t have been possible to use IPS. Previously, most games used IPS, which has a 16MB limitation. All of the experimental and intuitive ideas presented by Near pushed beyond the limits of what we thought was previously possible.They were always one to try new things, like using the UPS format for MOTHER 3’s English patch! ![]() Many who worked with Near were always so impressed with how they’d think outside the box in situations like these. The original MOTHER 3 Fan Translation Patcher, which launched the UPS format created by Near. This once again saved the team tons of work, preventing them from having to make compromises to the original script! Thus, Near came up with a novel technique for encoding the dialogue boxes so that the script could actually fit. Not only did they have to create several variable-width fonts for the different menus in the game, but they faced challenges fitting the script in the game! As MOTHER 3 is originally encoded, there was no way the team could fit the English script in without further modification. Near’s contributions wouldn’t end here.Īs Jeffman informed us in our previous interview with him, the toughest challenge in developing the fan translation was the game’s text. This saved the translation team months of work. While progress was stagnant on this and they needed alternatives, Near came into the picture and added GBA support to xkas, a very fast and reliable cross-assembler they developed originally for the SNES. “It was extremely cumbersome to us and we could not possibly have been productive with it”, Jeffman reflects in retrospect. Without their help, the wait for MOTHER 3 in English might’ve been much longer.īefore Near became involved in the Fan Translation, Jeffman and his team spent much time fiddling around with Goldroad in order to assemble the MOTHER 3 ROM. Near left behind a legacy very few others have achieved to the same degree in this community, but what’s most overlooked is their contribution to the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation. Near identified their online presence with the “Death Note” character of the same name.
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