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The GameCube side of the program now can convert from the propietary
character set to UTF-8. This is useful for representing names of Pokémon
and players in a neutral way. The propietary character set is mostly
compatible between the six languages supported by the games (as in, the
hiragana and katakana characters unique to Japanese occupy spaces not
used by the other languages for names, as do the letters with umlauts
unique to German). However, six codepoints differ between the Japanese
and non-Japanese character sets, and an additional two differ even
amongst the non-Japanese sets. Because of this, the function that
converts to UTF-8 takes a language as a parameter, and uses the correct
characters for that language.
From there, the behavior of this function differs slightly to that of
the games. In the non-Japanese games, the Japanese encoding is used if
the Pokémon in question originated in a Japanese game, and the
non-Japanese encoding (disregarding the regional differences in the two
codepoints mentioned earlier) otherwise. In the Japanese games, the
Japanese encoding is used regardless of the Pokémon's origin. The
decoding function I wrote always uses the character set corresponding to
the language of the Pokémon's origin, because that most accurately
represents the name given to it, and will not change just because the
Pokémon was traded to a different game. The character set used for the
name of the player is the one corresponding to the language of the
cartridge.
Additionally, a number of changes were made to the communication
protocol between the GameCube and the GBA that appear to have
dramatically increased stability. The most significant of these is
likely that the transfer delay was increased tenfold. This causes the
multiboot image to take slightly longer to download to the GBA, but the
difference is not large enough to outweigh the benefits of the increased
stability.
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A good portion of the time, the Wii will display:
Pokemon LeafGreen
Trainer: Starla (34182)
which is the correct data on the cartridge I am testing with.
Most of the GBA changes are within comments and are unimportant. I did
uncomment the portion where it sends over the trainer's name, and I
fixed how it reads the trainer ID from memory.
The Wii changes involve properly cooperating in the message sending
protocol I'm having the GBA and Wii use.
More description regarding protocol: I'm not super familiar with the
JOY BUS protocol because it's undocumented, but there seems to be this
issue where the Wii reads the same value multiple times from the cable,
and since the cable is used to negotiate the multiboot image, I need to
make sure that the Wii and GBA are on the same page. Since the last
message that the GBA sends is nonzero, I have the GBA image start by
sending a zero and waiting for a response, and I have the Wii wait for a
zero. The Wii then sends a zero in response to the GBA. From then on,
the message sending protocol works like so:
Wii: waits for non-zero value
GBA: sends non-zero value, waits for any response
Wii: reads message, sends 0 response, waits for 0 response
GBA: receives response, sends 0 response, waits for any response
Wii: reads 0, continues on with program
The reason for this is to prevent incorrect communication caused by the
Wii reading the same value from the GBA multiple times by essentially
delimiting the message. This is currently pretty slow because I have
debugging messages and sleeps everywhere. I will clean this code up, but
this project is slightly dark magic right now and I wanted to commit
something that worked in the slightest.
Also added a debug function that transcodes from the proprietary gen 3
encoding to ASCII in the domain of characters that can actually be used
in names (except for the 6 special German ones). Thanks to Bulbapedia
(https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Character_encoding_in_Generation_III)
for this. It's used for now to display the Trainer name on the console.
It assumes that the cartridge is non-Japanese; this will be addressed.
I'm not currently planning on transcoding names before transmitting them,
because of the fact that there are characters in the character set that
are not present in any other character set, and thus transcoding them
spuriously (like PK -> P,K) is a loss of data. However, it is true that
no such characters exist in the set of characters that can be used for
names (in either the Japanese or non-Japanese encoding), so I may later
decide to transcode to Unicode on the Wii before transmitting.
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