[quote:4b590a72bb="evilhamwizard"]Cool, I knew your name was familiar. Pokemon Brown is one of my favorite Pokemon Red/Blue hacks, just because of how immense and how much new content there was. It's the only hack of a Pokemon game where I actually attempted to play from start to finish. I heard you were disassembling Pokemon Gold to make a pretty advanced hack (sort of like the many Sonic hacks there are now) and played a short demo, and loved it. Nice to finally get to meet you. :)

The reason why I like Junichi's story so much, as it actually gives a possibile explanation to the following passage (with book source so it counts) from Wikipedia:

[quote:4b590a72bb]During the North American localization of Pokémon, it became apparent that simply altering the games' text from Japanese to English was impossible; the games had to be entirely reprogrammed from scratch due to the fragile state of the games' source code, a side effect of the unusually lengthy development.[30] Furthermore, as the games were being prepared for release, Western localizers warned that the "cute monsters" may not be accepted by American audiences, and instead recommended they be redesigned and "beefed-up". Then-president of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi refused and instead viewed the games' possible reception in America as a challenge to face.[33] Despite these setbacks, the reprogrammed Red and Blue versions with their original creature designs were eventually released in North America over two and a half years after Red and Green debuted in Japan.[34] [/quote:4b590a72bb]

(note: in this case, reprogrammed possibly means disassembled - I don't think they had to go that far)

The sentence that mentioned the fragile state of the code, which I kinda have an idea what it means (I think it means that it was very prone to being broken if a small change was made). But I always thought that what they meant was that the game's code wasn't backed up properly, and Junichi's blog post explains exactly why. The game's code was backed up monthly due to the fact that it took forever to back it up on tape. So they only did monthly backups of possibly small amounts of code. When NoA wanted the game to be localized, the people doing the localization probably got the end of stick and was left with only half of what they needed to translate the game.

Keep in mind, that this stuff happens all the time. In fact, when Edios was porting FF7 to the PC, Square sent them an old copy of the source code - and they had to wait months before they got the up to date code. On top of all that, most of the files for that port were not re-prerendered, and were copied from the PSX version because it would take even longer than it did to re-master everything all over again. Of course, there are other things that probably messed with the schedule (anime, etc) - so the translation of the game probably wasn't the only factor. I'm sure drx has more source code/game port w/ original source code horror stories (if he'd only find the time to post them :P).

Another thing about Red/Blue was the amount of actual prototype content of the original Japanese game. Besides hack findings and concept art, there really isn't much that we know before the game was released in Japan. The closest that we'd ever be able to get to understanding of what some prototypes might have been like (but since the localized game was considered 'reprogrammed' - the localization team might have added new things in the code to benefit themselves) is to contact the people who did the guide book. I heard they were given limited permission to work with a debug version of the game. By limited permission, I mean, the build of the game was probably limited to only people who worked within the publisher's building - they were probably never allowed to take it home. Same goes for the original localization team. I think drx has more information about that - since he's kinda into the Pokemon stuff as I am.

edit: also just wondering, have you checked out every version of every Pokemon game from the first generation yet? I just thought about the possibilities they had when they came back to develop Pokemon Yellow - you know, if they changed how something was done that can't be seen in game but only in code. Was also wondering if the least complicated thing about R/B/G/Y was the sound engine, since I heard rumors of them going back and re-doing the sound engine for later releases. Don't know how true that is in what capacity, but I thought maybe you'd know.[/quote:4b590a72bb]

Haha, glad you like Brown.  The final version was released a few days ago so give that a try if you want. What I'm trying to do with the gold hack (Prism) is steer it as far away from traditional Pokemon RPG's, with it still being a Pokemon RPG, and introduce several new elements and features into the Pokemon universe.  Anyway, back on topic...

"Fragile State" is EXACTLY what you guessed.  A few wrong bytes and all the gameplay is ruined.  Coincidental, I cited Red's coding as "very fragile" before I even read that.   I also had no idea backing up the code was that complicated back then.

Regarding the "Westerners won't accept cute monsters" argument, the games would have failed if they didn't have those tough looking Pokemon such as Nidoking, Rhydon Mewtwo, and Charizard.  For almost every "cute" Pokemon, has a tough and strong counterpart, thus appealing to two demographics.  In my opinion, that's what got 5 year olds and 14 year olds to like the same game.

As for coding, there were japanese-exclusive glitches, so a revision was necessary.  However, the biggest problem was the text.  Japan has a larger alphabet, meaning their words and sentences will be shorter than ours, and each letter takes up one byte of memory.  The problem was, the ROM size was 512kb, and the text resided in the same ROM banks as the map's header.  Keeping the English text in the ROM bank would simply be impossible, due to the lack of free memory.  So what they did was increased the size to 1024kb, moved all the text to the end of the ROM, which explains why the Banks that have map headers have so much free space.  This may seem easy, but what I understand, they had to rewrite the "read text string" code to read from other banks.  If they change that code, another piece of code is glitched.  They fix that, another one gets glitch, and it goes on and on and on and on.

I've heard a rumor from a Japanese friend that some guy who has a prototype or debug version uploaded a prototype video onto nicovideo.jp.  But since I've been told that that site is much stricter than Youtube, the video was removed. If I got my hands on that, I would once again, tear the game apart and try to find every last trace of anything beta that I could.  It's on my most wanted for prototypes/betas after Conker's Twelve Tales

I checked out Blue, it's basically the same thing except a few things moved around.  The sound engine is very easy to use, I even put new music into Brown's latest release.  I haven't looked at Yellow's coding much, but from what I've seen, it's basically the same.  I tried looking for "different" things, but nothing was found.  Although I'm sure it's sound engine was altered somehow to fit Pikachu's cry. However, Pokemon Gold has tons of beta maps, prototypes of Johto cities, so if you haven't checked that out yet, look at this: 
http://pkmn.net/?action=gallery&amp;page=viewgall&amp;id=19

And yes, I used some of these maps in Brown, I felt some of them were so good that they shouldn't go to waste.