I've been able to continue work on PG the past few months, by making a teeny concession: I'm using the lousy DBCS roman font. Where everywhere else in the game you see my replacement font, in places where those stupid "fake TIMs" exist, you get the ugly font. It's not a show-stopper, but I'm kind of embarassed that I haven't been able to figure the format out so far. If you're familiar with PSX graphics, please give me a hand.
And to make a liar out of myself, I'm backing off the mixed-case font for now. I've got bigger fish to fry. :-) Anyway, I devised a much better way to create the font through macro code rather than doing manual bitmap editing. If I put the mixed-case back, it should be pretty simple.
Not alot of text replacement done on this one, as I've hit an ugly font issue. More on that in a minute, but here are a few sample screens.
Something I hadn't seen in ePSXe until this game, the title screen resizes the display window. That's why it looks so stretched vertically.
From the start, I decided to make this a mixed case font. At some point, I'll probably retrofit Bloody Bride with one, but call that a "lesson learned". I'm not thrilled with the spacing on the letters, but I'll clean that up along the way.
The font is what's causing me to take a break on this one. I've been on it for about 3 weeks, but once I identified the font in a TIM with 4 CLUTs (palettes), I thought the ugly part was over. The thing is stored in 9 places across the CD in resource files. What's killing me is that I can verify that it's replaced in every one of those 9 places with a search macro I wrote, but the Mission screen (the main part of the game) still displays the old font.
I spent days trying to find it, so I'm hoping that stepping away for a little while will spark something to help me find it. Current theories have it as either a compressed or RAW format or that somehow there is a 10th version that's just different enough that I can't search for it using part of the old file and isn't showing up with TIMRip or PSMPlay. Neither seems very likely, but then again, that's why I was working on Tobal 2 while having this one active as well. Tobal is pretty much in the bag, so I'm ready to get back into Pixy Garden.