Time
The Boktai games have many game mechanics that depend on the current date and time. The cartridges contain an RTC chip and a battery, which will keep track of the time even when the system is powered off. The games use the following values:
- Date
- Time
- Sunrise/Sunset times in the player's selected region
- Moon phase (based on current knowledge, only full moons are used currently. But the games track every moon phase, not just full moons)
- Seasons
Region selection
When creating a save file (Boktai 1), or when starting the game with an uninitialized RTC (Boktai 2/3), the game will ask the player for their current location. This will affect the sunrise/sunset time calculation.
The list of regions is stored as a string in the game's script directory. Even though this is stored in the string list, the region list is stored as bytecode.
Example:
; Boktai 2 (U). String ID = 0x1b43
; Dumping from 0xce3dfb
i32 0x0 ; page number
i32 0x1 ; number of regions in this page
; region id
i32 0x0
; time zone offset (signed): 0x40 = +1 hour
; When copying Japanese regions to an USA ROM, set this to -0x40 (c0 ff in hex editor)
i32 0x0
; longitude:
; in the eastern hemisphere: longitude_degrees * 2^16
; in the western hemisphere: (360 - longitude_degrees) * 2^16
i32 0x0
; latitude: latitude_degrees * 2^16
i32 0x0
i32 0x1
i32 0x1
i32 0x1 ; St. John's
i16 -0x320
i32 0x13391ec
i32 0x2f570a
i32 0x2
i32 0x2
i32 0x2 ; Labrador City
i16 -0x340
i32 0x1257333
i32 0x3491ec
i32 0x3 ; Halifax
i16 -0x340
i32 0x128a666 ; ≈ (360 - 63.59...) * 2^16
i32 0x2c6148 ; ≈ 44.64... * 2^16
; etc...
i32 -0x1 ; done
i32 0x0
i32 0x0
i32 0x0
i32 0x0
i32 0x0
end
Japanese releases omit the time zone offset field (Japan only has a single time zone, JST). The region list is stored at these locations:
Boktai 2 (U) | Boktai 2 (J) | Boktai 3 | |
---|---|---|---|
String ID | 0x1b43 | 0x19bd | 0x247c |
Address | 0x08ce3dfb | 0x08d10af2 | 0x08dd3aa9 |
A map of all regions of Boktai 2 is available here: https://geojson.io/#id=gist:raphaelr/3b6f066014f8a5f6f84e9b50118c2c2c