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Editing in Retrolarium

Solomon's Key is edited in Retrolarium Studio, not by tools in this repository. Open solomons_key.rlj at the repository root in the studio. It asks which revision to edit, takes that revision's ROM (copied next to solomons_key.rlj and never committed) and keeps the edits in hack/<revision>/. Builds go to .retrolarium/. Neither folder is tracked; delete hack/<revision>/ to start over from the original.

Revisions

Revision ROM Timing
usa Solomon's Key (U) [!].nes NTSC
europe Solomon's Key (E) [!].nes PAL
japan Solomon no Kagi (J).nes NTSC

The USA and European revisions are the ones this repository rebuilds from source; the Japanese revision is edited from its ROM.

What is edited

The kit's Solomon's Key profile defines every view; this repository only names the revisions and the asset split. The studio offers:

  • rooms and their objects, the Demon Mirrors and the special rooms (Solomon's Seals, the princess room's prizes, the random bonus room);
  • room art, animations and sprite mappings, graphics and palettes;
  • music and sound effects, with a piano roll and preview;
  • the screens, the title and attract presentation, and the game text.

Capacities stay those of the original layout: each table keeps its place and size, and the studio refuses an edit that would not fit.

The game's names and tables

Retrolarium keeps nothing taken from the game; this repository gives it what it needs. config/names.json holds the game's own names (the player, items, constellations, enemy families and special rooms) in English. The studio and the kit read it when a project opens and show the names as they are, untranslated; without it they show numbers instead. Its guard list names what Retrolarium's own repositories must never contain.

config/game_profile.json is the game's Retrolarium profile: its revisions with their hashes and, for each resource, where it lies in each revision's image and which codec reads it. The kit reads it when it opens solomons_key.rlj or a project made from it; Retrolarium keeps no copy.

config/profile_tables.json names, by label, the tables the kit reads from the image built from this source; tools/profile_tables.py in Retrolarium Kit turns it into the offsets of config/game_profile.json for every revision.

Checking the repository

make studio-check runs rltool studio check solomons_key.rlj. In a throwaway copy of the repository it prepares every revision, decodes and validates each document and rebuilds each revision with no edits, requiring the original ROM byte for byte. It needs the revisions' ROMs and the Retrolarium kit (rltool on PATH, or RLTOOL=...), and never reads or writes hack/ or .retrolarium/.