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- Aug 17, 2013
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Hi, someone reached out to me if I could help them with the technical side of translating Diabolical Box JP (as the JP version has a special "Holiday" mode missing from the international version).
Though only having experience with CV I did set out to help, 'cause rom hacking is fun, and is something I want to encourage.
However I can't really seem to solve the core problem: English text is not rendered.
So what did I try:
1.
Simply modifying the .txt files in the rom to contain English/Dutch text.
This does not crash the game. however this results in empty text boxes.
2.
Using Shift_JIS encoding for "Full Width" or JASCII letters.
This sorta works, problem is it's "Full width" which makes it highly impractical, and it looks pretty terrible.
3.
Attempting to replace Japanse characters that do render with latin letters in the font used (font.NFTR), then using shift_jis encoding for those Japanse characters.
This provides more or less the same result, unless I can find symbols that internally already have the same parameters set for width, distance between chars etc. (Which yes I did update in the font.NFTR file, but from what I can tell either Tinke does not update the file correctly (unlikely as the changes persist within Tinke upon full reload, or more likely the game simply disregards this part of the font data for whatever reason...)
Main difference between this and the Full Width version that can be done without font modification is that the letters are smaller here, but as Japanese characters tend to be rather wide comparatively they end up taking up (about?) the same amount of space.
I was able to find this old thread https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=30895.0 which might be wholy unrelated, however it too seemed to be a case of regular ASCII (just like first attempt mentioned in this post) not working. However I have not been able to find much on what "2 byte" encoding would be, other than that it might be referring to Full width, in which case due to seeming lack of effective font editing would really not be a great solution...
If any additional info is needed in order to help, let me know!
Though only having experience with CV I did set out to help, 'cause rom hacking is fun, and is something I want to encourage.
However I can't really seem to solve the core problem: English text is not rendered.
So what did I try:
1.
Simply modifying the .txt files in the rom to contain English/Dutch text.
This does not crash the game. however this results in empty text boxes.
2.
Using Shift_JIS encoding for "Full Width" or JASCII letters.
This sorta works, problem is it's "Full width" which makes it highly impractical, and it looks pretty terrible.
3.
Attempting to replace Japanse characters that do render with latin letters in the font used (font.NFTR), then using shift_jis encoding for those Japanse characters.
This provides more or less the same result, unless I can find symbols that internally already have the same parameters set for width, distance between chars etc. (Which yes I did update in the font.NFTR file, but from what I can tell either Tinke does not update the file correctly (unlikely as the changes persist within Tinke upon full reload, or more likely the game simply disregards this part of the font data for whatever reason...)
Main difference between this and the Full Width version that can be done without font modification is that the letters are smaller here, but as Japanese characters tend to be rather wide comparatively they end up taking up (about?) the same amount of space.
I was able to find this old thread https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=30895.0 which might be wholy unrelated, however it too seemed to be a case of regular ASCII (just like first attempt mentioned in this post) not working. However I have not been able to find much on what "2 byte" encoding would be, other than that it might be referring to Full width, in which case due to seeming lack of effective font editing would really not be a great solution...
If any additional info is needed in order to help, let me know!