ROM Hack I'm struggling quite a bit with NDS ROM text editing, and I'd really appreciate some help.

[RedHeadedDuckling]

I'm pretty new to hacking NDS games, and I'm currently trying to edit the text/dialogue of a ROM of Professor Layton and the Last Specter. However, I can't exactly figure out how to do that. I've tried CrystalTile2, but I couldn't understand anything and almost all the text on the side of the hex numbers just showed up as a garbled mess of various letters and symbols. I tried looking at a couple of tutorials for the application, but the ones I found were just talking about games that have Japanese text and involved altering the system's language to read it (my ROM is in English). So I figured I was either doing something wrong, or the ROM isn't exactly compatable with the application due to the language. Then I tried extracting all the files from the ROM with NDSHeader, but I just ended up with a ton of files with extensions that I don't know how to open or work with (ones like .SAD and .fa). Honestly, I'm pretty lost at this point.

I apologize if the answer/process if very obvious or if I'm wrong about something I previously mentioned, but like I said, I'm new to this. If anyone could provide some helpful tutorials or other tools, that would be great. Thank you.

 

[FAST6191]

.SAD tends to be audio so there is at least that.

The techniques that work for Japanese also tend to work for English (or anything else). English tends to have a few more perks like relative search ( http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/513/ ) working better and if you are doing English-English alterations then maybe not needing font hacks (or the game coming with nicely handled text).


Text on the side of hex editors. All that the text usually on the right hand side of hex editors represents is the hex corresponding to a known encoding* (usually ASCII or maybe some subset of unicode but there are others, especially for Japanese, and the ROM hacking concept of a table is actually a list of things to apply in such a scenario).
Most things in things that are not console games use a known standard. Things that are console games... the DS was better than much of what came before but custom was still very very very common. If it is not the encoding the game uses, or the game is compressed (or encrypted but I don't think I have seen or heard of that on the DS, PC on the other hand...), or possibly is misaligned (unlikely for English language games, more a thing for 16 bit encodings like those Japanese tends to use) then it will appear as utter gibberish in said section of the hex editor window.

*as a kid you probably did A=1 B=2 C=3... computers do the same thing, except not necessarily starting at 0 and might be a somewhat random ordering.

So yeah same as anything else.

Find the encoding, or possibly find the text and determine the encoding. Order there is a bit variable, and might even happen at once (relative search maybe finding an encoding AND finding where the text is at).
Figure out what it uses to determine line length if you are changing things there (pointers and style thereof, markers or fixed length).
If there is anything fun happening in the text as far as placeholders (they don't have "your items will cost [blah] gold" where there is a separate line for [blah] for every possible value) even if so you know the leave it alone.
If you need font changes then that.
Some will take their decompressed (if necessary) and custom table and edit directly in an editor, fixing the pointers maybe with a spreadsheet. Some will built an insertion tool (if you have used a pokemon text editor then this would be an example of that). Some will use a tool setup like atlas and cartographer (though in some circles they have fallen out of favour for kruptar7 and oriton).

I have some more worked examples in
https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/