ROM Hack Official Mother 3 Translation Thread

[raulpica]

So I looked into hacking Mother 1/EarthBound Zero, and yes, as Schlupi said, the text system is really simple. But I can't just copy+paste the text, I need something that can repoint the offsets of all the text pointers because the lengths of the texts are different between EB0's script, and Mato's M1 script. This is my first time NES hacking, so excuse me if there are such tools available, but I can't find any. And I seriously doubt that Mato painstakingly repointed every single line of text in the game, according to his source, he has his own tool that finds the table and does the repointing for him. But that's for Mother 1+2, which is a GBA rom, not EarthBound Zero, which is a NES rom.

You'll end out of space (on the NES rom). EarthBound Zero simply did not have as much text as the Tomato translation has.

I remember reading somewhere that Mato said he expanded over dialogues and such as the original one had them cramped by size constraintes.

Also, if you want to avoid having to recalcuate LOADS of pointers, you're gonna need someone to program you a tool for that.

 

[Chaos Rush]

So I looked into hacking Mother 1/EarthBound Zero, and yes, as Schlupi said, the text system is really simple. But I can't just copy+paste the text, I need something that can repoint the offsets of all the text pointers because the lengths of the texts are different between EB0's script, and Mato's M1 script. This is my first time NES hacking, so excuse me if there are such tools available, but I can't find any. And I seriously doubt that Mato painstakingly repointed every single line of text in the game, according to his source, he has his own tool that finds the table and does the repointing for him. But that's for Mother 1+2, which is a GBA rom, not EarthBound Zero, which is a NES rom.

You'll end out of space (on the NES rom). EarthBound Zero simply did not have as much text as the Tomato translation has.

I remember reading somewhere that Mato said he expanded over dialogues and such as the original one had them cramped by size constraintes.

Also, if you want to avoid having to recalcuate LOADS of pointers, you're gonna need someone to program you a tool for that.

I don't have to repoint to free space. I could just delete all of EB0's text, then paste in Mato's text where the original text data was, but I still have to repoint the text stuff because the offsets would be different anyway. And once the data surpasses the length of EB0's text data, then the rest would just go to free space.

So does every NES translation, the author had to painstakingly repoint every line of text with a hex editor? And there's a French translation of EB0 on romhacking.net, did that guy repoint every line of text? Or did he have a tool? Or did he just use shorter text so he didn't have to repoint anything?

 

[raulpica]

So I looked into hacking Mother 1/EarthBound Zero, and yes, as Schlupi said, the text system is really simple. But I can't just copy+paste the text, I need something that can repoint the offsets of all the text pointers because the lengths of the texts are different between EB0's script, and Mato's M1 script. This is my first time NES hacking, so excuse me if there are such tools available, but I can't find any. And I seriously doubt that Mato painstakingly repointed every single line of text in the game, according to his source, he has his own tool that finds the table and does the repointing for him. But that's for Mother 1+2, which is a GBA rom, not EarthBound Zero, which is a NES rom.

You'll end out of space (on the NES rom). EarthBound Zero simply did not have as much text as the Tomato translation has.

I remember reading somewhere that Mato said he expanded over dialogues and such as the original one had them cramped by size constraintes.

Also, if you want to avoid having to recalcuate LOADS of pointers, you're gonna need someone to program you a tool for that.

I don't have to repoint to free space. I could just delete all of EB0's text, then paste in Mato's text where the original text data was, but I still have to repoint the text stuff because the offsets would be different anyway. And once the data surpasses the length of EB0's text data, then the rest would just go to free space.

So does every NES translation, the author had to painstakingly repoint every line of text with a hex editor? And there's a French translation of EB0 on romhacking.net, did that guy repoint every line of text? Or did he have a tool? Or did he just use shorter text so he didn't have to repoint anything?

What I meant is that the current text space allocated in the NES rom is most certainly not enough to contain the Mato text (which is way more than the original one, if my quote of what Mato said reveals to be true). You'll need to reallocate to free space, if there is ever any in the ROM, in case there is not, you'll have to expand the ROM, and you'll need ASM hacking right there to make everything work.

You can either repoint it yourself (which is maddening), or you program yourself a tool to do that. Every translator out there does that. The EB0 french translation guy MOST CERTAINLY made himself a tool.

Yes, butchering everything to make it fit current windows is a technique most amateur translators use, but it's mainly for games which don't have that much text to begin with.