ROM Hack Script Extraction/Dumping Help

[LittleTeaGarden]

Good Morning/Evening,

I am interested in translating and am trying to translate a Japanese game called ぼくじょうものがたり-Colobockle Station (Also known as Harvest Moon: DS Cute). I have read numerous guides about DS ROM hacking and I believe I have the gist of what I need. I have been advised to use Cartographer and Atlas when it comes to script extracting.

However, Cartographer is a bit difficult for me to fully understand, and I was wondering if anyone could help me to code the command .txt in Cartographer it properly so I can get it functioning. I have already read the 'read me' guide, but it is a tad unhelpful in certain areas. I have attached what I have put so far in the command .txt; however, I have only edited a little. (I have only changed the #GAME NAME and #TABLES, everything else is the same.)

To save yourself some time, I'm going to give you things I already know to prevent redundant information.

Already Know:
-HexEditing (and how useless it is to translate).
-Tables (I already have a table set up and ready).
-The Translation (I speak fluent Japanese and English, so translation is obviously not a problem).
-Pointers (I know vaguely why they are needed in a ROM script).
-ROM extracting (I already have the whole ROM extracted).

Do Not Know/Need Help with:
-Figuring out how to get Cartographer properly functioning (obvious).
-Finding Pointer/Pointer Tables (I'm not too sure where to properly look).
-Finding Assembly Code (I was told this was going to be needed in order to figure out #SCRIPT START/STOP)

Please note that my knowledge on technical ROM Hacking terms is extremely limited.

Main Goal:
-To be able to translate the game script without having to worry about the limitations that the pointers make. For example, with a Hex Editor, you have to literally replace each word, there cannot be any more bytes or less.

I know translating is not simple, and I am willing to take time to learn the process. If there is anyone who was translated and/or Script extracted before, any help is GREATLY appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

 

[matt!]

You may have more interest and response over at romhacking.net

Good luck!

 

[FAST6191]

You may have more interest and response over at romhacking.net

Good luck!

We do big boy ROM hacking around here, and they already are
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=27397.0

Anyway atlas and cartographer are great tools but I am not sure of their merits for the smaller files seen in DS games (compared to megs of ROM that makes up most things GBA and older that did not come on a disc). A lot of their stuff is aimed more for said big ROM files and lacks nuance for some things commonly seen in DS games. You can usually twist it to do what you want but it is a bit more of a learning curve on top of things.

Personally I prefer to figure out if the script I am dealing with can handle it and sort the pointers after the fact -- if there is a nice 0000 or something between every section you translate and you know the pointer formats then a simple search for 0000 nets you the locations of all them (a decent hex editor will give you this), if you have the locations then it is usually trivial if you yourself figured out/understand the pointer format (relative, plain but byte flipped, offset...) to change them to what the game expects them to be.
As most DS games, which would include Harvest Moon or whatever it is called nowadays, use an almost text file with a bit of markup format in individual files you are then mostly left with screen formatting issues or memory issues, oh and font issues but that sounds like it has been handled already.

Dumping a Japanese game can be slightly more annoying -- if they have 8 bit control characters you will get lines appear and disappear when a dumb decoder expects every entry to be 16 bits (with all these games nicely using the shiftJIS part I have occasionally even been known to force an encoding in a browser). Easy enough to solve though (find and replace works well), but might be an extra step to do and undo to get it back sorted again.

Pointer tables on DS games with text in standalone files tends to be in most cases in the file (typically at the start of it, or at the start of the text section), in a separate file with a similar name.

Not sure why you need to be playing with assembly for this one. While there might be text buried in the binary somewhere any "script start/stop" commands, if such things are even needed*, can usually be figured out from the files themselves (it is something they will pretty much all have to do, not like you are trying to figure out a never used symbol or anything), however I have not looked at the specifics of this one yet.

*if you are just doing a simple translation (no samurai pizza cats type goings on) then that should likely be unchanged. If it was new line/new page commands that would be a different matter, and for most we would tell you to maybe condense the translation at that point.