ROM Hack Naruto Konoha Senki

BlueFlame90

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Well i'm new to this stuff, so i decided to "learn by doing"^^
So i decided to translate a game.
I played a bit around with "Naruto Konoha Senki" and thats how it turned out:

Japanese:
jp.png


English:
eng.png



I need some help with the Jutsu names
for example:
"????" (Shunshin no Jutsu) that would be something like "Spell of Instant Self" but i can only use 8 charas to name it.
This Skill does: "Teleports by the power of charka. Can pass through obstacles."
So should i call it Teleport?
I have a lot of these problems, but the biggest problem is my lack of Kanji.
If someone wants to help me, tell me here.
 

FAST6191

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First very nice work (learning by doing is great).

Names. I assume this is not a simple case of pointers so is it a hard limit of 8 (it goes to the next line when 8 characters are up), a game issue (characters loop back or are displayed oddly) or a soft limit/end of line signal (you can end a line by putting a 00 or something).
In this case you have a few options:
Hack the game to display more characters, could be trivial or could be a 4 month session with assembly.

Hack the font, I assume Roman characters are already there but if you look at the likes of your "l" (l as in lemur) you will see space either side of them (it is also present to a lesser extent in other characters). You can then simply overwrite some kanji with the font which has the letters split across the tiles that make up the font and gain yourself valuable space.
Note any work/info you get from this as that font does not look very nice (different sizes, fixed width I looks like l) and you will probably want to tweak it at some point.
The other option in font hacking is to shrink the entire font (making it thinner in this case), this can be done in several ways but the easiest way would probably be to hack the OAM handling of the text.
Related to this is dual tile/multi tile encoding (the multiple characters per tile is a primitive but effective form of it) where one (or two) "characters" signals something else (often this is a variable or a user made name but it can be and is used for names of spells and the like), you can hack the text display to parse the hexadecimal in question and display characters accordingly (personally I would make the characters all start with something not used in the rest of the game to make comparing an easier task, if there is a routine for bold/moving/italic/whatever text it is an idea to add it onto that)

What to romanise to is always a interesting debate, I prefer to settle for not assuming the player is a moron (as is the case with a lot of official translations) but not assuming they know everything there is to know about the original language and culture behind it.
As you are dealing with a well known entity I would look to the fansub/scanlation community.
 

BlueFlame90

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Wow thanks, but almost everything you are saying is to hard for me.
I know the font loos a bit odd, but it was already in the game - i don't know how to change it.
A little help or examples would be really nice^^
 

FAST6191

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While it is not always the case by any means fonts are generally a long list of tiles (sometimes compressed with a simple algorithm) which you can edit. Worst case scenario here is the character is split across a few tiles (looking at that though it is unlikely).

You simply have to find a character (an obscure kanji character is a good bet, I try to leave the kana as is unless there is a good reason to change them (this is mainly because they occupy a nice set of hexadecimal numbers or there are not enough kanji/other stuff for my purposes)). Alter this character (and a couple of following ones) to display the word you want. Go back to the text and tell the game to display the kanji you just altered. Instant pseudo variable width font.

The original rom hacking documents I wrote up contain a bit of fonts (with a bit on Advance Wars on the GBA) so they could be worth a look (they do not really detail this though). There is a link in my signature or you can go to the DS rom hacking section around here.
 

mrgone

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BlueFlame90 said:
"????" (Shunshin no Jutsu) that would be something like "Spell of Instant Self" but i can only use 8 charas to name it.
This Skill does: "Teleports by the power of charka. Can pass through obstacles."
So should i call it Teleport?
I have a lot of these problems, but the biggest problem is my lack of Kanji.
If someone wants to help me, tell me here.

mindswap ? (not really a swap though)
mindjump ?
 

BlueFlame90

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Now i have a problem with the text itself, i need more room.
In the pokemon games i was able to solve this with pointers, but i can't get it to work with this game.
I need help with the pointers and i'm also unable to find the titlescreen graphic in the rom.
 

BlueFlame90

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New Screens: Thats what i have translated for now
1.PNG
2.PNG


5.PNG
3.PNG


4.PNG
7.PNG


6.PNG


Of course i am still working on it and after i translated the battle screen, i can do the jutsus.
i will also release a work-in-progress patch (of what i have done so far) after the main bsttle commands are translated.
 

Normmatt

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A While back on the old CheatandWin forums some guys Jazz, Daniel, Labmaster and Tauwasser got together a team to translate this game. Sadly they didnt get very far in the translation effort but they did get a working Variable Width Font into the game. Not sure if there was any public patch released though.
 

Qidori

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So, here's an interesting bit. I've been working a little bit on a patch for this game and am running into some troubles. Translation isn't necessarily an issue but I didn't see any need to start an entirely new thread.

Basically I've been adding new techniques, items, etc. to the game and it's been working out great, but my greatest goal is adding new characters. It seemed easy at first, I just planned on using the same method I did for the techniques and what have you, but I found that when I had a new character in the game and working he just didn't ever level up. He could fight, you could upgrade his moves and give him items and whatnot, but after a battle he'd get experience, it would say he'd level up, but it wouldn't show his stat boosts and when you check on him, he's stuck at level 10. Normally I'd assume that I just missed something, but then I decided to try to make one of the enemy characters playable and try that out and it's the same story! I find that especially odd considering most of the enemies are playable anyway, and it wasn't like an animal or something, he was nearly identical to some of the more average playable characters.

So my question is this: could it be that it's coded in somewhere which characters are able to level up? Perhaps they threw in a random spot some piece that says "only these characters should ever be playable"? I can't imagine somebody would go through so much trouble to make sure I don't add onto the game, especially since the item and technique hacks didn't give me any trouble.


Mind you, these enemy characters already have stat growth patterns, same as all of the playable characters. They're also each given individual information on how quickly they level up and so on, so having that it makes it doubly odd that they'd be so unfortunate as to be stuck at lowly level 10...
 

Qidori

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I guess my real question is, is it possible or likely that some assembly hacking would be necessary? Or is it more likely that I just missed what I'm looking for?

I've mostly charted out what all of the data in the last 10% or so does, and almost everything before that just looks like nonsense to me (or is bitmap data). Are most games built this way, where the more game-oriented data is neatly organized at the end and the system info is before it? I'm just trying to figure out the norm, as this is the only such project I've taken on.
 

JDalph

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I have a soft spot for this game since it was the first game I came across when I discovered Naruto so I decided to have a go at making a 'passable' English translation using my rudimentary knowledge of both ROM hacking and Japanese.

Much like BlueFlame (sadly the image files have expired so going off what s/he wrote) my main issue is with the character limits both within the hex code but also when the new font appears in-game. What I've been doing to some effect is finding a way to say the same thing but within the kata character limit, often resorting to shortened words such as 'Pwfl' for Powerful or 'Shrkn' for Shuriken when describing items and 'Wtr' as a replacement for Water Kanji. It's by no means perfect but playable imho. This does however present a problem when it comes to some names like Hatake Kakashi, Inuzuba Kiba, Nara Shikamaru because the entirety of their kana don't occupy enough hex code for full romanji typing and any extension, even into seemingly unused space, is game breaking so in some cases initials (i.e. H. Kakashi) have been used.

I realise my post is in effect the same as OPs and honestly, I am as out of my depth with regards to FAST6191's response as they were (the advice is still very much appreciated) but hopefully in a week or so, I'll have a 'playable' english translatation that I'll be happy to share with anyone interested and any specific tips on how to improve upon it would be greatly welcomed.

Unfortunately, I'm at work now and can't upload any screenshots but I will later today and if anyone wants to comment, I'm open to suggestions
 

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