ROM Hack Best Text Editor to Use?

[Girafarig]

I'd like to hack Harvest Moon: Tale of Two Towns so I can play as a guy and marry the bachelors.

I reckon that'd involve changing the girl sprites to a boy, and changing the pronouns from female to male.

What Text Editor would you recommend? What graphics editor? Thank you!!

I have to say, I have no clue what I'm doing xD Ive tried using CrystalTile to open the graphics but no luck ._. I followed the tutorial and... looks like TOTT is pretty different from Mario Kart ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ go figure

Any help is appreciated

(also, if this is the wrong place to ask, tell me! I'm fairly new)

 

[luckymouse0]

MadEdit all the way!

Best HEX editor ever.

 

[Girafarig]

MadEdit all the way!

Best HEX editor ever.

gonna be honest xD I have no idea what I'm doing

what do I do? How do I edit text ;-; I'm new to this and very confused ._.

 

[luckymouse0]

OK, this will be a little tutorial and I hope you like it

- First of all, if you are going to translate from Japanese, make sure that you have installed Asian/Japanese fonts/language (Select your OS and follow instructions):

WinXP Win7 Win8 Win10


- Now that you have support for Japanese language, open your file with MadEdit. For example I will use Khamrai.bin:

- If you search for Japanese text, you will find that everything is gibberish! Before you can see the Japanese text, you need to change the encoding to Shift-JIS (Wikipedia). Do this:

- Everything is set. Try searching for japanese text. This is the tricky part: If you know japanese you will find it in no-time. The problem is when you don't know. I write the characters using Google translator . For example, I will do this with khamrai.

This is the text I want to change:

Look what I found...

Be careful!!

* If you change something, make use it accept your encoding!!! You can just write anything and the game will recognize it!
* When you write somethiing, you are using 1 byte per character (examples are ASCII and UTF-8), and japanese characters uses 2 bytes per character.
* Make sure that if you modify something, the amount of bytes it's the same!

- Ok let's continue. In this example, Khamrai only accept Shift-JIS, 2 bytes per character. But the good thing is that Shift-JIS support latin alphabet!!!! Yeah, but in this game, that was cut off... ... BUT at least, it support Caps Full-Width Alphanumeric .

- Let's write full-width! Go to a Wide Text Generator and write your text.

In my example, I can't write spaces too, that is encoded differently. BUT that is because khamrai is a very old game. Newer games even accept ASCII!

- Ok, let's copy and paste the 2 bytes encoded text into MadEdit. In this case, I will replace ten japanese characters with another ten characters. BE CAREFUL HERE!

- Save and load your game! Let's see what we get:

- Eureka! We got it!

Remember:

• Not every game is encoded the same! Some games support ascii, some doesn't. Try everything in your game but remember, 1 byte = 1 byte!

• Sometimes you won't find anything because the files are compressed and/or encrypted! For example, Sword Art Online Infinity Moments got their files encrypted. But that is another story...

 

[Girafarig]

-snip!-

Thanks for the tutorial!! I was able to find some english! It just looks.... a little strange....

any idea why there's a black space in between every letter? (if not, thats okay! I'll just have to power through it xD )

 

[luckymouse0]

One thing that comes to my mind: Control characters or... garbage.

You remember me of something: Policenauts.
"So Policenauts appears to write its English in ASCII - it's just that each character is prepended with that euro symbol, which is a hex 80."
For more info on Policenauts hacking, read it here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091016201648/http://slowbeef.com/romhack/pnhack1.html
Apparently, the game's encoding is in 2 bytes, but support ASCII, which is 1 byte. So, in order to do it, they just add 1 byte to the ASCII.

In order to solve it, you need ASM hacking to change the amount bytes! ...and that is beyond my scope... sorry .

 

[DarthNemesis]

Editing all the player sprites and text sounds like a ton of work. You're probably better off asking on an Action Replay code forum if someone could come up with a code to disable the gender restriction.


(or just play Stardew Valley)

 

[Girafarig]

Editing all the player sprites and text sounds like a ton of work. You're probably better off asking on an Action Replay code forum if someone could come up with a code to disable the gender restriction.


(or just play Stardew Valley)

playing stardew is the reason I'd like to play TOTT. I've played over 800 hours, and I want a change of pace that modding can't provide.

I can look into AR, I guess, but I doubt they'll work to the extent I'd like them to, and they'd probably glitch the game (looking for male dialogue when there is none)

 

[luckymouse0]

playing stardew is the reason I'd like to play TOTT. I've played over 800 hours, and I want a change of pace that modding can't provide.

I can look into AR, I guess, but I doubt they'll work to the extent I'd like them to, and they'd probably glitch the game (looking for male dialogue when there is none)

You could change the dialog with hex editors, and the image with AR codes!

Or you could try opening the rom with Tinke to see what you find

 

[Girafarig]

You could change the dialog with hex editors, and the image with AR codes!

Or you could try opening the rom with Tinke to see what you find

thank you! You've been extremely helpful!