ROM Hack Extracting dialogue scripts using tahazan

[Aldrich]

Salutations everyone, greenhorn user looking for a bit of help deciphering some code in Dragon Quest VI. Using tahazan's features I've been able to look at the raw coding that hold's the game's script, but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to interpret it. Right now, the most I can extract is displayed in free file viewer as:

AC 6C 00 00 E9 08 00 00 24 00 00 00 C8 00 00 00 ¬l é $ È
​

This is likely a painfully obvious question that betrays my inexperience, but how exactly would I go about extracting the English script from the game? Not having the source code or a table to reference will be a serious hindrance, but looking at the way the data is stored in tahazan it does seem well organized and segmented. Any advice for a rookie who wants to extract a whole script for posterity's sake?

 

[FAST6191]

Do you mean tahaxan? Not seen that one in a while. Most people moved to other tools like tinke and crystaltile2 if they are using a general purpose thing.

That section looks like it might be a pointer section (possibly of the length variety) -- all those 00s are unlikely to be in normal text like that (you might see them as a space sometimes but not in that sort of pattern).

I don't have the game in front of me to pull apart further though and that snippet above I already covered.

Table wise if it is not using ascii/unicode/shiftjis/something known I have a few techniques covered in http://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ , though most would probably start with
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/513/

 

[Aldrich]

I picked tahaxan to start off after reading through Guardiansoul's thread https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-ultimate-nintendo-ds-rom-hacking-guide.291274/

Following the tools in your guide hasn't helped any, and cartographer (along with the older romjuice) flat out failed to start. I had my friends test it out on their machines to double-check and make sure it wasn't some random issue with mine, but no luck with them either.
To reiterate, I have no experience in hacking in general and I don't particularly care to learn--I just want to rip out the guts of the game so that fans of the series can easily check circumstantial dialogue without having to play through the title multiple times or heavily abuse save states. Any and all files extracted would be hosted on woodus.com/den

By the descriptions, cartographer sounds like it would be the best bet for a mass dump but I as I said above I can't get the program to run properly and so far no new download links have turned up through searching.