ROM Hack Getting start on translation

[Mirtos]

Hi everyone.

I want to start doing game translation/localization, but i'm having some issues and quite a lot of questions about extract and reinsert text on games.

i have basic knoledge on how Hex work, so using Crystal Tile 2 i was able to find .sbd files where all text are (Days of Memories 2 jp), but my question is basically:

how i extract the game text without having to look line by line on those .sbd file?
and how i modify the file so i can put the translated text into it? I can put it using Crystal Tile 2 hex editor, but i'm constraint on the number of character of the original language, since there's no empty space between dialogue lines. And it being japanese, that mean i can't just do that. It's too little of space to do anything.

Is there a program for doing that? or am I approuching this very wrong?

 

[FAST6191]

If the text is not in a game you know or possibly a known format (and I have never heard of SBD, not to mention game text is usually quite custom -- as far as the DS goes there is the BMG format some first party games use and that is about it) then you have to make your own tool, or possibly see what you can do with the likes of Atlas or Kruptar 7, both of which are quite complicated owing to the amount of options text has.

"Fitting within the size". This is likely handled by something called pointers. I usually describe them as like the contents page of a book (long lists of numbers that detail where the given line is found). These can be various formats but tend to fall into one of a few styles. If it is a reasonably simple format (doubly so if there is a nice term I can search for to generate a list of end of line/section to have for further use) I can usually bash a spreadsheet into shape here but a custom program is where it will end up heading.
Sometimes the text can be pictures (seemingly not the case here, and usually more for small puzzle games, menus or fancy looking text) or fixed length (menus being a big one here).

 

[Mirtos]

Any good guide/resource on how to do those tools?

 

[FAST6191]

http://romhack.github.io/doc/kruptarPlugins/ has a bit for kruptar. Atlas and Cartographer have been popular in NES and SNES circles for years so you might find something there but I don't have a go to document for it.

That said I would look at a more manual approach first, figure out what would need to be done and then approach either of those setups with an idea about doing that rather than trying to learn text outright -- text is hideously complicated when you start accounting for edge cases (and we see most of those in games at some point* so the tools have to handle it if they do want to be "universal") so trying to learn said tools as is/for the sake of learning is not terribly fun. After having gone manual or trying to track it all in a spreadsheet you might even find you can make a program to handle this format/game more easily than using the tools mentioned above -- text is almost never going to be some high end computer science/maths problem as much as a list of quirks you get to account for but using basic addition, subtraction, shifts and maybe a bit of boolean filtering to blank certain bits.

*I don't think I have seen boustrophedon (text going from left to right and right to left and then left to right) but have a look at the sorts of things http://transcorp.romhacking.net/scratchpad/Table File Format.txt and you will get an idea of what goes here.