ROM Hack hacking help?

[azerty1]

i was playing around with the 7th dragon rom for a while when i realized that iwth the shift-jis table, all the katakana and all the hirogana showed up, but none of the kanji did.
has anyone ever encountered a similar problem, and if the solution is to make a new table, is the only thing i need to do to bump all the values up a bit?

 

[FAST6191]

Without pulling apart the rom I am not going to be able to say definitively but you have to remember there are many kanji so game devs often only grab a subset of common ones, the ones they are using or some hybrid of the two. It is not such a problem on the DS with the "large" amount of resources it has but if you look back at the 8 and 16 bit era games you will see a fair amount on the subject.

You asked if it is just a number shift; possible but unlikely if a subset has been taken as the kanji and if it is then you are likely to be in for a long job. Some blathering, we can use relative search for European based languages but there are many ordering systems for Kanji and often there is none at all or it is "game based" (I have seen a few games have characters in the font appear in the order they appear in the game).
Main methods here are brute force (you try every character; worth repeating them/having some form of order or surrounding unknown characters with known characters as that might enable you to see a pattern) and pulling apart the rom at the assembly level. As an aside I have seen a few games with furigana which means you can have a crude Rosetta stone sort of thing going on.

It would also be wise/a thinking point to consider that you may be dealing with the Japanese equivalent of the "extended ASCII"- 128 characters is enough for most European languages and their associated symbols but 8 bits affords 256 characters so the "extended" set has no real definition and as such can and is used for anything; there are common sets but no one is truly standard across computing.


If/when you do make it can you post back as I am always on the lookout for interesting examples of things like this.

 

[rastsan]

I took a look at this game too. You are aware that the game has 4 display fonts and one main font for internal stuff...
I tried to make my own table and then realized that the one table works with the one font and another table with the next. The relative search thing works fine until it comes across the lz77 compressed 4 fonts. I found the same character with 3 different hex values, sigh....
on the plus side almost all the translation stuff is happening in the system.bin file... I am currently doing a graphic translation, as I gave up with the text translation (I just do not know enogh to do it). The emulator works fine(except for the shop menu screw up) but on the m3 the text translation just crashes. google unicode table file ruten table file and get back to me perhaps a collaboration....

 

[azerty1]

hmmm...i can't seem to find the ruten table file...oddly enough, this topic appears near the top of google. could you maybe upload the tables you used? i tried making my own by bumping all the numbers up by the differnce of one kanji word, but it didn't quite work out. i did notice that the kana is all the same, though.
i didn't spend too much time on the rom, yet, but with what you're saying, my interest is now piqued.

could you please send me the table files you used, and i'll see if i can figure out how to work the text out.

oh yeah, the dialogue script and everything is int he evtdat.bin. the system.bin just has all the items and skill descriptions (a guess. i don't know japanese, but generally MANA+10 is not in plot related dialogue)

i'm fairly certain the script itself has all the string length and textbox stuff mixed in there, but i really can't tell for sure until i can see all the kanji...'cuz now i just have awkward spaces surrounding the kana...

oh, and if you want to do some screwing around with corruption, the first text of the game is at 1D4F0 of evtdat.bin. it's mixed in with the rest of the stuff, and but the first words of the game are, i think (from my somewhat limited jap knowledge) so-re-wa.

 

[rastsan]

Cannot believe i missed that oh well check it later