Homebrew application for translating games in realtime.

[Moshe]

Hi, I thought of an idea, to make a homebrew application that always stands as a buffer between the console and the text it displays on the screen. And before it displays it, it will contact some translation API, translate it, and then display it on the screen. My question is if it is possible to track when the console accesses the text (probably MSBT), even if it will only work on games from the familiar Nintendo engine.

 

[thesjaakspoiler]

I've never played with stuff like this on the Switch so forgive me if I'm wrong.
GDB seems to have an option to set a breakpoint whenever a certain memory address is accessed.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58851/can-i-set-a-breakpoint-on-memory-access-in-gdb


Text is just data so from a system perspective, you can't see whether the CPU accessed some text data or some other data.
Another approach is to override the text printing method and translate the text whenever the game tries to print it on the screen.
There are some very low level calls for printing text (see Hekate or Atmosphere) without using the NintendoSDK.
But I assume that in games, the games use some call in the Nintendo SDK.
With Atmosphere you can have homebrew apps running in the back, like for example Edizon does.
But this will be a major research attempt as not many people have tried to hack into the system this deep.