ROM Hack How do you translate a ROM?

[CPhantom]

There are a few games I'd like to work on and see if I could translate, but I'm not sure how to even open up the game o.o;
How exactly does it work?
How do you do it?
What are the necessities for doing this?

Any help would be necessary and helpful :]

Thanks!

 

[SpyMaster]

Firstly extract the files of the rom with "ndstool" or "DSlazy".
Open them with a text editor. If you see text, you are very lucky !
If not, the translation will be harder.

You must open the files with an hex Editor like "xvi32" !

 

[CPhantom]

Is that really it? Wow, haha okay.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't text within text boxes written out? Which means that it could be translated, right?

I'm not to worried about images and the like that are to be translated, just the major text to understand what is up.



how do you get it back to the ROM though? o.o; I'm sure thats not just a "save your text file and exit" situation




is the hex editing only for editing images then? or is it more to it than that?

 

[duy64]

Google is your friend, now use it. Unless you want to be useless and have people spoon feed you for everything for the rest of your life.

 

[CPhantom]

Chill bro. I did Google it, but I couldn't find jack (mostly just ROM download links). Hell, one of the links took me back to these boards haha. I just needed some information on how to do this, not a lecture on using Google. :-\

 

[Narin]

Is that really it? Wow, haha okay.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't text within text boxes written out? Which means that it could be translated, right?

I'm not to worried about images and the like that are to be translated, just the major text to understand what is up.



how do you get it back to the ROM though? o.o; I'm sure thats not just a "save your text file and exit" situation




is the hex editing only for editing images then? or is it more to it than that?

In most games, you may need knowledge of programming to translate games. Some games have the text within compressed files and so on. Not only that, but many files need to be hex edited and the bytes offset changed. Also keep into account that the games have a set limit on the number of characters you can display per line, that and since the Japanese characters use a monospace font, your severely limited. You'll have to hack the game and change how the fonts get displayed to squeeze some more text in.

Its certainly far from easy to translate most of the Nintendo DS games you come across. It took some people years simply to hack and translate some games.

At any rates, heres more information

http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=87626