ROM Hack How to Hack/Patch DS ROMs for Translations?

[Knolly]

As the title says...

I'm wondering, does anyone know how to do this yet? I have a certain game (Zoids Saga DS) that's in Japanese that I would like to translate at least certain parts into English to make it playable and then try to make a full translation over a year or so. Does anyone know how I could go about extracting and reinserting text?

 

[FAST6191]

Translation of DS roms is pretty much the same as translation of any other systems rom: you find a table (some roms use plain/ slightly tweaked ASCII even) and you convert any graphics (a lot of roms use either 4bpp or 8bpp GBA mode for graphics).

Lack of a decent emulator and tools has somewhat stymied any happenings here with the only translations I know of being Jump Super Stars:
http://www.translationrl.it/
And NSMB partially to French by myself and Onodream.
I have a few more things coming (Athlon-pv translated the script/some menus of NSMB to Dutch which due to my overwhelming laziness has not got further than bugtesting yet), I have done a bit of work with some other roms too although nothing other than my findings playing around with them has been released.

On the upside you can split roms apart into their separate components, Zoids Saga even having a script directory and using uncompressed script if I recall (it has been a few months since I last looked at the rom).

 

[Knolly]

Thanks for the info! I don't really haev the technical know-how, but I'm more than willing to learn, heh. Thanks!