Japanese Pokémon black

[TylerQuest]

I know this is probably a silly question but I have an official copy of Pokémon black Japanese and I was wondering if I could somehow patch it to English. I know you can patch the rom but I was wondering if you could patch the actual cart somehow

 

[r1vver]

The main chip of the DS cartridge (designed to store the game) is Read-Only Memory (ROM). Read-Only Memory cannot be overwritten in any way. At all. Even Japanese and even black.

 

[FAST6191]

Three main scenarios in which anything like this is possible.

1) Some games can have languages forced that are already in the game, usually because a weak emulator or flash cart does not care for the firmware settings but there are some that hid Japanese (one of the Advance Wars titles and Go Go Cosmo Cops being the main two) from other regions but the same cheat could activate. There are instances of first boot selects a language for all time/until the save is wiped as well. Some more subtly hidden languages could possibly be revealed by cheats as well, not sure if we have anything like that for the DS.

2) The text volume is small enough that you can force alter it with cheats. As most cheat engines fall over after about 20 or 30 cheats then that had better be a short menu translation for a puzzle game or something.

3) You replace the ROM chip with something else but leave the rest of the cart as is. Not seen this for the DS yet (forms one of the better home made GBC flash carts and some of the GBA repros) but within the realm of possibility one day.

2 and 3 could theoretically gang up with a GBA slot flash cart to have the binary rewritten in memory and referencing data in the GBA slot. At that point better to get a real flash cart and write the save back when you are done.