ROM Hack Making a text editor

[Deleted User]

How would you go about making a text editor/dumper for a DS game? I have the table for the game and know how the pointers work.

 

[FAST6191]

There are tools to help dump and insert test (cartographer and atlas being the big two, you may also like Kruptar 7) but they do not always work the best with modern console text formats (they are built more for set memory locations and the like).

Usually then you find a programming language and teach it how to read your text table (up to you if you want to render it in the game's font), handle your pointers should there be any, handle any markup if it is not part of the font, handle any variables if such things are present and so forth.

You may or may not want to do line/section length checking, if you are exporting to text you have to both figure out a way to export it so others can read it (I usually use square brackets with readable text* or XML style markup) and a way to import it back again (including fixing the presumably altered pointers). If you are doing a 16 bit to 8 bit conversion then you also have to account for that, most of the time this is just a matter of having an export table and an import table.

*an example might be

You need to get the [italic]rusty spork of destiny[/italic] to enter this palace.

Basically any general purpose language will do here. If you already know one then go with that, if you do not know any then you have several choices. For the most part though it boils down to C#, python or java though not many hackers use java (thankfully).

 

[DarthNemesis]

TingleTrans v1.0

I didn't look closely at the other files, other than to see that they use LZ77 compression.

 

[Kelebek]

Did you figure out what those other shorts were for in each string entry Darth?

 

[DarthNemesis]

The third one? I suspect that they're flags, but messing with them didn't seem to do anything.

 

[Deleted User]

Thanks so much for making this!
But when I change ふうせん-

Spoiler

to Balloon I get this-

Spoiler

 

[DarthNemesis]

I double checked and it's recalculating the line length correctly in lang.bin. Did you start with a fresh file? I'm not running into any particular length restrictions.

 

[Deleted User]

Oh, I just redownloaded it and now it works.

Thanks again for making this!