ROM Hack Question about translations and save games.

[Dann Woolf]

I know there's a lot of translation projects for DS games being worked on at the moment (like the new Pokémon games). If I were to play, for example, Pokémon Black with the version 6 translation, when version 7 eventually comes out would I just be able to patch the rom again, and continue with my current save? Or would I have to start over every time a new version is released?

 

[Crass]

The save should be perfectly fine using it with different version of the translation.

 

[Dann Woolf]

And this is the case with any game? Not just Pokémon?

 

[jflower]

yess, if the game id ist changed then it will do.
you can always check witch the code editor 'r4cc'

 

[twiztidsinz]

The majority of the time, the save files are not changed.
This means you can usually play the clean, unmodified game then switch to a translation patch without problem as well as go between translation version.

 

[Spenstar]

If I were to play, for example, Pokémon Black with the version 6 translation, when version 7 eventually comes out would I just be able to patch the rom again

If I under stand this part correctly, it looks like you are asking if you can patch the already-patched v6 with v7.
Actually, if a new version comes out, you will need to apply the new translation version to a 'Clean' game. Because if you try applying a new patch to an already patched version, you will most likely encounter errors.

And as for the save working for newer versions of patched games.
Yes, the save will work with a newer version of the game. Just make sure the save has the same name as the game.
eg: 'Pokemon Black.nds' and 'Pokemon Black.sav' will work.

 

[Dann Woolf]

If I were to play, for example, Pokémon Black with the version 6 translation, when version 7 eventually comes out would I just be able to patch the rom again

If I under stand this part correctly, it looks like you are asking if you can patch the already-patched v6 with v7.
Actually, if a new version comes out, you will need to apply the new translation version to a 'Clean' game. Because if you try applying a new patch to an already patched version, you will most likely encounter errors.

And as for the save working for newer versions of patched games.
Yes, the save will work with a newer version of the game. Just make sure the save has the same name as the game.
eg: 'Pokemon Black.nds' and 'Pokemon Black.sav' will work.

Yeah, I already know you have to patch a clean rom every time, it's the save data I was wanting to know about.

Thanks for answering my questions, guys.

 

[FAST6191]

Just to be a bastard it might not always be the case-
If you think about what save games might contain it is not a stretch to include text strings (character names among other things).
Should the translation teams switch up from something like 16 bit (necessary for many Asian languages) to 8 bit text (enough for most European languages) things can fall over there- such a hack is done on occasion while it is normally not vital to the translation effort (at least this side of the 16 bit era) it is nice and equally it usually involves you fiddling, sometimes extensively, at ASM level (not necessarily a skill available to all hackers) so it can be left to later stages of the hack (long after multiple versions might have been released).

Indeed this is one of the things that sometimes troubles people swapping between regions of games- I recall a problem with the final fantasy 3 remake when people played the Japanese version and later wanted to swap when a more complete translation appeared. This was fine but the fonts (or indeed lack of Japanese/the Roman character encodings used in the Japanese font) messed things up. Other times Japanese regions used U16 style unicode and the European versions stuck with plain 8 bit ASCII.
Depending on how the saves (and things dealing with it) are worked it could even lead to the far more difficult to recover from situation of shifted offsets (where a game thought something started at one place now starts at another).

I will spare further discussion for now though as the concepts are largely academic (see interplay of APIs, generation of dynamic files, lacks of bounds checking (DS games can be considered to be static entities after all and there is no need to waste time and resources on programming around it*). Generally though it is always worth trying.

*the effects of this approach are one of the big things would be hackers have to contend with-possibly the simplest example being that of fixed length strings (usually in menus).