ROM Hack Question Removing Language Files

[Orphen07]

There was a similar thread almost a year ago, but I was wondering if there was a tool to let you extract language files to save space.

 

[FAST6191]

Is there likely much benefit to this? It might have made sense back in the day but today video and audio take up the bulk of the space, with 3d graphics being the next biggest culprit and orders of magnitude greater in size.

Anyway yes. From the point you could run a custom ROM you could have pulled it apart, excised the languages you did not care for and probably put it back together, or sorted what needed sorting and then put it back together.

To the best of my knowledge, and what basic computing would predict, there is no universal, or indeed all that common* format for text on the Switch, and I would not expect there to be one in the future as there is no great benefit to it and a fair few downsides for all sorts of things. This also means automated tools to do it... I could possibly see some kind of relative search (or enhanced text detection) do something that might be useful but realistically nobody is going to make such a thing.

*the DS technically had that BMG format but other than a handful of Nintendo own games nothing really used it.

 

[Orphen07]

Perhaps I'm being hopeful but I thought those files would be in their own partition, considering that you won't see them unless you switch system regions.

 

[FAST6191]

"suitcase stem"? Bit of fun with predictive text there?

I assume you mean some kind of manual region override to force it into another. Japan sometimes does this to prevent people from buying copies outside Japan that might be cheaper but there are other instances of things going back years (I think I still have a GBA game in my list of things to hack that never made it out of Japan but has a full English script locked inside the ROM, came the other way for the second DS Advance Wars which had a Japanese script but needed a hack to load it and the game never made it to Japan during the DS' lifetime).

Anyway sometimes these languages might require some measure of hack to access for certain ROMs. Easier to block things from loading than it is to remove them entirely and make multiple versions of the ROM (and possibly do multiple patches). What partitions the Switch formats have don't really have any even minor bearing here (if you were thinking like the 3ds with the exefs and ROMfs then even that means nothing -- any number of games include text in the binary part*).

*for the original DS the wifi error codes were usually there which meant I would then overwrite the obscure ones nobody would ever get when I needed some space in it to do something.

I could go on and ponder the various approaches a game might use for regions, how you could in turn twist it into finding these text files more reliably than folder names/file extensions/file sizes/eliminations/..., and some of the ways games approach text in general to explain why no universal thing** is likely but I am not sure it would do much here. This on top of the existing problem of size of text/languages not being a lot in general relative to modern game sizes -- have a 16 meg ROM with 5 languages and yeah a 1 meg script for each makes an appreciable amount, however said 1 meg is probably still going to be the size of a modern game as it is not like game scripts have got bigger in the last decade or so (maybe longer than that).

**simple thing -- many games use plain text, other games have fancy text effects, fancy effects means extra code and handling to deal with that plain text does not and as plain text has worked in thousands of games for decades now then nobody is going to force fancy stuff on those that neither need nor want it.

 

[Orphen07]

I seem to be replying to your posts either very early or very late in the day, so I apologize, haha... that meant to say "system regions".

Very well written post. Actually, I'm not sure how to respond to that. Hmm, I'll likely edit this later.