ROM Hack Say I wanted to take a crack at translating a ROM

[Czernobog]

Could anyone point me in the right direction as to the information and tools I would need to do such a task?

Thanks.

 

[ShinRyouma]

As Noitora always says http://www.romhacking.net/start

 

[Czernobog]

Is there any steadfast rule as to how one can obtain the table containing the ingame text? Or is it a case-by-case situation? Thank you for the link, by the way. It offers a good introduction to the concepts used in ROM hacking, but it seems to be a bit outdated.

 

[Vague Rant]

You wanted to take a crack at translating a ROM.

A table is something you generally have to make for yourself by finding which hex values represent which text characters in-game. There are a few "orders" of characters which are fairly common, so it is possible to guestimate what goes where, but it's unlikely you could just run some program to do it for you.

 

[Czernobog]

Okay, so to begin to figure that out, would I have to decompile the ROM and then look at the files in a hex editor and reason my way through it? I appreciate the help, btw.

 

[ShinRyouma]

Could anyone point me in the right direction as to the information and tools I would need to do such a task?
You asked for information and tools. That site has a lot of information, and the documents suggest some tools, the site also has a lot of tools.

QUOTE(Czernobog @ Jun 27 2009, 08:42 PM) Is there any steadfast rule as to how one can obtain the table containing the ingame text? Or is it a case-by-case situation? Thank you for the link, by the way. It offers a good introduction to the concepts used in ROM hacking, but it seems to be a bit outdated.

Have you learnt the basic? There's NO SHORTCUT to be a rom hacker and a rom hacker must have PATIENCE. The documents aren't outdated, they gave simple explanation so beginners can understand, they used NES rom so beginners can practice from easy rom.
I suggest you learn to make the table manually. Each games are different, there're games which you can hex edit directly, and there're games which compressed.
Learn step by step. I'm a beginner, too.

 

[Blebleman]

Make sure you're fluent in both languages ("from" and "to")...

Many kiddies here think they can start a translation project with their cutie anime Japanese. They're wrong.

 

[Czernobog]

I was planning on playing around with a German English translation actually.

Edit - Also, would the lessons learned through editing text data in an NES ROM translate to the ability to hack an NDS ROM? I understand that they use different machine language, would this obfuscate the issue?

 

[Blebleman]

I was planning on playing around with a German English translation actually.

Edit - Also, would the lessons learned through editing text data in an NES ROM translate to the ability to hack an NDS ROM? I understand that they use different machine language, would this obfuscate the issue?

From what I gather (I haven't touched these things since that exact tutorial, years ago!), it really depends on the game.
Some games, you can extract the script almost directly, while others have their script either compressed or split, or other really really fun things. (Read:Not Fun.)
AFAIK, DS roms are actually containers and have folders/files so finding the script is at least a little cleaner than searching through a typical 128MB file.

Good luck, pal!

 

[Czernobog]

And I would use NDStool to unpack the ROM in to its components, correct?