ROM Hack Translating/rom hacking.

[Mraellis]

Hi all,
I'll start by saying you've probably heard this a million times but I've got a couple of questions about translating and editing an xdelta patch. I've been having a look through the unfinished translations today and I have noticed a few that I would like to finish that already have released states, for example Dragon Quest IX. All I want to do however is basically see whatever has been done in text and sit and translate that text to English and put it back in for people to read when playing. To do this how would I go about it? Would I be best just helping a team translate a game or is there a simple way to open the xdelta file and see what's been done and just continue it? Like I said I basically just want to get the Japanese and make it English as simply as possible. Surely that will be easier with a half done project?

Sorry to sound noobish but I just figure I could be of help translating a few games now and then,
Mraellis.

 

[FAST6191]

Starting from an existing translation is probably the easiest and maybe even best starting point.

You could edit the xdelta patch itself (I have no format description to hand but source is available http://xdelta.org/ ) but frankly that is a somewhat backwards way to go about it.

You have a few choices here

You could try and join a team but this could be difficult.

You could try and get some information out of the team- most DS translations are relatively open so that should not be too hard.

You could just take what the team has already done and run with it.

Any hex editor worth anything will have a file compare function will be able to compare two files and highlight differences. DS roms are fairly big but few, if any, hackers will add extra files to a rom so you can always pull the rom apart, hash the files (CRC check is good enough) and compare against the same rom but with the translation applied.
This will show the files that have been changed allowing you to narrow in on them and as you already know what the game will say you can rapidly figure out the basic encoding format (these two things are the hard parts of hacking, most things after this are just boring or long winded)

 

[DarthNemesis]

You can't just edit a patch; you'd have to apply it to the game, edit the game's script files, then create a new patch. Figuring out how to edit the game files can be complicated, so you'd be much better off just offering your translation abilities to the patch's creator or to another existing project.

And don't bother with DQIX, it's getting an official release.

 

[Mraellis]

Thanks for the help guys especially you fast. It appears I may be helping out in something now already..

I might still try the hexedit route on DQ9 because it sounds like it was mostly done and Square still haven't announced a release date so I reckon it will be a while till we get it.

I'd prefer to ask the team that was working on it though and continue from that as it seems easier. Who where they?