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11-02-05 12:59 PM
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Acmlm's Board - I2 Archive - Rom Hacking - Hacking GBA Fonts... | |
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dark_archon
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Posted on 04-03-05 08:09 PM Link | Quote
I've hacked some GBA games... it is quite easy to hack texts on this system, but I'm having some problems with hacking the fonts in some of them... They aren't compressed using lz-77 and can't be found using normal tile editors... Are there any other ways to "hide" the font from the romhackers?
Kyoufu Kawa
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Posted on 04-03-05 08:25 PM Link | Quote
Sure there are. Some are in crazy bitdepths. Others are compressed in one of the other schemes available on GBA; RLE and Huffman. Or any combination of the above.

Since the GBA BIOS does all the decompression work, one could watch VisualBoy Advance Devr's Edition's SWI logger for BIOS calls like, in order of thread appearance...

LZ77Uncomp-something
BitUnpack
RLEUncomp-something
and the Huffman call I can't remember.
Gideon Zhi

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Posted on 04-03-05 10:25 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Kawa-oneechan
Since the GBA BIOS does all the decompression work, one could watch VisualBoy Advance Devr's Edition's SWI logger for BIOS calls like, in order of thread appearance...

LZ77Uncomp-something
BitUnpack
RLEUncomp-something
and the Huffman call I can't remember.


That's assuming that the game -is- using the GBA BIOS to do its decompression work - it could very well be using its own proprietary scheme, and lord knows I've seen more than a few games like this.
Xkeeper
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Posted on 04-04-05 12:35 AM Link | Quote
Why would you want to hide it from 'the romhackers' in the first place? You forget that if the font is amazingly good, people will just take a screenshot of it and copy it by cut/n/paste into MS Paint.

()
Gideon Zhi

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Posted on 04-04-05 01:29 AM Link | Quote
Maybe so 'the romhackers' don't change it into a Roman font and hack the game into English? What do 'the romhackers' have to do with mspaint, and where the blazes does mspaint come into the picture anyway?
Xkeeper
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Posted on 04-04-05 01:43 AM Link | Quote
Forgive me, it was early in the morning (for me) and I'm running on empty. After re-reading the post I realized I had mis-interpreted it.

Regardless, I've almost never seen a compressed font, unless you count diffent formats (1bpp, 2bppGB, 2bppNES, etc) compressed.

What ROM are you looking at? Mabye I can take a look and see if I can find it. . .
Someguy

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Posted on 04-04-05 03:02 AM Link | Quote
I came acrost this same problem trying to insert a roman font into Densetsu no Staafy, so if I am lucky I can learn from what you tell him. (For all I know he could be trying to do the same thing)
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Posted on 04-04-05 05:40 AM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Xkeeper
Forgive me, it was early in the morning (for me) and I'm running on empty. After re-reading the post I realized I had mis-interpreted it.

Regardless, I've almost never seen a compressed font, unless you count diffent formats (1bpp, 2bppGB, 2bppNES, etc) compressed.


S'okay!

But regardless, you obviously haven't looked at many games Especially in GBA cases when games often contain the entire SJIS set, it becomes absolutely imperative to compress the font to save space. Some games that I've worked on that I can definitively say had compressed fonts are Clock Tower SFC, Gundamwing Endless Duel, Magical Pop'n, King of Demons, Jutei Senki, Kunio-tachi no Banka, Shin Megami Tensei: if..., Majin Tensei, GD Leen, Yuu Yuu Hakusho and Yuu Yuu Hakusho Tokubehuten. And those are just SNES games Slime Morimori Dragon Quest's font is packed too in a fixed-bit-length sort of compression, it's not exactly BIOS standard stuff.
dark_archon
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Posted on 04-13-05 07:28 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Xkitten

What ROM are you looking at? Mabye I can take a look and see if I can find it. . .


For GBA... that would be 1299 - Worms World Party (U)... 1277 - Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga (U) or... I_don't_remember - Grand Theft Auto Advance

In GTA i was able to find only one of the fonts... which wasn't compressed

Originally posted by Xkitten

Why would you want to hide it from 'the romhackers' in the first place? You forget that if the font is amazingly good, people will just take a screenshot of it and copy it by cut/n/paste into MS Paint.

I am trying to add Polish characters
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