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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - ROM Hacking - What is the most efficient way to obtain a game script? |
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bakuretsu Newcomer                Since: 01-14-07 Last post: 6313 days Last view: 6306 days |
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| It seems to me that the first step in any major text edit hack is to gain a full understanding of the original script (dialogue, menus, any on-screen text). While one could simply play a game over and over until it is memorized, that's time-consuming and it would still be useful to have a copy of the script handy for later reference.
Some possibilities I have considered: 1. Use a program that extracts all the text from a rom. From what I've seen in the downloads section on this site, it appears that this is only possible with a very few games for which custom programs have been written. 2. Use a hex editor that allows one to extract all intelligible text from a file. I don't think such a feature exists in any hex editor, and I read here that most roms do not contain intelligible text. 3. Use a hex editor that performs relative searching and extracts all then-intelligible text from a file. Again, I don't think this is possible with existing programs. I imagine there's a complicated manual process for doing this. 4. Use an OCR program (such as Kleptomania) to copy-and-paste on-screen text as it appears. 5. Use an OCR program that automatically captures on-screen text as it appears and appends it to a text file. I don't think such a program exists, but it would be nice. It may be possible to write an Auto Hotkey script to do this. 6. Just transcribe the text by hand as it appears. This is exactly the tedium I hope to avoid. Does anyone have any links to programs, links to tutorials, keywords to search for, or general advice on this subject? |
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Gideon Zhi Keese     Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 6282 days Last view: 6279 days |
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| You basically want to do a relative search to determine how the dialogue is stored and generate a table file. Then you'll scan through the rom using a hex editor, noting where text begins and where it ends; following this, you'll use a text dumper like Romjuice to extract the text from the game.
Romjuice is a generic dumper. It's also open source, so it can be modified as necessary. some games won't like being dumped with a generic dumper, but that's just the way it goes... you can mod Romjuice (or something similar) to do what you need it to, or write your own. Transcription is worthless because the text is often stored out-of-order; your OCR suggestions will provide similar results. There's always going to be some element of human agency in the dumping of a script, whether it be the development of a custom app for a particular game or the utilization of a generic dumper like Romjuice. You can't expect a magic button that'll just make the text appear on your harddrive :p |
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bakuretsu Newcomer Since: 01-14-07 Last post: 6313 days Last view: 6306 days |
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| These are all good keywords: text dump, script dump, romjuice.
The process you describe is just so convoluted, I don't think it would be worth doing, except as a first step in actually replacing the text. I mean, if you're going to replace it all, I guess you might as well do this. If you're only replacing parts of it, though, or doing a remake, then it would make more sense to find a more efficient method. I don't think the most common method--or accepted method--is necessarily the best method. |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 6282 days Last view: 6279 days |
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| Well, given that what I do is completely replace Japanese scripts with English ones, then yeah, for my purposes it is the best method.
*shrug* |
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Dwedit Rope フクト オン フォニクス   Since: 11-17-05 From: Chicago! Last post: 6281 days Last view: 6280 days |
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| What game? Usually for NES games, you can hand-make a TBL file based on the pattern tables, then view the rom in a hex editor which uses TBL files. I'm saying usually, since some games do not have an exact match between the pattern tables and values to encode each character, such as M.C. Kids which uses ASCII text, but begins the font lower than character 0x20. (edited by Dwedit on 01-15-07 08:37 AM) (edited by Dwedit on 01-15-07 08:38 AM) |
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