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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - ROM Hacking - Compressed? gba rom... |
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Shiri Newcomer                Since: 08-16-06 Last post: 6471 days Last view: 6471 days |
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| I'm trying to translate a japanese GBA rom into an english one..
My problem is the font. It's japanese, ofcourse.. but I'm afraid it is compressed. I searched in Tile Layer Pro, but couldn't find it and when I searched for words in relative searcher, it finds no matches. I have a few questions.. - How extactly do you know if it's the font that's compressed, or the graphics? Or both? - Are there good tutorials on how to decompress those things? - If you need ASM, same question as above... are there good tutorials for it? (where to find them? I searched google, tried romhacking.net, etc.. I heard someone named 'gbaguy' had one, but his site is offline..) Just so you'd know.. I do know how to change & edit text, graphics, work with tables, etc.. in normal, english roms. Thanks  (edited by Shiri on 08-16-06 08:17 AM) |
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Kyoufu Kawa Intends to keep Rom Hacking in one piece until the end       Since: 11-18-05 From: Catgirl Central Station Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| Super Happy Anecdote Time!
I was prodding around Chobits, which is in Japanese, and couldn't find the text -or- font, looking for the random tech in one scene. Then I went upstairs to... hmm... distract myself... and realised it might be 16-bits, like Unicode. It was. Added wildcards between each letter pair and got on a roll. |
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interdpth Mole MZM rapist Since: 11-18-05 Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6284 days |
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| Ok, well you can do this download Visual Boy Advance Development edition
Before the scene with the text go to Tools, then Logging then enable SWI logging. Next Load up the Tile Viewer to see where the font goes in RAM hopefully the SWI logger will tell you the compression function used |
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Shiri Newcomer Since: 08-16-06 Last post: 6471 days Last view: 6471 days |
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Originally posted by interdpth Well, that might be a problem since I have no clue how to decompress.. .. so bassicaly.. I don't know what to do.  |
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Gideon Zhi Keese  Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 6287 days Last view: 6284 days |
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| Here are a few things you might want to try.
First, scour the rom using a number of different display modes in TLP. Just because the game's a GBA game doesn't mean that all of its graphics are going to be stored in "GBA" mode. Very few SNES games store their fonts in "4bpp SNES" mode, simply because it takes up four times as much space as a 1bpp monochrome mode and twice as much as 2bpp "GG" mode. Second, when relative searching... 1) Try using wildcards between your characters. Kawa's right - a lot of GBA games store their text in 16-bit mode, with an extra byte between each character. Those extra bytes help determine which character is shown if the font contains more than 256 characters, and most Japanese games contain -way- more than just 256 characters. 2) It may seem like a no-brainer to some, but only search for letters of like capitalization. Super Robot Taisen's names are great for this - you'll find "DAITETSU" in dialogue, that's something great to search for. But if you try looking for "Cybuster" or "Gespenst", your relative searcher will get confused between the uppercase and lowercase letters, and the accuracy of your results will decrease dramatically. Third, and this may also seem a no-brainer, but a point to be aware of is that fonts and text are two very different things. When you're relative searching, you're looking for actual text data, whereas with fonts you're looking for visual, graphical data. They may be connected - each character in the font data is usually tied to one or two bytes in the text data - but they're not the same thing. Sorry if you already know this, but it wasn't entirely clear from your first post exactly what you were talking about You're not going to be relative searching for font data, and likewise, simply changing the font won't translate your game for you. (Unless your game stores its text -entirely- in pictures, which while incredibly uncommon, isn't entirely unheard of...)
Last, in the event that you do find one but not the other, it's always possible that any given game might compress its text while not compressing its font. The opposite is also true. Hell, one game I'm working on stores -part- of its font uncompressed, while the rest of it (and its text, as well) is very much compressed. It really depends on the game. |
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DarkPhoenix Red Goomba Since: 12-27-05 Last post: 6289 days Last view: 6289 days |
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| As far as the graphics (fonts) go, you can try running the program through UnLZ-GBA.exe (it's packaged with EliteMap, I believe. Check the Pokemon Hacking forum, in the Program Resource thread). But interdpth's method is really the best way to go about it, I think. You don't need to know how to decompress it, just if it's compressed. If the SWI logger says something like "lz77UnComp" when the font is loaded into RAM, you know it's compressed. Someone (I think it was Interdpth) gave some good step by step instructions on how to do it, in regards to Metroid hacking, a while back.
Run through Gideon Zhi's methods first, though - checking the different display modes will find it 90% of the time. Scroll slowly. The Capitals vs. Lowercase is good general advice, though it doesn't apply to Japanese, so much as Hirigana vs. Katakana. Since I doubt many programs really play nicely with the Input Method Editors, I'd imagine it'd be easier to use relative searching for text after you've changed the font to an english one. |
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