Hi there,

I'm probably going to say a lot of things here where people will say, "Go read this, it should have been obvious you should be reading this," though I guess it's not plainly obvious to me what I should be reading.  Most guides I've been looking through have used SNES ROMs as examples, and a lot of little things here and there are helpful, but it's different enough to be confusing.

I'm playing around with the idea of translating "Fushigi Yuugi DS".  I'd like to think I'm serious enough, but I must admit that the ROM hacking part of it is a steep learning curve for me.  Here, let me tell you where I am and what I already know (which is bound to sound uneducated) -

I gathered my ROM, and upon cracking it open, I was quickly able to find the fonts folder.  I opened it up in a font-reading program and found its tables and the hex and binary each character coresponds with (this includes the romanized alphabet, so I'm assuming I won't need to create any of that on my own).  There's also a folder with many script files (saved as .dat files).  Obviously, when I open those .dat files, it's a bunch of jibberish.  I'm certain that I'll want to either edit those script files or write one of my own.  But, because it's jibberish, I'm not certain what I should be writing.

What should I be doing to read this?  Am I even pointed in the right direction?  If there's something specific in some guide I should be reading instead, I'd certainly like to be pointed in that particular direction, too.  Thanks for any help.

The vast majority of DS games use a standard encoding such as Shift-JIS or Unicode, so you rarely need to create your own table file. Either use an editor like Crystaltile2 that comes with its own tables, or find an existing sjis.tbl for windhex.

Once you've selected the encoding and located the text, you can simply work within the limits of the existing text and replace it, but chances are you will need more room for some lines. In that case you'll need to look for patterns to figure out how the game finds each individual string, and use that understanding to create a replacement file that follows the same rules.