Hi everyone

I've encountered severals games that uses 2 bytes pointer. This means the pointers can only point to the range from $00 to $FFFF. It's OK with almost Japanese games, but if you translate the game into English or other language, the text block will be much longer and sometimes exceeds the above range. In this case, the pointer can not point to the remaining of text. So I would like to ask how to remedy this without reducing the translation?

For example, the original text block locates at $1E8900 and ends at $1E89FA, pointer value is 0089.
The translation of this block also starts at  $1E8900 but ends at $1F0021 so
the remaining part from $1EFFF to $1F0021 can't be displayed.

And what if I expand the Rom and want to move the above block to $31A200?
I wonder is there anywhere in the Rom that store the index address for all pointers?

Thank you in advance.

Thank your very much, Lenophis. 24 bit pointer is what I'm looking for. The 24 bit ptr can point to everywhere in the Rom, but how to convert the 16 bit one to 24 bit?

I'm just a beginner in Asm.

And once you've done that, you have to expand the pointer table to load 24-bit values, which is going to overwrite some of your original text unless you move it somewhere else, which also is going to require assembly.

I don't know if you changed it in yours, but I recall BoF2 would look at the string number when checking the pointer table. It would by default set the bank value to the ROM bank of the first dialouge bank. If the string number exceeded the (hard-coded) amounts (say like knew string 100 was the first string in bank 2 and string 200 was the first string in bank 3. I forget the actual numbers, but it was that idea) then it would increment the ROM bank in the pointer.

Yes, I've done that before. it's especially useful for games using scripting blocks that contain text intermixed with various scripting commands that may contain relative jumps and other things making it quite difficult to insert different size text without figuring all of the scripting commands out. Instead, from the game's perspective all the original pointers and strings are the exact same as they were in the original.

The drawback however is difficulty of insertion. You probably need a custom inserter to handle inserting to the original location and then adding the far pointer to continue into the new space. I don't think any available utilities do that.

And be mindful with this case. I did this one time and found a few strings that were only 2 or 3 bytes long. Oops.. The new far control and 24-bit pointer wouldn't fit and it overwrote other things. It took me awhile to figure out what happened.