Since I don't know Japanese and I'd still be interested in playing lots and lots of untranslated games, are there emulators for either GBA or SNES with a text hooking feature? Recently I saw FCEUXD SP edition for NES which this so maybe there may be something similar for other consoles as well.

Sorry, OP, there's no magic bullet.  Learning kana well enough to be able to type up menu options and items into a dictionary or machine translator really doesn't take too long, so I'd recommend going with that option.


With such pleasant personalities like yourself on RHDN, you really wonder why?  Where is this "and still doesn't" insult coming from?  How do you know what I have and haven't learned in the last couple of years?  If you want to trash my software go right ahead, but there's no reason to trash the coder.

This was a personal project that I never widely distributed.  It worked on my then-current XP installation and that was good enough for me.  Somebody added it to RHDN and then someone else pulled it into FCEUX (which they really shouldn't have).  It is naturally not a useful rom hacking tool since it has nothing to do with rom hacking.

There was no insult intended. I was simply going by the news posts. What you can and cannot do is entirely your business.

cYa,

Tauwasser

I'm sure you can ASM hack a GBA game to do text hooking in VisualBoyAdvance with an unmodified emulator.  Just use the VBA_PRINT SWI call that only exists on VBA.  Find where the game reads its characters, turn them into Shift-JIS, run VBA with applocale, and hook away!

The reason Text Hooking works so well on a NES is that games have a read only font that's actually made up of tiles.  GBA games tend to draw text into tile data.

The hardest part would be converting to SJIS. Assuming a little ASM knowledge the easiest way to accomplish that would be a simple lookup table.

For the game Tomato Adventure , I went ahead and found the text routine. At 806DF10, there is the instruction ldrb r1,[r0]. This loads the next character to display into r1.

To make a text hooking routine I would replace this instruction with a call to my own routine. Use a bl your_address if the location you intend to put your routine is in range, if not use ldr r1,=your_address, push r14, bx r1 (note: I chose r1 because it will be overwritten, it's not a value we need to save).

The text hooking routine would probably look something like this:


For the lookup table you can use this chart to see what values you should use. http://www.rikai.com/library/kanjitables/kanji_codes.sjis.shtml

That code is completely untested but should give you a general idea of what you want to do. I know it probably looks like gibberish to someone uninitiated in ASM, but it's really not that difficult of a hack.

If you give an example of a game you'd like to hook I'd be willing to write a simple patch for you (I'm curious to see how well this would work myself).

Proof of concept text logger hack.



I haven't got AppLocale setup yet, but if I save the output I can read it in JWPCE perfectly. Note that is two boxes of dialog. You could play through a cutscene, dump the output and read it in JWPCE (which has a built-in dictionary, so if you can figure out basic grammar you can get a much better idea of what's going on than if you use Google Translate).

Source Code: here
IPS patch: here

This doesn't support Kanji, but that'd be as simple as adding a second lookup table.

Do you think it's an endian issue?

I can't get AppLocal to work, well I can't figure out how to install Japanese locale, so it's hard to test. Yeah, I didn't code the part for Kanji, but I will if you guys would like to use it.

You know, I bet it wouldn't be too difficult to make an app that automates the ASM hack. I think the hook routine could be generalized pretty easily.

Seems like a typical double conversion issue. Why not use Unicode in the first place?

cYa,

Tauwasser