Hi, some of you may remember (probably not) the minor patch I released for Crayon Shin-Chan Ora to Poi Poi (Famicom) a few years back. I have since dropped that project (as well as the Angelique Super Famicom game I'd picked up but was never able to make progress on) mainly due to loss of access to the files I was working with.

I am considering coming back to the ROM translation scene and picking up Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School (Miho Nakayama's Heartthrob High School) for Famicom Disk System. However, I have some questions in regard to FDS games.

-I know Nintendo of America has taken a lot of legal action against ROM sites, but have they done anything to fan translators? Since this is a first-party Nintendo game, I'm slightly concerned. However, I don't really think this game would be marketable today even in Japanese, and certainly not widescale in English, without a total revamp (Miho Nakayama is nowhere near as famous/popular as she was back in 1987, and even if she was still successful and bothered to make an international debut, she's well past high school age now.)

-This game has what I /think/ is DTE (I'm really not sure, could someone check it out for me? I'd post a screencap, but right now the machine I'm working with isn't connected to the internet, though I suppose I could burn one to a CD and transfer it over later if needed). I've only done very basic rom hacking before, where tables were clear. I've looked for tutorials on working with DTE-compressed rom text, but there wasn't much I found, and what I did read didn't make sense to me. Does anybody have any advice in regards to working with (and altering) this kind of text? I'm guessing already I might need to look for a team to work with, but I want to see if I can work alone on this first.

-How do I get a table file for a Famicom Disk System game? Nesticle won't run on my machine, and I don't think that had FDS support anyway (been a while since I've used it). Similarly, what graphics program is best for FDS? I tried it in Tile Layer Pro, but no format looked quite right (in addition to apparent DTE, I couldn't find the ASCII that I've seen in at least a handful of in-game instances - it may contain a full roman alphabet table already, but I'm not sure).

-Any general advice on script dumping would be great. As I am really just a beginner, skill-wise, when I did work on the Crayon Shin-Chan game I just played the game, chose text that I saw while playing, and translated it. Is there a way to just be sure I have everything by extracting certain data from the ROM?

Thanks in advance, and I hope to get something going here.

"DTE" is Dual-Tile Encoding. That is, certain bytes are actually "abbreviations" for commonly-occuring pairs of characters. To make use of it yourself, you'll have to find the table that tells the game which bytes to insert in place of the single-byte abbreviations. You won't be able to tell for sure, though, until you can make a table and examine the game's script yourself.


FDS uses NES-format graphics. The font might be offset by a few bytes: use the plus and minus keys to make it line up properly. As for an emulator, I recommend FCEUXD, which you can get here on romhacking.net. I have not tested FDS support on it myself, but *.fds format files appear in the Open ROM dialog's filter, so give it a try. FCEUXD has an excellent debugging suite including map and tile viewers, so assembling a table with it should be a simple matter.


Use a tool like romjuice (also available on this site), or code your own (easy with Microsoft's free Express compilers and IDEs for the .NET framework). The latter option might be a bit out of your reach, but romjuice has served me well translating Sylvanian Families (don't ask XD). As for finding the script, your main options are just to hunt down the text in the ROM, work out the block length and pointer format, and dump what you find. If something shows up in the game that's not in your dumped scripts, go back and look for it.

That's not DTE, that's a 1BPP font, switch from 2BPP NES format to 1BPP and you should be able to view it fine.

I wrote a DOS program (FDS Builder) that'll rip FDS images apart, into seperate files, and paste them back together into a new disk image. Should be in the Utilities section of this site.
Should be easier to find fonts (it'll create a text file listing the files it ripped. Then look for any type "1" files, those represent stuff that gets directly copied to PPU RAM (though Dracula 2 compresses the graphics into Type "0", which is CPU stuff).

That'll also make pointers MUCH easier to calculate (if the game uses pointers, it'll just be the offset in the file, plus the RAM offset the file is to be loaded into, which is a number this text file will give you).
Otherwise, if you directly hack the *.fds, then to calculate a pointer, you'd have to find the text offset in the .fds, and subtract it from the start of the file within the disk image, then add the file's RAM offset (and that is another topic in itself).

EDIT: How could I forgot that FCEUXD SP has a hex editor built in?  You could find pointers that way too. If you know the hex values for a string, go to the hex editor while playing, and search for it in CPU RAM. Find the offset of a matching result, and there's your pointer value.

As for tile numbers, yep, FCEUXD SP will tell you the tile number in the PPU viewer. Supports FDS games well. It'll write saves back to the FDS disk image you loaded. (the last official FCEUltra would try to write saves to a copy of the FDS image. Unfortuantely, it would tend to forget saves sometimes, especially when ROM hacking becomes an added factor)
Another a big warning about save states: USE THEM AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE! Might want to delete them when you're done with them, too. FCEUltra copies the .fds into the savestate (some version encrypt it to make the savestates grey-legal to distribute). When you load a savestate, it'll restore the disk image to the point it was saved. I wiped out a week's worth of Sword of Kalin hacking with a single keypress! (lucky I could rebuild it just as quickly with my tool above)

I think I saw your utility somewhere but didn't download it because I wasn't sure I understood the description. I'll check it out now, thanks.

I don't know how to edit pointers yet.

What is FCEUXD? I did a search for FCE Ultra on this site, but the only result said it couldn't handle FDS. I've never been able to get FDS images working on my regular FCE Ultra (for some reason only VirtuaNES will on my machine, I don't know if it's something I'm doing or the version I have).

Is that savestate issue true for all emulators, or just FCEUXD?

This was more than a year ago (probably two or three). I know someone else has been interested and contacted me at one point in an effort to get the files, but I don't have them (hopefully she got in touch with Marfisa who started the project).

God, am I that rusty? -_-;

*wishes there were an Objection! for Phoenix's "oh crap" mode*