After I pushed this away from me for months now I finally ask for help on this. I need a vwf for Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart.

I have problems programming in ASM, changing little things here and there is ok, but as soon as the routines become of a slightly bigger scope I'm terribly lost and give up easily. Before I drag this on for another year I thought I'd ask if someone would be willing to code a vwf for me. The game is not hard to work with, I can tell you the address of the routine which copies the characters directly into VRAM. All you'd need to do is changing this routine to do the vwf magic.
I already have a completely translated script for the game, it's time I get this done. I'd really appreciate every help. In the meantime I'll code the insertion tool, I'm better with this kind of programming.

Thanks in advance.

http://download.yousendit.com/D2F43A366ABC58B7

Here I bundled up some files, that should be everything needed.

There is an ips file which will insert an English font. It's not properly aligned and not the final font, I use it for testing. The patch will also translate the second line into English, again, best for checking purposes, the rest will still be Japanese. There is also a table file for that font.
Furthermore there is a mini trace of the game's drawing routine, you can use the address of that as a breakpoint as well. The comments are half English and half German and are sometimes intelligent but usually guesswork :p So better ignore them

Last but not least there is a file where I wrote down important memory locations. It contains the RAM addresses of things like where the pointers to the tiles are stored, I think this will be very helpful.

I hope that is enough, it's pretty much all I have. If you need anything else I'll see if I can provide it.

Thanks!

I figured that one out before. It uses DMA!

r3 holds the control word and r4 the DMA register.

I see, no problem. At least others who read this now know what kind of deal they get themselves into

Well, he had other things to do so he couldn't help me after all, yeah.

D o   n o t   m o c k   t h e   T e r r a n i g m a   f o n t ! 

A question to those with some experience:

Would implementing a half width font be a lot easier than a full vwf? I think I would have to rewrite the whole routine as well, so I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to go for a vwf right away.

Ok. I think I'm going to have to step in here and start offering some help. I've taken a brief  look at the information. I don't think it's going to be all that horrible at all. Yes, it's usually always easier to do a fixed width hack versus VWF, especially for a first timer.

So, let's get this straight. The current routine simply DMA's characters DIRECTLY from the ROM to VRAM? I don't know the GBA hardware off the top of my head, so how many bytes does it DMA? What is the size of the font in question here? What is the size you want it to be? It is most likely an even tile length or it would have to use RAM.

If it's 16x16, it might be a matter of simply reducing the amount of bytes transferred and altering the tilemap to reflect it. That would easily get you to 8x16 potentially.

For a fixed width hack, all you're doing is changing the size of your font. You just need to figure out how to reduce the amount of data loaded and probably fix the tilemap to reflect that so you don't have gaps between letters.

The VWF route will be much more difficult becuase you WILL need to use RAM and therefore need to add code to load characters to RAM and then get those tiles to VRAM. And of course deal with the actual VWF logic itself which is hard enough for new people.