So I've been trying to translate "Summon Night - Swordcraft Story - Hajimari no Ishi" for GBA to English. I do not know Japanese but I believe if i could first manage to get a text dump using a table file, than with alot of babelfish, online Japanese dictionaries, and self-interpreting the babelfish gibberish, I could make the game somewhat playable to myself. I am however going to be taking a Japanese class next year and if I can succeed now I will continue work on it to make a better translation.

Now, aside from that, mainly what I'm having trouble with is making a table file. I do not know if I'm failing to follow all of the guides so far, or if I just picked a really bad game to start with. So far, after a few hours and multiple attempts I haven't managed to even get started. I'm assuming the characters are in a wierd order, but have had no luck so far. I've tried checking a tile editor but I'm pretty new to rom hacking and failed to find... Anything. Searching through all the tiles I managed to find what looked like sort of a big, wrongly colored boss, but not a single other thing.

For those who have no idea what game this is, something that might be helpful is that in the name selection it has full Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji/English (uppercase and lowercase), and some other things including roman numerals. It also seems to have some Kanji, but I have no idea how many. I came across a table file with addresses starting with 8 that had all of that and a few thousand Kanji, but that didn't work for me.

So yeah, if anyone could help I'd appreciate it. I've so far failed to find where to start.

Update: I've been working at it and... It appears to be Shift-JIS, but messed with. The bytes are reversed. For example: Hiragana "a" is normally 82A0, but here it is A082.

That's not the confusing thing. The names I chose for 2 save files are, in hiragana, "a ka sa ta" and "ta sa ka a" and here's the results:


The top one should be "a ka sa ta", but it's, with known bytes replaced with character:
sa ka a 0288 0000 9383 0000 ta
and the second, which should be "ta sa ka a":
ka sa ta 0288 0000 9383 0000 a

The pattern repeats obviously, where the 4 characters are in the order "3214"

So I tried a new character with the name "Snyper" in English - and here's what I got:
8299 828E 8272 0280 0000 8292 8285 8290
With known bytes replaced with the text they represent:
y n S 0280 0000 r e p

Using this knowledge I've tried searching the rom with the bytes for "arigatou" (one of the first words in the game) in a few different ways, including normal, forwards text. No luck so far. I'd really appreciate help. Thanks.

Unicode doesn't map directly to characters. This doesn't look like UTF-8 or UTF-16, though, so it's probably some random ordering.

A name in a savestate shouldn't be compressed.

Psst. Hey Snyper. I changed some menu text, along with the naming dialog.

It's obvious that either we're searching wrong somehow...
Or that this game stores the regular dialog in a different manner.

I was looking at it to see if it had a different font, but it looks almost, if not identical.

Well at least I have the offsets for where almost everything in the menu starts at.
This include weapon recipes, I believe.



Can anybody tell us how to find out if dialog is compressed?

Do a trace while running a textbox. You'll be sure to get the code in there. Dump the ram and search in there. The string should be uncompressed in ram. After you find that you set a breakpoint at that position in ram. If you step backwards or look at the trace you should be able to see where it's loading from and it's compression scheme.