I never understood the whole concept of relative searching.
In relative searching, you search for a
pattern as opposed to a
literal sequence.Quoted from my crappy example on my DevBlog:
Even if you can't actually understand a word of it, pay attention for any patterns of characters in the game's text that are close together in the font. We'll need to know such chinks in the game's armor for our final step, which involves our hex editor's special power tool for table making: the Relative Search function. Relative Search takes a pattern of characters and searches for it in the ROM: if you searched for "king", it would search the ROM for every set of four bytes that have the same relation between them as the letters in the word (which, in theory, will help us determine what values represent what letters). For example, if all our relative search matches for "king" are identical, then it's safe to assume we've found the values for "k", "i", "n" and "g", and we can extrapolate the rest with the aid of the font.
The same thing applies here, only we'll be doing it with Japanese characters. We can't search for "king", but we can search for patterns. Let's assume our font has all the "plain" characters in order and leaves special characters such as dakuten and small kana outside the main run. For the sake of argument, let's say this is a "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" game and we've decided to use the name of those lovable, inescapable Tachikoma as our key. In Japanese, Tachikoma is written in katakana as "TA-CHI-KO-MA", which are close enough in the font for us to Relative Search. So let's take a look at the syllabary, and assign English letters to each one:
A-ko
B-sa
C-shi
D-su
E-se
F-so
G-ta
H-chi
I-tsu
J-te
K-to
L-na
M-ni
N-nu
O-ne
P-no
Q-ha
R-hi
S-fu
T-he
U-ho
V-ma
(Trust me, that "A-ko" isn't in there on purpose. I've never even watched it. >_>)
So the pattern we're looking for is going to be "GHAV". EDIT: Theoretically, 'HIBW' or 'IJCX' would work as well, or anything that keeps the same pattern. If we get results from the Relative Search that are all the same, we've found "TA", "CHI", "KO" and "MA" and can begin work on extrapolating the rest of the table. If not, we'll have to refine our search a bit, maybe choose a different pattern to look for...
But once we're sure we've found the correct pattern, we can start work on the table!
Oh, and Celice? You're from Acmlm, right?