Which version? How much previous hacking experience do you have?
I'm using Revision 01 (although I don't know what the actual difference between revision 01 and 02 is.) As for previous hacking experince, I'm a novice on almost every account. I can edit text with a hex editor and table file, and edit uncompressed tiles with a tile editor. That's about all I know. I was messing around with the rom to fix up some of the spelling and grammar in Naflign's patch, as well as "retranslate" the parts he left alone (ie the pregame text that explains the history of Motavia, some townspeople speech, etc). I'd eventually like to learn some assembly, but as of now I can't do much more than that. That's the reason why I want to draw "condensed" tiles to have a few 5 letter words displayed with 4 tiles (and 4 letter words with 3 for the use/give/toss menu) instead of changing the size of the actual menus.
Hmmm, something doesn't seem right here. I'm curious as to how you've determined that the font is compressed. Is the rom still interleaved? A good indication is the file extension, and no simply changing the extension won't change it being interleaved.
I'd thought about that as well. *.smd files dumped by the Super Magic Drive are interleaved, but aren't all Genesis roms in bin format already de-interleaved? I'm editing Phantasy Star II (U) (Rev01).bin, patched with Naflign's retranslation patch. Since the patch worked flawlessly, I figured that the rom I'm using is indeed in bin format, not just a renamed smd file. The tiles may in fact not be compressed, but if they aren't then they're likely in a format that Tile Layer Pro and a couple of other programs aren't able to use. Edit: Also, I did remember to switch TLP to "genesis" mode, as it tends to display bin files in 1bpp when you open them.
Well, there generally aren't many tools for Genesis. There's a
couple of tracers for Genesis, which is about all I can suggest. There's nothing specific for PS2 in the database, unfortunately.
My apologies about the lack of help, all I can suggest is the interleaving from earlier.
No need to apologize, I appreciate the fact that you replied in the first place. I'll take a look at those tracers; I was using Gens Kmod earlier to determine the font's location in the ROM. Unfortunately, when I checked that location in Tile Layer, there wasn't anything that resembled the font. There was, however, a couple of "garbage" tiles underneath where the font was supposed to be that looked identical to the "garbage" underneath the font when I was viewing the VDP in Gens. I'll check out revision 02, as well as try to de-interleave the rom I'm using to see if that was the cause. Thanks
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