I suck at Relative Searching. Yes, I've downloaded all of the programs, and read all the docs. I even searched around the forum a bit looking for a topic that may have the answers I seek (I even found some post Ryusui made that was pretty close, but I didn't quite understand it).

I understand the basics, and I can find table values for games that are already in English. However, I want to know how you go about finding table values for two things in Japanese games: 1) The kana/kanji in the game. 2) The English font (when available).

One example that I'm trying to mess with right now is Chocobo no Fushigi Dungeon on the Wonderswan. It has a full English font (A-Z, a-z) that looks great. However, it doesn't really use it from what I've seen (aside from the occasional HP reference, that sort of thing). I guess the place I may want to start is relative searching for the English phrases I can find; but how would I go about searching for the Japanese phrases. I know that you can Relative Search one of two ways: search using the number equivalent to whatever phrase you're looking for, or just search for the actual phrase (and the relative searching program will relate it in terms of number distance anyway, which is basically the same thing).

Any help pushing me in the right direction would be great. I've been meaning to learn this for a while now, but it doesn't seem like there are any documents for this particular situation.

~DS

Cool, that seems easy enough to understand, especially since the kana in that game are in what I call "standard kana order" (a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc...).

Thanks for the help Kaio. ^_^

~DS

Edit: I tried what you said to do, Kaio, and it didn't really work well. I was looking for the word "Aitemu" (obviously, a common RPG word...) and came up with no results. Mayhaps this is because the numbering of the font wound up over 100 (and there'll be more if I start to number kanji). What I wound up searching for was 82 (a), 83 (i), 100 (te), 114 (mu), obviously minus the parenthetical notes. Did I do something wrong?

Also, there are lots of relative searching programs: Search R, Relativeful Search, Relative Search, plus the relative searchers within other programs (like Thingy and WinHex, for example). What would you guys recommend?

~DS

It helps if you choose a string of characters that are close together in the font and map the range to the alphabet. For example, I finally cracked "King of Bandit Jing" for GBC by searching for ともに:

と=A
な=B
に=C
ぬ=D
ね=E
の=F
は=G
ひ=H
ふ=I
へ=J
ほ=K
ま=L
み=M
む=N
め=O
も=P

So relative searching the string "APC" brought me...well, not straight to the string, but after examining a few false leads, I found exactly what I needed.

アイテム covers too wide a range to be convenient for relative searching...but アイテ would work nicely.

Also note that in some games there are control codes between the characters, so sometimes it's usefull to search values ignoring the bits between each character. For example:

I was trying to find the names of the wrestlers in Final fire pro wrestling. First what I always do, since I can't understand Japanese, I try to search words that have English characters in it. One of them was named WAKA. So I relative searched that and got nothing. So I've introduced a skip value between each character, so I search using: W?A?K?A. With this I've found the player's name, and note how the game uses the '82' to separate the characters:
76 82 60 82 6A 82 60 -> 76 W, 60 A, 6A K

I've noticed that this happens a lot in games that use more than one character table

And I use Translhextion to do my searches

Did you count in hex? You need to...

We've got both EUC and SJIS tables in our database here. They're in the Documents section I think.

I never said I hated relative searching. I said that at this point I can figure out the table a lot easier and quicker using a debugger/tracer.

Use my example. Don't search for the characters, search for the pattern.

ア=a
イ=b
ウ=c
エ=d
オ=e
カ=f
キ=g
ク=h
ケ=i
コ=j
サ=k
シ=l
ス=m
セ=n
ソ=o
タ=p
チ=q
ツ=r
テ=s

If your font is in the exact same pattern as the above sample, then relative search the string "ABS". If it's not...you should be able to work out what to do.