Ok I've been looking at this game for about 2 days solid now and I'm yet to get anything out of it.

Before I started I decided that this would be one of those projects I don't stop untill I finish regardless of whether it takes years or no and that way it'll force me into advancing my knowledge since right now I find myself just bouncing from game to game applying what I already know to each. However because of the slow start I'm starting to think it's going to be one of those projects I don't stop untill I get pissed off and decide to stop Just kidding, it has been frustrating so far but I'm determind.

I've put this topic up because I'm having great difficulty finding any graphics or fonts in the ROM and I'm losing track of what I have and have not tried and where something is which I have read. I'm now keeping a little diary of my current attempts so I know what I've tried and it is as follows:

1.Tile Layer Pro and looked through for graphics and font. No Result.

2.YY-Chr and looked through for graphics and font on all settings. No Result except  6ff28 – 1BPP 16x16 maybe a ingame graphic. (Doubtful)

3.Relative Search on the line from Trans2.jpg with:
FU FU N = 28 28 46 = Too many matches
FU FU N * * A TA = 28 28 46 * * 1 16 = Nothing
A TA SHI NO = 1 16 12 25 =  Nothing
A * TA * SHI * NO = 1 * 16 * 12 * 25 =  Nothing
A * * TA * * SHI * * NO = 1 * * 16 * * 12 * * 25 =  Nothing
Relative Search on the first enemy's name:
D R A C = 4 18 1 3 = 3 Matches: 5E10Ch, 7BBC0h, 7E28Dh
5E10Ch increased by 1 affects graphic for first enemy. Text is fine.
7BBC0h increased by 1 affects nothing.
7E28Dh increased by 1 affects nothing.
All increased by 1 affects graphic for first enemy. Text is fine.

4.Romaji Search on the line from Trans2.jpg with:
FU FU N = Too many matches
FU FU N A TA = Nothing
A TA SHI NO = Nothing

Here's the image I'm working with:


I'm calling it a day for today on trying things out and away to read over what I've already read.

Tomorrow I'm going to find out more about FEIDIAN although from one of the topics I read it says "you could, for instance, rip them with FEIDIAN if you're certain you know the format." and I'm not, so that may lead no where.

I'm also going to try and find the document I read about a rather standerd Japanese table - Shift-JIS or something along those lines - and see what I can do with that.

If anyone can throw me a clue as to what I should be looking at it would be greatly appreicated. Oh and the thought that everything is compressed has crossed my mind but how likely is that? Even if it is I'm still going to stick in there till this game is done!

Out of curiosity, are you trying to hack a ROM in .SMD or .BIN format?

It makes a difference. I'm not at home, so I don't have access to most of my information, but .bin is probably the proper format for hacking, if you've successfully found data in .bin format ROMs before. It could be that the graphics are compressed (not uncommon in Genesis ROMs.) If that is the case, you may want to consider choosing another ROM to force your way through, unless you're interested in learning 68K ASM.

If the font utilizes 16 bit values, relative searching isn't going to find anything, and 16 bit values are quite common when kanji are involved. As a last resort, you could always try corruption to find the text in the ROM to see if it's compressed or uses something larger than 8 bit values.

The font is compressed. When its written to ram it comes out as a standard 4bpp linear 16x16 font.

dte and dictionary are primarily used for text. RLE would be the "easiest" graphic compression.
there is a gens tracer and I'd make that my next stop were I you.
even if you don't know any assembly, you can usually just make a trace log and just look through and see if you strike gold. i'm no expert on the megadrive, but if you find some basic programming guides you can probably figure out what vram addresses look like in code, what rom addresses look like, etc. look for those rom addresses in the trace log, corrupt a few bytes around them in the rom, run the game, see if you're able to find the font data that way. once you've found it, the fun part of trying to figure out the compression kicks in. assembly knowledge saves you time, but it is by no means absolutely necessary. most of the time you can reverse engineer these things just by looking at the input and the output. once you know the input, you can dump the vram in an emulator and get the output, and hopefully figure out how one relates to the other.

VRAM is the "Video RAM", similar to the RAM on your graphics card. It stores tilemaps and the data for background and sprite tiles.

There's a starter pack for this game by a man with many names. I could probably get it for you. Fact is I should probably upload it to the site. Anyways it usually deals with the script and graphics. If they're compressed then he'll decompress them.