A script is the actual text in the game, not the graphics used for the font (I assume tlp = Tile Layer Pro). You're going to need a script extractor/inserter as well as knowledge of where the game stores it text in the rom (starting and ending offset). There doesn't seem to be any script related tutorials in the doc-section, but this site has one in case you're interested.

Or if you're actually trying to dump graphics, then TLP has an option called import/export bitmap that is used to dump/insert images.

Ok so I did a kana search for a sentence from the game and there was no matches so I tried a few more searches and still no matches am I forgetting a step or does this mean that it uses a compressed font?

If I'm using winhex searching for japanese text will there actualy be kana on the right side or will there just be a bunch of stuff that stands for kana

If you're not so lucky as to have a game that uses an industry standard encoding, you'll proably have to use relative searching. The way relative search works is that rather than search for a specific string of bytes, you use a program that searches for a seqence of bytes that change (plus or minus) by the amount you specify.

As you've already found the font graphics, that may be very helpful. Many games use letter numbers (codepoints) that are in the same order as the graphics in the font.

What I would recommend you do is find a word or phrase you can easily get to in the game, but distinctive enough that there's not likely to be very many instances of it in the game. Then look through the font graphics and locate the characters in your search string. Using the relative offsets of these characters, you might be able to locate the string.

If you find what appears to be your string, edit it and see if it changes in the game. Once you've found some text, you have two tasks ahead of you. These are constructing a TBL file and locating the rest of the text (and related pointer tables). If you found text using the method I gave above, the TBL file should be pretty easy to build as the graphics order would equal the text order.

Once you've got a TBL file, use a hexeditor with TBL support and you should be able to locate the script without too much difficulty. Locating the pointers may be easy or complicated. Some games have the pointers near the text, while others may have them located elsewhere. If you can't find them near the script, you'll have to start searching the ROM for pointers that point and the known beginings of text strings. (Of course, some games don't have traditional pointers.)

Best of luck.

It is if you filled the "space" with color 0 which is treated as transparent.



With systems that use a palette (SNES, GBA, PSX in most (?) cases, Master System, Mega Drive, maybe NES etc.) you should load the palette from a savestate.

IIRC TLP displays the palette as 16 sub-palettes á 16 colors. Have you switched through all of them?

If it's a SNES game then you can use vSNES to view the screenshot scene and find out which palette colors the font uses. (GBA users have it easier with VBA...)