Hi guys, I came to this site a while back hoping to find hackers in need of translating. But now I'd like to learn some hacking myself.  Then I can go ahead and translate whenever I want!

I've started learning on one of my Japanese roms, and I think I'm doing pretty well for a total newbie. I figured out how to find the text, made up a table for the kana and romaji, and dumped a test excerpt of the script (with crude placeholders for its groups of umpteen million kanji, but I can recognize a lot of stuff from the kana alone and can tell it's working)

Now I need to find the font and I'm having a real hard time here.  I'm not sure if it's because the font is compressed or because I'm not using the right tools. (or because I have no clue what I'm doing...) There's bugger all tools for hacking on my Mac, so I'm using my hubby's computer which runs ubuntu. Some of the tile editors I've tried are in Wine rather than their native Windows and I'm not sure if they're really working right.  The one that seems to work best for me so far is Djinn Tile Mapper.  I could have sworn that near the end of the ROM I could star t to make out the "symbols" part of the font where it has punctuation and numerals from 0-9, but they're always a bit stretched and garbled and despite madly flailing at the tile settings, it never comes into focus, so to speak.

I should be able to try more Windows stuff in the near future once my hubby gets a virtual windows machine up and running again in VMWare, in case anyone has some good stuff to recommend.  Are there tricks I should try before assuming the font's compressed? And if it is compressed, what do I do now?

Or of course, if anyone happens to know anything about this game's font in particular, that would be even better, it's SNES Tokimeki Memorial. (I know, shut up  )

allright, that FEIDIAN program's really helping, I can definitely see I've found something now.  But for some reason, 12x12 isn't working for me.  I've played around with lots of different settings, and oddly enough the one that gets things looking lined up the best is... 16x28?     Even that's still off a bit, but it's the only one I've had come out like it's actually in a grid instead of smeared all over the place, and the kana look like they're almost there.

Do games sometimes use 2 different sizes, one for kana and one for kanji?  (although, so far this is the only one I've got looking decent for EITHER group...)

using this command:
./feidian.php -r 16,28,32,32,0x3E8200 tokimeki.smc tokifont2

I got this bitmap:

It’s been years since I looked at tokimemo for SNES, but IIRC there’s more than one group of kanji.

(I am working on the PSX version, myself. In secret.

I do have access to a complete dump of the SNES version, but I still have no freaking clue if it’s okay for me to give it to anyone – if anyone from j2e can give me a go-ahead, I’d appreciate it!)

And yes, the font is stored all weirdo-warp like that. This isn’t normal, but Konami is never “normal”.

The characters are not supposed to be tilted like that. The offset is actually half a character-width to the right, and then the halves are swapped (this is why the left half is lower than the right half in what you have here).

IIRC, Tokimemo SNES stores kanji in SJIS order (which lists kanji in phonetic order at the beginning, pretty much). But I’m not checking here, so I may be wrong.

Well I've made some progress!  I've figured out how to re-insert new font tiles without stuffing it up, and tested it out by hacking all the stats in the stat window.

(...would've liked to insert a screenshot here, but photobucket is just not working for me this morning, will have to try again later)

Might need to play with it more, it looks a bit ugly, but I can fix up the cosmetic stuff later. I'm just glad it finally worked.  Thanks for pointing me to FEIDIAN, it's a really great program.

So now I'm back to looking through the script. I was able to find the stat window and some other random stuff like the girl's profiles at the start of the script.  Then farther down, I've found uncompressed dialogue from the endings.  But in between are big chunks of unreadable stuff except for the odd kana and kanji floating about.  Looks like the script is mostly compressed (no big surprise there).

Now, having the endings is actually pretty sweet, if I could make a patch that translates them that would be a nice accomplishment for me in itself.  But while I'm working on that, I'm hoping I can try and wrap my head around this compression stuff too.  I've looked all over trying to find info on previous Tokimeki Memorial translation attempts, but can't seem to find anything.  Any links or advice will be appreciated!

I understand that the PC Engine version is actually more than one version (identifiable by a glyph on the rear of the package, in Konami's address: star/dot/dot-in-circle/etc., 5 in all).  These apparently have different minigames and so on.  I ripped a couple of different ones once, and noticed different binaries, but I never played it enough to know what was different.

Anyway, PC-E version's script might be nice for a running start, but maybe not so reliable for a 'definitive' script rip.  Maybe the versions on other platforms also have the same variability ?

Yeah, I've heard a lot about this being practically a cursed project.  It's been fun for me to learn the basics of hacking though, by trying to get started on it!

I have plenty to chew on now with the uncompressed text alone, but I'm hoping that trying to figure out the techy stuff too in the meantime might help give me a distraction when translating gets too tiring.  I'm also planning to make lots of SMALL patches.  (once I figure out how to make patches...)  If I make it through the uncompressed stuff, my first goals in the compressed text will be translating the "bonus" characters of Miharu and then Rei, who never get in on the standard dating procedure.

oh yeah, Photobucket's finally working again:
("Lit" is slightly dodgy as a translation, but makes a nice short stat for your "book-learning". "Trivia" is much more dodgy, but mangling "General Knowledge" down to some crazy abbreviation doesn't seem right. I think "trivia" works okay when the main way you get it is just chatting with your buddies)

Just wanna point out, if you finish this translation you'll be my hero forever. This was even the game that brought translation hacking to my attention in the first place back in... I don't know... Maybe 99? Well, this or Seiken Densetsu 3... And been longing to play it even longer, since 96 atleast. And thus you=hero.