A few days ago I started looking into Rom hacking. I know very little, but I'm trying my best. I'd like a little help.

I am currently trying to edit text in the NES version of Bard's Tale (1st one). I basically only want to rename the classes. I was told to get an emulater such as Nesticle, FCEu or any other emulator that allows one to view pattern tables. I did this, and I then went to the PPU Viewer mode of FCEu. It showed me numbers, an alphabet, etc. I moused over all the numbers and letters in order to find their hex code (I think that is what it is called), and I made a table (.tbl file) such as AC=S, 99=9 and so on like I was told.

I then opened the Rom with A.X.E editor and tried to find the word Sorcerer, SORCERER and ACC3C5B6B8C5B8C5 with no luck. I merely want to replace a few class names in the game with names of my own, but I am apparently lacking the necessary skill. Any help is appreciated.

P.S. I gave you the above information based on my most recent attempts. I've actually tried several emulators, hex editors, how-tos on Rom editing and whatever else. Guess a few days isn't enough to grasp it all or something. :S

lol Well, that was simple enough to know. I did notice the "orcerer" and "izard" and such, but I didn't think that it meant those words were not formed from the regular font or alphabet.

I found your string (ACDFE0E1E2), so now I'm just messing around with how to edit it. I put regular letters in the ASCII side (think it is called that), but that obviously didn't work... lol Anyway, I'll mess with it some time longer then say something here if I need more help.

Thanks a lot!

Yeah, I'm using WinHex now. I'm simply finding and replacing class text with text of my own. Seems to be working.

From the screenshot posted above, it looks like it only uses squishy tiles for the class names.

This most likely possible.

Hopefully this will clarify things rather than confuse you more.  If it confuses you, disregard what I say:

The NES doesn't know what letters or words are.  All it does is draw specific tiles at specific points on the screen.  Likewise, the game doesn't really have "words", per se.  Instead it just has a set of tile ID numbers which get drawn.  This is why you need table files for text editing -- the actual "text" isn't really text.

The graphics of these tiles represent letters, so the end result is that it looks like words are on the screen.  For example... if the game tells the PPU to draw the hex string:  "AC DF F0 F1 F2" -- the PPU would just draw the graphics for those tiles.  Now, if you look at the pattern tables in FCEU (that PPU viewer), you'll see that tile 'AC' has a graphic for the letter 'S', and DF,F0,etc are the squished 'orcerer ' tiles.  The end result is that the tiles drawn onscreen look like the word "Sorcerer "

If you were to, say, change the 'F0' in that string to 'AD', you'd find that the squished 'ce' tiles (tile F0) would be replaced with a wide 'T' tile (tile AD), and thus it would look like "STcerer "

So if you wanted to change 'Bard' so that it doesn't use squishy tiles, you'd find '9B DD DE' ("Bard " with squishy tiles) and replace it with '9B B4 C5 B7' ("Bard" with normal letter tiles).  The problem with this, of course, is that the latter is 4 bytes, while the former is 3 bytes, so you'd need more space, and you'd probably have to do some pointer manipulation if you have to move things around to get that space (but that's another topic)

This isn't really much of a problem for your Sorcerer -> Conjurer example (as they're both 8 letters, or rather that Conjurer isn't bigger than Sorcerer).

I found the letter graphics easily enough with Tile Molester (1bpp planer, about halfway down) although I had to use the 'back byte' button twice to get them to align properly:


as you can see this is just a simple graphics hack to something like:


and then changing your ACDFE0E1E2 to 9CDFE0E1E2 so that the S is now a C.

This won't be quite as easy if the new class name is larger. That will take some working with pointers and such as Disch said.

EDIT:
Went ahead and tried this out, and it worked:


although there was another ACDFE0E1E2 in there that might mean nothing, or it might be a different display somewhere. Did this help at all?

Java executables are .jar files.  If you double-click the .jar file it will start up and run like a normal exe.

I downloaded YY-CHR, and it worked well. I modified two class names with it and modified a lot of text in game with WinHex.

Thanks again for the help.