Actually, if you can't learn programming on your own, you're pretty much incapable of being a programmer. Sure, you can be taught how to put programming code into an order that accomplishes something, but that's no more programming than putting together a bunch of grammatically correct sentences that you find on various websites constitutes writing a novel. I'd like to restore a car, and I'm sure I could go get a manual for said car and manage to restore it, but since I have very little mechanical aptitude, I'd never become a mechanic no matter how many successful repairs/restorations I completed. Either you're a programmer or you're not, and if it doesn't come naturally to you, you're not. The first programming language I learned was GW-BASIC back in the 80s. All I had was a little booklet that listed each command and the proper syntax for the command, but no explanation what-so-ever about what the commands actually did. I had to figure it all out on my own, and I did so, writing a text-adventure style game with a few rudimentary graphics. (Full Disclosure: I've been reading Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Stephen Levy (classic book that a lot of programmers and hackers around here would probably enjoy, focusing on the original hackers from the 50s, 60s & 70s, the ones that built the systems, not the later generation that would only try to break it.)


I would think that it would be the other way around. (Though your actual point, of course, was correct.)

English has difficulty differentiating between free as in beer and free as in speech. An environment is assumed when discussing a language and it definitely costs money for a few, but by and large it's free to develop. Sidenote: real men use C.

Try studying a language to become a translator instead. While not necessarily easier to do once learned, the learning process for translating already dumped text isn't as steep.

Myself, I don't often make threads like this because I'm aware of my inability at romhacking and fully acknowledge it. A concept the Pokemon hacking "community" could learn wonders from. Real romhackers find how many n00bs the series attracts so annoying, that few of them have any motivation to take on a serious Pokemon-related project.

It is possible, but not always. A simple LZSS or RLE compression can be implemented purely by guessing, that's right. But if it's anything a bit more complex, like this ( http://phpfi.com/329392 ), one of the two decompression routines used by most Tales of games, then you're pretty much out of luck without debugging.

Not to mention it's faster, too.

The Tales games have another one as well. It, too, starts at 0xFEF, but has RLE mixed in.