Ok... I'm not sure if I'll get anywhere with this, but I figure it's worth a try...

I've been interested in translating games from Japanese to English and know enough basics to do simple translations and after looking up words can piece together stuff that makes sense. My problem is that I can't actually get started on the insertion of text. I've taken English ROMs before, figured out how to make tables of the text, loaded it into Thingy, and edited the text in the ROM before, no problem. The problem is that I can't seem to be able to make any tables for Japanese characters. Maybe I'm missing something in the process of doing it, but it has me thoroughly confused.

I've read some translation guides here, but none were too helpful. One said how to search for a few of the hiragana characters, but every hiragana phrase I looked for contained characters not listed in that guide. Another just told me to search for the words in Relative Search, but offered no guidence on how I should be conducting my searches when we're talking Japanese characters.

Does anyone know of either a more in-depth guide dealing with Japanese to English ROM translation or can personally offer some guidence on how to go about figuring out my search so that I can actually make a table? Once I get my table properly in order, I know I can insert the English text back into the games easily enough.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for the reply.

I've tried two different games that I was hoping to translate, running them through TLP... it seems that I get nothing but a bunch of garbage pixels scattered all over the place with nothing resembling the letters/characters of either game, unfortunately...

I guess that means they both use compressed fonts, so I'm out of luck...

well these are GBA games so I didn't think they had any alternate storage modes for that... I did briefly look at the 1BPP, 2BPP, 3BPP, and SNES version of 4BPP, as well as GB modes briefly to see if they looked any more sensible, but they kinda just looked the same with different colors... I didn't scan through the entire thing in those modes though because that's a lot to look for... plus you can't actually see how far to the right the thing goes since there's no scrollbar on that one... I can tell when I reach the bottom because of the main scrollbar, but for side-to-side, I could be going forever @.@

Is there any way to easily tell what mode it correct or will it take scrolling through the thing forever in every single mode available?

The FF Advance games store their fonts in VB 2BPP mode, not sure if that's common for GBA games or not but it's a start. Compression is also a possibility, if you're lucky it just uses the GBA's built-in LZ compression, we have at least one tool that will scan the entire ROM for that in the database.

Yes



Hrm. That does appear to be the location of the font. Once you got there, did you try switching through the various modes again? Also, you might try Tile Molester, as well. It supports more formats than Tile Layer Pro. Judging by the screen shot, you've found the correct location but not the correct format.

It's not uncommon. A game can use any size font and yours apparently doesn't use 8x8, the "standard" tile size. One good thing about Tile Molester is that it allows you to set the block size, which will allow you view graphics that aren't stored in basic tile structure. (I'm pretty sure I'm utilizing completely inaccurate terminology in describing this, but it will make sense once you play around with it.

(As for how to determine the proper block size, which will most likely be your next question after experimenting with TM.... I can't help you much there. I just try random values (between 1-16) until everything is automagically organized. Perhaps someone else can explain what exactly the block size is and how to determine it, I'd like to know myself.)

I'm going to go out on a limb, here.  You are trying non-square sizes, right?  Fonts do not have to be exactly 8x8, 12x12, 16x16, although it's convenient to develop fonts in native tile sizes. Try something else, like 12x8, 8x12, etc.  The "slanted" look of the image would suggest that the final data size of the format that you're using doesn't match the expected size.  Otherwise, it should line up horizontally.  As always, though, take my advice with a block of salt.

BTW, does Tile Molester handle non-square images?

Upon further investigation, it seems that I might not have been actually changing the tile size after all... the option I was using is Block Size. I have no idea what the difference is, but it's not what I want apparently. When I turn the Tile Grid on, the grid shows around an 8x8 square still and I can't seem to change that. I have the block set to 16x16 but I'm not even sure what that means. I looked through various menus and was unable to see an option to change the tile size, so I'm pretty much lost here @.@