Hello everyone.

I have decided, as a personal project, to try to hack the script of Final Fantasy IV DS. While this is very much a personal project, it's something I'm really serious about and really want to do. I am trying to make some edits to the script in final fantasy iv ds, and i've run into some snags. I am changing some small things like the characters names, since I grew up in an era where naming your character was very much commonplace.

I am not really a total n00b, I have a little bit of rom hacking experience. Coupled with my obsessive compulsiveness, I can't really let this rest until I figure it out.
That being said, I have uploaded a few screens of what I did, what i'm trying to do, and where I'm stuck.

Basically, I've got the characters renamed already on the menu screen and battle screen (please don't laugh at my names, Karl is a character from my comics, and Sara is my name)

I also have found some of the text, which would be the "speculation" text. Everytime you go to your menu on the world map, your character has a little thought bubble, and I was able to edit these no problem.

This is where the problem comes in. I have located what I believe to be the text. I cannot figure out if I need to be making a table, exploring compression, or what.

This is a shot of a file from the game open in a hex editor, and this is where I believe the script is located. The file is called CAST_EVENT_MSD.dat and it is located in the N folder of the rom (probably for "north america"). If you look at the top line, you can see the name "Cecil" very clearly.

I can view bits and pieces of the text throughout in what appears to be unicode, but then there are just garbled symbols, too. and this worries me as well. At the top of this file there is this:

to me this looks like this dat files is calling in files that I cannot find anywhere else. Which leads me to believe that this is some sort of compressed file, but when I look at it in the hex editor, I cannot tell if this is compressed or not. It doesn't look like the examples that i've read about in the countless tutorials that I've read.

Anyway, all of that being said, I was wondering if someone can shed some light on where I need to go from here. Should I be tabling this? Is this compressed? basically what should I be doing to get this script to be to the point where I can edit it?

thank you all for your help/advice/wisdom in advance.

It might be that the names are "hard-coded" into the script. That is, you might have to extract the game's script, replace all the instances of every name, and reinsert it.

Oh, and Deathlike2: the point is, in this version Namingway doesn't modify anything, since the game uses voice acting. When you first meet Namingway, he offers to change Cecil's name, but no matter what you enter in the resulting name entry screen, Namingway discovers he can't rename Cecil and goes off to find a new purpose in the world, setting off an all-new sidequest.

It wouldn't be the first or the last of that happening...


Methinks someone (the devs) tried a little too hard to make something out of nothing.... oh well.

I have a bunch of files that are .mds or .msd files. These seem to contain much of the menu text. I cannot for the life of me find the script though. I was able to find the battle message script, and I changed that too. ...

could it possibly be compressed, and if so, what do I do about this?

I just radiate an aura of not knowing what I'm doing, don't I?

I did some reading up on tables and the like, and I can't really make heads or tails out of it. I thought that was mainly for translation purposes anyway.

once again, any help is much appreciated.

unfortunately, i'm not sure i can help much with the hacking endeavor, but just wanted to say i love The Sword That Cuts Things... Albonshasta introduced it to me a few years ago

all right, we figured this out!