I recently started hacking the game The Highly Responsive to Prayers for the pc98. All of the text is in exe files, but I can't figure out how the pointers work or whether there is a pointer for every input string. Does anybody know a bit more about pc98 hacking or have a friend who does? (there are no documents on it, I checked) PM me if you want to help, and I have the file for the alpha patch (no string lengthening) in my sig.

Edit: the title should be 9821 pointer hacking, if it makes a difference.

That patch de-translates as much as it translates, like changing "heaven" to makai. It also leaves the high score screen and end game screen in Japanese.

I'm translating them as well, to the best of my ability.  Well to say I'll translate the whole series is a bit of a stretch at this point, but it's where I'm headed. Thanks for the tip-offs, not sure how I would contact the maker of the neko tracer, since it looks like he signed in as a guest, dropped of the util, then disappeared (I tried google searching, but no luck.) I think at some point I'll try playing around with the neko tracer to figure out the pc-98 in general, since it can't play the touhou games.

When you start using neko tracer read some docs on 8086 assembly and segments.  Recently I was using Neko Tracer on a game called Aiza.  I found the text routine by searching for a sjis character number in a trace log done by Neko Tracer.  But even with the text routine in front of me I could not figure out how to find the text pointers.

I learned shortly after downloading neko tracer that np2 can't actually run the touhou games, on account of them technically being for the 9821, a slightly later version which seems to have used the 80386 processor.  There was something in the docs about some sort of "soft patch" though for th 2 and 3.

As far as learning some assembly and segments, I've already got some books from my university library, guess I'll see how far I can get into them for now.

Edit: mixing up my 3's and 8's...what's a 30836?

Edit2: I figured out how it accesses and handles the small bits of text, can't figure out much else though. All plain text translated (save one place where the text just wouldn't fit [i.e. Touhou Reiiden --> Touhou: Strange Spiritual Transmissions])

Glad you asked.

30836 Schnittke – named for the composer and teacher at the Moscow Conservatory (’62–’72). He died in ’98.