I'm having trouble in locating the pointers for this SNES ROM, it is LoROM/SlowROM
so Xcalibur's Pointer Doc's process should work, but I am stumped.

ROM: Ultra Baseball Jitsumeiban (J).smc

Thanks KaioShin, that explains the pointers that ROMs use, I think I got
it now.

Unfortunately the pointer doc doesn't specify exactly what text bytes are
the start (could be the first or last bytes) so I tested with both - though
after carefully reading I believe it is the last bytes' offset.

My example:

Text: ヘoナント
Hex: AC5FA4BDA3
Offset (AC): 6E63
Offset (A3): 6E67

I then subtract the SNES header, which is 200 and add 8000 since the hex
is not between 8k and FFFF:

Pointer (AC): EC63 (63EC)
Pointer (A3):  EC67 (67EC)

Neither of these are the pointers, I even take it a step further and tried
it w/o the 8000 and tested multiple strings...I can't seem to find it. Unfortunately
I haven't found any documents that discuss SNES Pointers.

The doc states that the end bytes maybe different making it very difficult
to find, so I did a test by a "replace all" to see if the bytes are found
and no such luck...guess I am doing something wrong?

It's a seperate character (byte) in that font system so it's written wrong in the table (o=5F), the hex values are correct though. Unfortunatly that's not the problem  :'(

A big thanks RedComet for the help, I appreciate it 

Ah OK I see, yes it works now searching for the text, text searching wasn't working on that charcater 

Not sure what you mean by the address $200? The last byte's offset is: 0007FFFF

I found the pointer table, it was directly above the text as described...the question is how do I calculate it?

Here's some samples:

Text
9482AB5FBDFF

Pointer
5DEE

Text
AC5FA4BDA3FF

Pointer
63EE

Text
93A25E69C3A3FF

Pointer
69EE

It could be the ROM doesn't have a header, it does use control codes (FF Line Break) I did try to calculate that, I can also try it w/o the header (-200) could it have a smaller header??

Compare the pointer and the address of the string:

The pointer is $63EE for the string at $6E63. First flip your pointer bytes around: $EE63. Okay, now just subtract the string address form this pointer value:

$EE63 - $6E63 = $8000

So add $8000 to each string address before you flip the bytes to calculate your pointer, or subtract $8000 from your pointer after you've flipped the bytes to calculate the string address.

Not much else to it really.

Pointers still point to the beginning of stings, not the ends, so 0x8000 is correct. Everything else would not work either way with real hardware.

cYa,

Tauwasser

How much text are you dealing with? If it's only a few screens, it might be easiest to do the editing directly in WindHex. Otherwise, you could dump it (I haven't used WindHex's dumping feature, most of my dumping experience comes with ROM Juice. There's also Cartographer.)

As for making room for more text.... I think it is possible to add space to the end of a SNES ROM as long as your pointers are able to access that space. (This will depend on the size of your pointers and the size of the ROM.) (Note: I have very little experience with SNES hacking, this is primarily going off of memory from reading various threads.) You may need to ensure that the final file size fits into a particular "group", though I'm not sure if this is necessary with SNES. (Look at NES ROMs, for instance, and you'll see that almost all file sizes are a power of 2.)

First, however, you should look through your ROM for big banks of blank space, primarily as a bunch of 00s or FFs in a row. If you can find one or more of these, you can move some (or all) of your text there. Also, keep in mind that you don't have to move all of the text to the same place. If you can find an empty bank big enough to hold half of your new text, don't forget that you can now use the space where that text originally was to hold the text that was left over. (To give a slightly more concrete explanation, let's say you had 50K of original text but your translated text is 100K. If you can find an empty bank that is 50K in size, you could then move the last half of your translated text to that empty bank, which frees up it's original space into which you can expand the first half of the text from it's original location.)

I'm not quite sure I'm understanding you at this point.... (I'm thinking it may be a mixing up of terms, but I could just be misunderstanding the situation altogether.)

When you say you have a pointer that points to LAYBALL (and you did mean to spell it that way, right, not simply leaving off the P?) what do you mean? They way you're describing it almost sounds like you're saying there's a control code byte that prints out LAYBALL when entered, but maybe I'm just misunderstanding. (If my understanding is correct, you're talking about dictionary compression, in which a single byte references an entire word.)

If that's not correct, can you provide some more information, such as the location/value of the pointer you're referring to an example of where it is and isn't working?