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[tuta]

Just wonderin if theres a gba rom unpacker sumtin like dslazy which unpacks nds roms?

[Koji]

I don't believe there is... The GBA and DS file structures are quite a bit different.

[tuta]

then how do they make translations for the gba roms?
There muz be away right?

[liquidnitrogen]

back when i was interested in this thing...

its called rom hacking

haha

anwyays, i dont really know how, but this is what they do

they get tools and change the characters from Japanese to English if it isnt there already (most of the time its there...)

then they make a table of the values of what is A, B, C, D, etc...

using some hex editor, the program will allow them to see where the text is, and they can change the values then (which will change the text)...

(though i'm not really sure how to do this for GBA, though, this is the way they do it for NES, SNES, and GB, and GBC... so i'm pretty sure GBA is included..)

(and.. i never got far... haha)

[tuta]

speechless..........

thats a hard thing to do I tot it was unpack and pack em together I was interested in this thing coz I tought I might able to take the english text of naruto ninja council 2 and stuff em in to the jap rom(naruto ninja council 2 doesnt work with supercard)

[Koji]

liquid.... <_< Maybe if you're a complete newbie and you want to spend eternity looking at hex digits hoping you don't make an error that's the way you do it...

What us rom hackers normally did was figure out what the text is stored as as hex, then find the script within the rom. Then you'd dump the entirety of the script and write a small app to convert it to a standard text document to make it easier for the translators and editors to work with. You'd work through the script like that and make another application to convert the text back into a format the game could understand and reinsert it into the rom.

Of course it's not really that simple. You'd have to do a lot of ASM hacking to expand text positions, expand the rom to support the larger script (english scripts are always larger than Japanese scripts).

It's a lot of work... which is why I never really settled down in a group to handle a translation. I've done a few small text hacks for myself, including a couple DS attempts...

Anyways, what you're trying to do won't happen. As I mentioned above, it's not just a simple matter of putting a script in, there is a lot of assembly hacking involved to make sure that all the text fits, etc. One of the first things nearly all companies do when they translate a game is insert their own custom font and rework the code to display variable width fonts (japanese games almost always use a fixed width font. 8x8, 8x16, or 16x16 in GBA/NDS titles). If you just inserted the script in the japanese game, there may not even be a complete english font in the section the script calls for. Or if it does, it will likely still be in a fixed width format, meaning that many lines of text will be too long to display in the box... Leading to missing text or other graphical errors.

[liquidnitrogen]

yup. like i said, i was pretty new haha

but thanks for correcting me