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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Cramped UI? Cramped Strings?

« on: May 30, 2011, 03:37:56 pm »

Interesting idea.  The bitmap containing the SHIFT-JIS isn't big enough to hold the entire character set, just around 500 or so characters.  There's about 80 lines I need to insert, a good portion of which are just one or two words.  I can't figure offhand whether 500 characters is sufficient, but in case it isn't I'll see if I can lengthen the file and have the game will recognize the new additions or if it's programmed to only load a specific chunk.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Cramped UI? Cramped Strings?

« on: May 30, 2011, 02:32:46 pm »

The primary font is the game designer's own custom SHIFT-JIS encoded font created with a table of 8x8 pixel characters in bitmap format.  The second font for 8-bit ASCII is also 8x8 pixels, so  there's no advantage there. 

I tried finding the routine that prints text by decompiling the program with a demo version of IDA and setting breakpoints at every DirectX call that looked relevant.  It passes three breakpoints before the window pops up, but I never seem to hit any breakpoints after that.  I don't know if it uses something else or if the decompiler's just unreliable.

Thanks a lot for the idea of redirecting the pointers.  It might not work if the code tries to access that memory via an address and an offset rather than just one hardcoded address, but it's worth a try.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Cramped UI? Cramped Strings?

« on: May 30, 2011, 11:18:33 am »

I came across a Japanese indie game I liked so I figured I'd try my hand at translating it.  I've finally managed to get an insertion script written and working, unfortunately much of my translations are too big to fit in the game's UI elements, and end up overflowing off the side.  Even worse, some strings have little to no padding giving me a hard limit of around 15 characters to write what should be 26.

Are there any special tricks to dealing with limited UI space other than just abbreviating things?  And for the limited length strings, is there some decompiler that can add padding to an executable without misaligning everything and invalidating pointers?

I'm probably asking for impossible things, but I figured if they existed, people here would probably know.