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ROM Hacking Discussion / Making sense of HMDS:Sunshine Islands dialog

« on: June 03, 2015, 02:39:01 pm »

I'm trying to do some editing of the script for Harvest Moon DS: Sunshine Islands (I'm using an EU M5 rom).  I'm 90% sure all the text is in \data\rom\mes\MessageDData_Eng.bin, but I can't seem to make sense of any of it.  There are clearly words in there, but it's also cut up with a bunch of other junk.



There are some obvious control characters (I can decipher line-breaks here and there), but there's also random null characters, and other stuff that doesn't even look like anything.  I thought it might just be some character replacements, but I've had no luck getting that to work.  Any suggestions?

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Newcomer's Board / Pointer Table Woes (Harvest Moon GBA)

« on: January 08, 2013, 03:11:57 am »

Hi everyone,

I've been lurking around the forums looking for information on this and trying to follow through with the advice that others have given for their particular edits.  I want to edit the script for the GBA games Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town.  I found Cartographer and Atlas with a pretty good understanding of how they work (I hope).  The problem I've come across is the complete inability to find the pointer table.  From what I read, it's supposed to be easy.  Can someone double check my work and see if I'm doing something obviously wrong?

My procedure:
1) Open Rom in Hex Editor
2) Search ANSI for known dialog.
3) Find beginning of the dialog.
4) Write down Address of the beginning of that dialog (00 37 9F C8)
5) Replace most significant bit with 08 (08 C7 9F C8)
6) Convert to little-endian (C8 9F C7 08)
....
7) Search HEX for bit sequence (no matches)
8) Search HEX for sequence without the 08 appended: C8 9F C7 (no matches)
9) Search HEX for sequence without the least significant bit: 9F C7 08 (no matches)

I must be doing this completely wrong.  I'm not sure what else to do from here.

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Personal Projects / [GBA] Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town - True Love Edition

« on: December 24, 2012, 03:34:38 pm »

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town - True Love Edition

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Falling in love is one of the most memorable moments in any Harvest Moon game.  Unfortunately for some, it always seemed like you had to choose between who you want to be and who you want to love.  I think some out there have been waiting for a game like this for a very long time now.

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This is a request I've been hearing a lot, but so far no one has taken any action to create this.  Basically, all I am doing is replacing the Pete (boy) sprite with the Clair (girl) sprite from More Friends of Mineral Town.  Here's the current status

• The sprite replacement is done, barring any bugs I haven't found.  There are a few anomalies (missing chunk in the wedding dress), but I can't fix that without having to mess with some pointers.  Still relatively new at this, so that's on the back burner for the moment.
• No scripts have been changed at this point, so the main character is still referred to in male terms.  This is the next phase of work while I figure out how to use Cartographer.
• I want to modify the Title Screen, but the tools I've used so far have been unable to help me access the Logo or any other part of the Title.  Help here is appreciated.
• A Boy mod of More Friends of Mineral Town is planned, but will take a considerable amount of work due to it having more animations to edit.

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Newcomer's Board / [GBA] Harvest Moon - Friends of Mineral Town: Title Screen Edit

« on: December 21, 2012, 05:47:17 pm »

Hi everyone.  So I'm attempting a simple graphical/script edit for Harvest Moon - Friends of Mineral Town.  I was able to edit the sprites I needed changed pretty easily, except I can't seem to change anything on the title screen.  I want to add some version information (and maybe a custom logo) to the title.



I suspect the title screen is compressed.  The background, the primary logo, and the copyright text at the bottom is not easily located in the rom.  I've tried unlz-gba and GBA Graphics Editor to "Scan" for compressed images, but all I get is junk.  Do any of you have any ideas on how I can edit these images?