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ROM Hacking Discussion / MOTHER (NES) Retranslation Project - I need help with hacking.

« on: June 08, 2017, 10:46:32 pm »

I'm retranslating the original MOTHER on the NES. I need help utilizing extra space in the ROM to add my translation. If anyone's good at assembly hacking and interested in this project, I could really use your help.
Thank you.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: NES Text Editing Help

« on: June 07, 2017, 04:54:10 pm »

The NES game I'm hacking is Mother, which uses an MMC3 mapper with 16KiB banks.

From what I can gather, all the enemy names and battle messages are stored in one bank with extra space. All the main dialogue is stored in two consecutive banks with no extra space. Finally, all the PSI ability names are stored in one bank with no extra space.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: NES Text Editing Help

« on: June 06, 2017, 10:55:32 pm »

Is there any sort of indication of which bank is which?

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Newcomer's Board / NES Text Editing Help

« on: June 06, 2017, 07:34:39 pm »

I'm translating an NES game with tons of extra space. Is there any way to use a hex editor to jump to another offset, write out some text, then jump back to a previous offset?

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Expanding and Using NES Memory

« on: June 11, 2016, 08:37:34 pm »

This is one of those things that if you know how to do it.... it's actually pretty easy -- but if you don't know how to do it, it's super confusing.

FF2 uses MMC1 (aka mapper 1).  FF2 also currently uses 256K of PRG, which is the maximum PRG allowed for a typical MMC1 cartridge.  However, there are board variants like SUROM that still use MMC1 and hijack CHR bits to allow for larger PRG.

So you have two options:

1)  Switch to the SUROM variant
2)  Switch to another mapper entirely.  MMC3 (aka mapper 4) would be the next logical choice.


The good news is, both of these things are possible.  The bad news is BOTH will require some significant code rewrites, as even SUROM requires different code from a typical MMC1 to swap.  Not only that, but FF2 is probably tight on space in the fixed bank -- which is where the swapping code will have to be, so you won't have a lot of space to work with when writing swapping routines.

And even once you get the mapper changed, you'd need to actually cut into the text reading code and have it swap to a new bank... which may be incredibly easy or somewhat tricky depending on how the game works.



This is definitely an asm hack.  You'll need to know 6502 basics and how to use a debugger and/or how to read a disassembly.  If interested I can probably throw out a few pointers as to where to start, but I've kind of rambled enough already, and I'm not sure how much (if any) knowledge you have with 6502 and NES architecture.

Okay... Obviously, Final Fantasy II is a little to ambitious for me right now. That aside, I mostly began this topic to find out what it means to use expanded NES memory for text editing. I want to know which programs I should use and how to use them. Back to Final Fantasy II, I mostly have trouble changing the MENU text, even when using smaller fonts. I don't think the dialogue'll be much of a problem, but I could be wrong...

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Newcomer's Board / Expanding and Using NES Memory

« on: June 09, 2016, 01:16:46 am »

Hello there. I've set out on a quest to create my own Japanese to English translation of Final Fantasy II on the NES. Only...I've run into a big problem while attempting to change the game's text. There isn't enough room for the new English text, as the Japanese language tends to use fewer characters.

I'm aware of some fairly simple ways to increase the usable space on an NES cartridge. But how exactly do you put that extra space to use in this kind of situation? I'm a little bit unsure of what it means to significantly change the code of an NES ROM, and how one would go about doing so. I'm fairly new to this sort of thing, as I'm only really knowledgeable about basic Hex and tile editing. Can somebody with more experience than I give me a hand? Thanks in advance!