[ncp_1411]

Hi, I'm a Spanish 30 years. I initiated into the romhacking. In Spain there are good translations teams, but few who work with video games SEGA. I'm a fan of the Shining Force series, but are not in Spanish. I want to start translating ... together with a friend who is a professor of English (this frien translated texts) ... I will do blog, testing, text extraction, etc ...

We are beginners and have yet to experience. I read manuals and tutorials. And I managed to translate things for NES and SNES. Now thinking about the first real job ... SHINING IN THE DARKNESS ... I have problems. Genesis video games are more complex than the SNES.

First convert my rom .bin, with SearchRX ... I look for words ... to find equivalents to create table [hex]. But the result is not good  (A = 25, A = 32, A = CD = 25, a = 21, a = B7, a = 08 ... etc). I can't see text Translhextion because I haven't a correct table.

I searched info about this, but I find few Spanish romhacking working with GENESIS. I think the ROM is compressed (compression HUFFMAN), but can not find infromacion decode. Can you help? .. thank you very much.



Sorry for my ignorance ...

[EarlJ]

Genesis video games are more complex than the SNES.

Nah, it's just that a lot of documentation is targeted at SNES stuff, so it's better understood and by more people. It seems like only a handful of people tackle Genesis stuff, so there's not the same pool of information and community experience to lean on if you run into something you're not familiar with.

But aside from that...
I don't know much about Shining in the Darkness...

But I'm pretty sure both SF1 and 2 use Huffman to compress most of the text, so Darkness probably does too. I'm just getting comfortable looking at 68K assembly, so how various compression schemes work is pretty far beyond me.

However, if you don't have your heart set on Shining in the Darkness, there are editors available for both Shining Force 1 and 2 that will allow you to change the text without having to worry about tables. SF2 has the Caravan, and SF1 has SF1 Edit.

Both work with the US ROMs though, so there could be issues displaying any special characters (like eñe), and because at least the Caravan works with the existing compression scheme, certain character combinations won't be accepted (like xy)... but working with those programs would certainly be an easier option if you don't have the technical know-how to write de/re compressors and text extraction/insertion programs yourself.

In fact, one guy already translated SF1 into Portuguese that way.

[ncp_1411]

The first thing I want is to thank you ... so thank you very much!! (every beginning is difficult).

After other tests with simple games, I thought it would be easier ... but now I see that some videogames are much more complex. A user has told me how I could do it. First I have to know the processor GENESIS (motorola68000) and see how it performs the execution of the game. So I can see where the texts are ... and after that to decode. Though I think it is too difficult for the level that I have...

If I can not move forward with Darkness ... will try to translate into Spanish the SF1 and SF2 using the tools that you told me (thanks again) ... and maybe in the future may translate to rethink DARKNESS.

But still keep trying...