Phantasy Star I - Finding the spell names?

[FlamePurge]

Hi everyone, I've been messing around in various versions of Phantasy Star I lately, and I've been trying to compile the table file for the original game. (Not planning on releasing anything, I promise.) But for the life of me, I can't find the spell names. Credits, item names, all dialogue including dictionary words? All found and compiled. But I Ctrl+F "THUN" or "WIND" in Windhex32--can't find it.

Anyone have any idea? Could the spell names be stored as graphics in the ROM? Is there some kind of special compression just for this game's, like, twelve spell names? I'm very confused, and hope someone can shed some light on this soon.

Thanks for your time; have a great day!

[tvtoon]

As far as I remember, these menus in Phantasy Star, like most old games, use tilemaps. So you will need to watch memory.

[FlamePurge]

Can you explain it clearer? Do you think the magic names are stored in VRAM, maybe?

[Rand]

(Not planning on releasing anything, I promise.)

Holding you to that, Vivify. Because if you do, you know I'll have to monkey with it at some point and embarrass myself in front of the Internet doing it.

[FlamePurge]

Hahah, no, I was just curious about it. Play SMS Power!'s retranslation if you want a purer Phantasy Star I experience.

[tvtoon]

Can you explain it clearer? Do you think the magic names are stored in VRAM, maybe?

No, I meant that you have to check the memory to know how tilemaps work. For record: tilemap example, tilemap tutorial.

[henke37]

There are two approaches. First is that the game uses a non standard character encoding. That means that you can't search for the text unless you figure out the encoding. Depending on the design, this may, but far from has to, mean that one character value directly corresponds to one tile in a tileset.

Second is that the text isn't treated as text at all, the game just treats it as an image.

And to make both extra fun, the game might be using compression.