Translation of compressed snes games, Help!

[Kyoichi]

Hi, I've been translating snes games for a long time and now I'd like to try to translate games that have compressed text, like the Dragon Ball Superboutuden, and I'd like you to recommend me a guide to translate it.
Thanks

[tvtoon]

There is only one "guide" for those: learning how to debug. You can only go so far messing the bytes, debugging is the key to understand your missing score at the fastest way. You also need to learn machine operation, obviously, and as things have been proven often here, you don't really need to know programming in order to succeed.

[Kyoichi]

And what guide on the web do you recommend?
It is that there are many

[KingMike]

Learning Assembly language (aka "ASM"), that is how the console's actual programming works.

Compression is an entirely game-specific issue. You're not going to find a generic tool for it.
(well some systems like GBA had a BIOS with built-in compression functionality, most cartridge-based consoles prior to the 2000s did not, so there was no standard to how they were written.)

[FAST6191]

Debugging is in your future.

I would however find a general guide to compression methods of the time* as having to learn how compression works from disassembled code would be a pain.

*for general ideas of compression families when teaching people to hack GBA and DS games I always liked
https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~ece611/LempelZiv.pdf

Some of the things there are old but still more complex than most of the things I have thus far seen documented for the NES, SNES and such. On the flip side the important word in that is probably "most" as there are some with proper big boy LZ of Huffman. Equally it is mainly about LZ family stuff but it mentions enough things in passing that you have a jumping off point.

[Kyoichi]

Thanks