[FANS]

This is my first attempt of trying translate a SNES game. I chose Ryuuko no Ken 2, AKA Art of Fighting 2. This game was Japan only and was one of my favorite fighting games at that time.

First, I've opened the game and it's a mess! All sprites are misaligned. But with some help of Mesen emulator, I could locate the japanese characters.





With this, I've realized the fonts are bigger and use 4 tiles per character. Also, there's no "romaji" characters with that size, it will be needed to replace all japanese characters sprites for romaji characters sprites (I was thinking use the sprites of Art of Fighting 1, that had a western release).

So I request a help about this:

1-How can I do a table here? With the characters using 4 tiles, it will be possible to do a table?

2-Is there some way to organize the sprites in a better way? I've used some options in Tile Molester, but nothing helped.

I didn't found any tutorial or video of some similar problem. I hope someone can help me here. Thanks!

[FAST6191]

1. While some use tile order to determine some things then ultimately it does not matter. There will be some kind of abstraction between what is stored as text (assuming it is text and not graphics with text in it of course -- fighting games might well be graphical as the text count is generally low enough for it to make some sense compared to big RPG or something) and that is where the hacker comes in. Japanese by virtue of its language characteristics* lacks some of the easier methods of doing things in English (relative search in English gives you the font happily enough in a lot of occasions, for Japanese you still have some relative search options, indeed many will have used the font ordering to inform such an effort, but you are generally going to see more involved approaches required).

*to say nothing of said characteristics being a part of Japanese language knowledge.

2. Yes and no. Yes in that somewhere in the game will be a mapping that the game uses to determine locations of things, no in that outside of background art then nobody really uses it and animations get in the way anyway -- looking at that I would not be surprised if only parts of the overall sprite are swapped out each frame/stage of animation as it is a way of saving video memory and processing time vs getting whole new sprites every time. You might find that a smaller horizontal window size (don't know if tile molestor has the option offhand but most tile editors will) has things line up slightly better but ultimately 99% of hacking jobs will see the hacker either build their own tool or take the more abstract path, maybe build the whole sprite up in the editing window and copy that back to the ROM when they are done.

[KingMike]

1. While some use tile order to determine some things then ultimately it does not matter. There will be some kind of abstraction between what is stored as text (assuming it is text and not graphics with text in it of course -- fighting games might well be graphical as the text count is generally low enough for it to make some sense compared to big RPG or something) and that is where the hacker comes in.

I've only heard of one game that stored its dialogue as a graphics (a Hammerin' Harry game for GBC).
Even for a fighting game, storing every line of text as a graphics would be incredibly wasteful, especially for a relatively low capacity console as SNES.

What this game appears to be doing, and is pretty common on SNES games with large-sized (and especially with kanji) fonts: it is loading the font from ROM and then drawing the current line of text as a graphics object into VRAM (usually by drawing it out in RAM first and then transferring it, due to that on consoles on the SNES, you have limited access to the VRAM so you want to economize opportunities to write it to it)

In that picture of the font in ROM, trying seeing if it becomes legible at a lower bit depth and incrementing/decrementing the address.
If it still doesn't become easily editable after that, then it might be compression, which would require knowing ASM to disassemble the code to figure out the format.

[FAST6191]

I can't speak to the SNES library and common methods there, however roll in the GBA and DS and I could probably get notable amounts of/predominantly text as graphics* up to the going to start needing to count on your toes range. Equally for something as traditionally low volume as most fighting games (menu, UI, credits which might well be a separate affair anyway, end cards for fights) it becomes something I could reason to see.

*indeed it is probably going to be the case for all the tategaki (vertical Japanese text) I have ever seen and looked at in a ROM.

[FANS]

Thanks for reply!

Certainly there's no text in the examples, only graphics.

I've made a comparison beetween american and japanese versions of Art of Fighting 1. In the american version, the characters are graphics with 2 tiles. In the japanese version the characters are graphics with 4 tiles, same way of Ryuko no Ken 2.




It's very scary for a beginner like me! If only I could find a easier way to find the pieces of characters and try to replace it. Also, there's no romaji characters in the japanese version.

When I chose this one and start to study the way the game works I've never imagined something like that!

[Jorpho]

Certainly there's no text in the examples, only graphics.

Are you referring to the images you posted? There is indeed no text there; were you expecting that?

As per the above posts, the precise text strings are probably laid out somewhere else in the ROM – probably using some custom encoding – and you will have to find them with a relative search.

[reyvgm]

If you eventually are able to insert a translation into the game, please get someone to translate the original Japanese script and don't reuse the bad translations SNK did (as hilarious as they might be).

[Anime_World]

2bpp linear reverse-order, enable row interlevead

[FANS]

Are you referring to the images you posted? There is indeed no text there; were you expecting that?

As per the above posts, the precise text strings are probably laid out somewhere else in the ROM – probably using some custom encoding – and you will have to find them with a relative search.

No I'm not expecting, the question was about tables, probably I will not do a table in the way I was trhinking.

If you eventually are able to insert a translation into the game, please get someone to translate the original Japanese script and don't reuse the bad translations SNK did (as hilarious as they might be).

Yes, I'm studying japanese and I certainly would do a new translation.

2bpp linear reverse-order, enable row interlevead

Thanks! Mine isn't so perfect, still a little disorganized:

[Jorpho]

probably I will not do a table in the way I was trhinking.

What exactly are you trhinking? Making a table is kind of inevitable.