We have a file that we know is compressed, we have a pretty good idea of what it decompresses to, and we know where that file is used in-game. So we actually have a lot of information at our disposal here. However, because the game expects the text to be compressed, we will also have to be able to recompress the file so we can reinsert it into the game. In order to do that, we will have to be able to decompress the text ourselves in order to edit the file. So okay, now we know it’s compressed – what do we do next? Well, we know our end goal: we want to replace the text in the file with English-language text. This is a sign of what’s called run-length encoding – a method for compressing a file that focuses on eliminating repetition. How did I know that this section was compressed? Well, looking at his screenshot, we can clearly see that the in-game text is showing up in the hex editor (I’ve marked an example in yellow below), but some portions of the text are missing – for example, the “ハルヒの” bit that I’ve marked below is replaced by a shorter character sequence that I’ve highlighted in blue. There are multiple lines in the game that fill up the entire box and there's no way you're going to be able to fit that in there with full-width characters, so you'll want to investigate that, too.
The other thing you'll need to be thinking about is a font-width hack (half-width or variable-width). You'll have to decompress it before you can begin editing it and once it's decompressed we'll have a better idea of what all the parts do which will give us a leg up on editing it. I don't know what all of it does yet, but I can tell you that this entire chunk is compressed and that the decompression subroutine lives at 0x2026190.
#010 editor shift jis code#
Hi! So that's not game code surrounding it that's more data for this scene. This game uses an encoding called Shift-JIS, which is how Japanese was represented prior to the advent of Unicode.ĭrawing on my past experience, I did some investigation and then posted a perhaps less-than-hinged reply: You might be familiar with ASCII, the most basic of encodings – each letter in the alphabet is represented by a single byte. The characters on the right represent the bytes we’re seeing on the left interpreted through an encoding. When writing numbers, to distinguish the base we often use 0x as a prefix for hex numbers (0x17 is 23 in decimal) and 0b to represent binary numbers (0b0000_0100 is 4 in decimal).
0, 1), programmers often use hexadecimal because it allows us to represent a single byte in two characters. Hexadecimal is also called base 16 – while we normally use decimal (base 10 – i.e.
#010 editor shift jis series#
He was able to find the script, but the issue he was having was dealing with what he called “game code” that surrounded the text he was trying to replace – modifying the sections he marked in red broke the game entirely.Ī quick explanation of what we’re seeing here: on the left, we have the raw binary in the file, represented as a series of bytes in hexadecimal. What Cerber was doing precisely was opening up the ROM in a hex editor (a tool for modifying binary files directly where each byte is represented as a hexadecimal number) and searching for the text he was seeing in-game. He had made some progress on finding the script in the game and replacing it with English characters, but was getting stuck on being able to reinsert text fully. This whole project started with two posts on the GBATemp forum from a user named Cerber (now one of our graphic designers!) asking for help translating an obscure DS game based on the Haruhi series.
#010 editor shift jis free#
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to tweet at us! These blogs do get quite technical and include things like code samples, but are written to be intelligible to a general audience. Howdy folks! This is the first in a series of blog posts that will delve into the technical challenges involved in translating Suzumiya Haruhi no Chokuretsu (The Series of Haruhi Suzumiya).
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