Hi Scot, sorry about the delay in responding.
Each game has its own method of storing the text. But there are really
only a few ways, when it comes down to it. Unicode is never used in these
games, since it has only gained any sort of popularity since Win 95 days.
(1) SJIS - there are 1-byte and 2-byte storage formats for this. 2-byte is
seldom used in HuCards, because of the complexity of interpreting the code
- but it is nearly universal in CDROM games because of the built-in support
in the CDROM system card.
So 1-byte SJIS is often used in HuCards instead. However, 1-byte SJIS only
defines code entries for katakana, in the 8-bit range of ASCII (above
regular A-Z, a-z characters, instead of the wide variety of European
characters added by ISO-8859-1). In these cases, the game might also
choose to use the regular range for katakana, and replace the 'normal'
english characters with hiragana instead. But it can also choose to have a
special 'switch' character to swap between katakana and hiragana sets (like
in Lode Runner Lost Labyrinth).
In this case, you would try to search the ROM by using a SJIS-based viewer,
or a SJIS viewing aid such as NJWIN.
(2) OR, they might simply have their full font laid out in a completely
non-ASCII format, and completely ignore standard formats for saving (like
Valkyrie no Densetsu, where 0 = 'A', 1='B', etc.). In this case, you would
need to use TMOD2 to find the font definition, and copy it to paper. Then
you would play the game until you found some sort of text appearing, and
copy it down. You would use the font definition as a 'magic decoder ring'
for numeric representation of the letters, and you would use some program
like Relative Search to find this first bit of text (because these letters
might start with "0", or they might start with "1", or even "20" as far as
you know). From there, it is a mathematical transform to the ROM in order
to view the text and find the rest (and a mathematical transform back when
the new text has been substituted).
I believe there are utilities already written to help with this, but I
don't know enough about the translation world yet to know which work
best. It seems that the NES and SNES worlds are most developed for this
type of thing, but for text translations the PCE should be able to
piggyback on the work already done in both the NES and SNES worlds.
There are a variety of good documents out there on sites such as
http://www.romhacking.org and http://donut.parodius.com and
http://rpgd.emulationworld.com .
Please let me know if you find any good utilities for displaying and
modifying non-ASCII text.
Find TMOD2 and some other tools and stuff at my page:
http://www.interlog.com/~daves .
At 09:45 AM 3/5/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> > > I think I will try something a little more challenging for my next
> > > translation. ;-)
> >
> > Maison Ikkoku? :-)
>
>Hey guys,
>
>I'll take a stab at Maison Ikkoku... how do I extract and read the hiragana
>from the program? Is it in a form of unicode?
>
>Lemme know