Kid Paddle GBA text insertion test

Testing out text insertion in Kid Paddle for GBA for an English translation patch. I've achieved strings of arbitrary lengths. Note that the translation isn't final and you can see several errors in this video.

[@mirazwrld3764]

This looks great

[@ObscureNForeign]

Sorry about the lack of progress.

[@SkyeGuy]

This is absolutely incredible work! Currently, I've only successfully translated, like, foreign Flash games through decompiling the SWFs, or I translated an old Macromedia Director game by opening up and modifying the assets, but I've always dreamt of translating SNES games and the like. Is there any chance you could explain how you did this? I'm sure this is ridiculously complicated, but it'd be amazing to really learn. The tutorials that have been online have been geared towards only explaining how to do it for the game they've personally translated, and haven't really made it easy to explain how to start from scratch on a game that hasn't been well-documented.

[@ObscureNForeign]

In this case, altering the text was made unusually easy due to the text being stored as plain ASCII in the rom. Text is terminated with 0x00 and the game will just keep reading the text until encountering such a byte. This combined with working out the offsets meant I could just insert the text with a hex editor. It isn't pretty but thankfully there isn't a lot of text in the game. I haven't figured out how to change the graphics yet, unfortunately. Offsets: French starts at 5B0580, Dutch at 5B5090. Text offsets are relative to the first offset: The first offset will be FC06. (Appuyer sur start / Druk op start text) Since the GBA's ARM CPU is little endian this is backwards: the address will actually be 6FC. Between being able to alter the offsets and the game reading until encountering a NUL byte, it gives a good amount of freedom to alter the text. I'm currently trying to document the data bundle format though... they seem to be nested and begin with the string "Burp"... heh. If I can find a way to alter how the game stores those it opens up even more opportunities. The game has a lot of unused space in its rom. Also, a bunch of Mistic Software GBA games seem to work this way, at least Totally Spies and two Duel Masters games do. Of course, they're already in English. Hope this helps someone.

[@SkyeGuy]

@@ObscureNForeign Thank you so much for your reply-- good job finding a game that would be such a good translation project, with the text easy to access and easy to end each line, with lots of space to play with. I hope I can have similar breakthroughs, but there's just so much stinkin' information to comb through in a hex editor, and I can't seem to find the corresponding tiles that match the text so I can get a nice dump of the script. All the best!

[@thenoobman93]

bien joue

[@Lilyyy72]

Trans flag 💅

[@ObscureNForeign]

I'm a translator

[@Lilyyy72]

I'm a transcriptionist

[@ObscureNForeign]

@@Lilyyy72That's awesome