![]() ![]() Artemio recommends 010 - a not-free hex-editor that actually lets you set up "binary templates" which will fontify your buffer. It became invaluable later, so I'd personally recommend. MadEdit lets me regex search for English, and copy/paste chunks of hex. ![]() I use MadEdit, but as far as free hex editors go, I guess it won't matter too much. So, hat in hand, let's open our savestate file in a hex editor. Some ROM hackers are going to raise a hand here, and you'll read why in a minute, but let's just keep going with it. So, let's take a savestate while the text is on-screen. If you make changes to the savestate file, you can load the state and instantly see your progress (if any), as opposed to having reset the whole game. At only 4 MB of memory, you have a lot less to sift through. The advantage to savestate hacking is two-fold: That's why savestates are so quick - it's just a really fast memory swap. When you load state, it blows away the current RAM and just loads it back into memory. ![]() The emulator takes RAM and just dumps it to a file. Savestates are pretty much just memory dumps. For the Playstation, let's introduce a new and very critical concept: ![]() That's ridiculous - the entire Playstation ISO is about 722 MB, which means any search is going to take forever, and you won't be editing the ROM directly anyway on a big job like that. I started searching through the whole ROM for "BEYOND COAST". Now, I mostly wanted this document to match how I did it, but I'm going to diverge here, because I did something silly. (This was kind of a poor idea, because that furigana - the tiny characters above the letters - could have made that more complicated. But for whatever reason, when I decided to tool around with Policenauts, I focused on "BEYOND COAST" in the intro movie, and tried to see if I could fool with that. If you don't know Japanese at all, it really is a struggle to try and connect game events to hex code to Kanji, so the first thing to do is play a big chunk of the game and find some English.įortunately for you, Japan thinks English is the bee's knees, so you're likely to find it somewhere, even if the majority of the game isn't in it.Įither of these would work well as starting points, and in retrospect, searching on "POLICENAUTS" might have been the smarter idea, since it's one longer string. In fact, once most of the game is readable to you, that's when you really start understanding how it's working and what events are triggering what. Look, I don't care what kind of anime jerk you think you are, unless you are beyond-fluent - I mean, like really Japanese is second nature to you - you're going to want to be experimenting in your ROM hack project in your native alphabet. Part 50: ROMhacking Technicals: Part 1 1. ![]()
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