I DUNno i've only ever used a hex editor to translate stuff. There are times where it is going to be quicker and easier to hex edit but for teaching new people then it still has to be "until you can argue otherwise do not use a hex editor to translate more than a few paragraphs, fix simple typos or occasionally translate a menu. Personally I happen to find sewing more tedious than kayaking so I know the feeling. Or if you prefer then maths wise I am better than my computer, other than the time I made it into an AI it is mostly a piece of silicon after all, but I would still trust my computer to recalculate pointers for me far more than I trust myself to stay focused.Īssuming you do not mean like some N64, GC and wii translator do with texture replacements then by all means find image editing more tedious than hex editing.
Given it is probably not going to be me with all my knowledge of encodings, text systems, the hardware of the device the code will run on and computer programming as much as someone that spent an equal amount of time instead learning languages that does the translation then even better if they do not have to worry about it. i find editing images 1000x more tedious and unsatisfying than hex editing.Best way to get a better translation is to be able to focus on the translation and have something else take care of the tedious stuff like managing character counts, placeholders, formatting and whatever else.
Just thinking of having to spend all those hours, days probably, grinding away with some image editing software hacking the elminage 2 menu tiles. but my pipe dream is to eventually someday translate elminage 2 and 3 and those have huge, huge scripts. i've never bothered checking them out as i stick to Wizardry-style dungeon crawlers which are extremely light on NPC dialog. I've never used the two programs you mention for ripping text but i have seen them bandied about on forums like this one for a while now. i find editing images 1000x more tedious and unsatisfying than hex editing. They didn't change or add any new spells or skills so all of the tiles worked out perfectly.
Of course i have nothing against extraction tools just yesterday i had spent like a week looking for tools to rip the menu tiles from elminage 1 psp so i could replace the menus from the (japanese language) elminage 2 psp with the english ones from the 1st game. bin file that contains nothing but dialog via hex editor will be time consuming: but if you want something done RIGHT you have to do it with a personal touch.īest way to get a better translation in the end is if you do every single letter. The only time you would really want to be using a hex editor is if you have maybe a couple of paragraphs, you typoed and put a character when you meant another or something equally minor.īasically if you have got it then use the tool for the job, it might be doable with more elementary tools but it is probably going to be a pain.
You will probably want something that supports some flavour of table format and then also something that will attempt to display the game with similar limitations to what you might see on screen (characters per line, character spacing, maybe the font.). As it is not a massively demanding task this would usually be taken care of with a less demanding language which is where some hackers come up short. Others however include kruptar ( ) and crystaltile2 (don't use it for script extraction, it has some nice searches I do not see elsewhere but that is about it)Ģ) Write your own tool to extract and insert. Around here the dominant ones would be Atlas and Cartographer. these will typically be almost scripting languages unto themselves. There are many ways to set about editing text, broadly speaking there will be two main ones thoughġ) Use premade/existing tools for extraction and insertion. Very potent and allows you to do whatever you can do to a file but by no means is it always going to be the superior way to set about it. A hex editor is a very dumb tool when all is said and done.