what's a good program to edit the language of a gba game?

[beware]

i wanna edit the language of a gba game, but what is the easist way :?:

[Shane R. Monroe]

I dunno about editing an EXISTING game ... but you could do a lot worse than DragonBasic for DEVELOPING a new title...

http://www.jm-basic.com/dragon/

[beware]

i wasn't very clear earlier, but i meant the language that is spoken inside a game, or maybe you already understood that, because i want to translate a game for some1

[Shane R. Monroe]

Oh ... You want to change languages ...

That's supposedly pretty tough to do ... anyone out there have ideas?

[Bryan 'KidHype' Smith]

You would probably have to Hex Edit a dumped ROM of the game you want to translate. I wouldn't wish doing this on any one.

[Fredrik]

One problem you might run into is that texts isn't stored as ascii as some games doesn't include a full ascii-table, so instead of "abcd" it can be stored as (in hex) 01 02 03 04. I don't know if there's any good tools out there for finding and decoding texts in another format than ascii, but it should be quite possible to write a program that takes a piece of text and search for it using relative values. Searching for "abcd" would search for 0001020304, 01020304, 02030405, 03040506 etc.

One major problem would be if the language you are translating to is much longer than the original so that the text doesn't fit inside the original one. Then you would probably have to disassemble the game and "re-code" parts of it, something that is really hard (I know from own experience from AGA-fixing some old A500 games that did all kinds of nasty hardwarebanging )

Anyway, here's a good page with a few tools for ROM-hacking:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/mod.html

Good luck..

[beware]

thanks for the help

[crcasey]

One problem you might run into is that texts isn't stored as ascii as some games doesn't include a full ascii-table, so instead of "abcd" it can be stored as (in hex) 01 02 03 04. I don't know if there's any good tools out there for finding and decoding texts in another format than ascii, but it should be quite possible to write a program that takes a piece of text and search for it using relative values. Searching for "abcd" would search for 0001020304, 01020304, 02030405, 03040506 etc.

One major problem would be if the language you are translating to is much longer than the original so that the text doesn't fit inside the original one. Then you would probably have to disassemble the game and "re-code" parts of it, something that is really hard (I know from own experience from AGA-fixing some old A500 games that did all kinds of nasty hardwarebanging )

Anyway, here's a good page with a few tools for ROM-hacking:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/mod.html

Good luck..

Another quick note...
GBA does not have a handy printf kind of string output. So the above may be an index into a tile set that is not using the english (assuming that is your translation target) alphabet. So not only may you need to recode the 'translated text' but you may have to create a tileset with english letters to display the translated text.

I wish you good luck on your project.

[Antiriad2097]

I dunno about editing an EXISTING game ... but you could do a lot worse than DragonBasic for DEVELOPING a new title...

http://www.jm-basic.com/dragon/

Shane, you rate Dragon Basic then? I'm curious myself. I rtfm, looks to be pretty neat from a coding standpoint. You know of anything developed with it or users of it beyond whats on the site? Demo download seems really restricted, but I don't want to spend $50 on something that won't give me at least a half decent turn of speed without getting really bogged down. You know how it is when you're tinkering with code, it gets a little out of control when you're learning a new system by bodging stuff...