Script-Dumper coming along slowly but steadily

I've been working on the script-dumper lately and I am making slow but steady progress. Just a few minutes ago I successfully dumped my first string in the way I wanted it to appear into a textfile.

This blog does apparently not support Japanese characters, so I took a picture.

This is a huge step for me, if someone had told me 3 months ago that I would be able to write a working script-dumper on my own, I would have had laughed at him

There is still a lot of stuff missing that I need to add before I hold the complete script in my hands, but this was already the most difficult part (at least I think so *cough*).

Small Update

I filled most missing blanks in my table and figured out almost all control codes. I don't think I am missing anything vital. I successfully redirected a string to the end of the ROM, so my pointer stuff is working right. At the end of the ROM I have ~150Kb of empty space and I should be able to expand the ROM by a few MB if necessary, so space is not an issue for this translation  

I started writing a script-dumper but I am only progressing slowly. I have to relearn a lot of stuff since it's been almost a year since I programmed anything. I am confident though that I'll make it

Most of my exams are over, progress on DQM

Yeah, today I finished my second of three exams. i have a day off now and nothing to do, so I used my good mood to work on Dragon Quest Monsters

I finally found what I am looking for. The code that loads the text pointers. As it turns out the game uses three offsets to jump through several pointertables until it reaches the current string. I'll have to look into the way the game terminates it's strings and I'm almost ready to write a script dumper

All that's left are some control codes I need to figure out. Aside from that it all comes down to my rusted programming skills. Let's see if I can still write such a nifty tool

On a side note while I messed with the pointer blocks and the offsets I noticed that the very first block contains an English debug menu. It would be interesting to find out how to access that menu in the game. The screenshot below is the result of my experiments with the offsets

Fun with GBA ASM

Today I finally started to investigate the text routine. It’s much more exhausting than I thought and takes a hell lot of time.

I found some interesting parts and got some bits of information about the way the routine handles the text figured out but I apparently only scratched the tip of the iceberg. After I went through the “apparently” short (Read 3 DinA4 pages) long routine, I noticed that something was not going right. The program seemed to skip all BL Opcodes. BL works very much like CALL on other systems and basically jumps to a specified address while remembering the origin in a register. pSXAuthor from the romhacking.net IRC channel made me aware of the fact that debuggers usually have two single step options. One that leaves out calls and one that follows them. Needless to say I used the wrong one all the time >_<

The good news is that I can make more progress now. The bad news is that the routine is MUCH bigger than I initially expected. I don’t know how many own calls and sub-calls every of the sub-routines has (I think I skipped around 20 during my rounds through the routine without tracing into BLs).

I should really suspend further work until my exams are finished but it’s really tempting to continue working on the game now that I got into it^^

Hey all!

I created this blog to keep you posted about developments with my romhacking projects (if there is any).

Currently I am working on 3 projects concerning romhacking:

• Dragon Quest Monsters Caravan Heart (GBA)
• Xuanyuan Jian 2 Waizhuan: Feng zhi Wu (PC-DOS)
• Tenchi Muyo (SNES)

Dragon Quest Monsters is my very first project and the one with the highest priority. I already located the font and the text. Tables are done too, so I am now preparing my own custom dumper for this game.

Xuanyuan is a very nice looking Chinese PC game. I really want to hack this game but I haven’t gotten very far yet with it and that propably won’t change until Dragon Quest Monsters’ script has been dumped.

I am not actually hacking Tenchi Muyo, I am translating the english script into German for danke. I hope to get this done right after my exams which are next week.

These damn exams are what’s keeping me from doing any work on these projects. Once they are over I should have plenty of time to make real progress.

Here is a two weeks old screenshot from Dragon Quest Monsters which is more proof-of-concept than anything else but still worth showing