I thought it would be a fun project to edit the text in some games to clean up some of the Engrish or weird things in them, just for my own kicks.
Are there any fairly easy-to-use programs, or some good methods, to help a dummy like me text edit?
My first undertaking would be Metal Gear, if it's a game-specific thing that needs to be known.
Some of the more popular games out there already have text editor utilities available, but otherwise, yeah, it's a pretty monotonous and frustrating task to just pick up.
if you're lucky enough the text is contained in the ROM uncompressed and unaltered and can be extracted via simple tools (linux offers the aptly named 'strings') or edited with any hex editor you like. Note however, that you can't just change the length of text - padding a shorter text with spaces is easy, making something longer requires more complicated, game-specifig tools.
if you're lucky enough the text is contained in the ROM uncompressed and unaltered and can be extracted via simple tools (linux offers the aptly named 'strings') or edited with any hex editor you like.
That assumes NES games use ASCII characters (or other ASCII-compatible encoding) for their text. Is that really so?
I could perfectly imagine NES games *not* using such an encoding. Why would they? It's a wasteful encoding which contains tons of characters probably not needed in the game.
My guess is that most NES games have an image containing the characters used in the game, and all text strings consist simply of index values to that image (ie. 0 meaning the first character, 1 meaning the next one, and so on).
Thus even if the texts are uncompressed in the ROM, you would still have to figure out their "encoding", and you would have to write some kind of converter between that encoding and ASCII if you want to view the strings normally.
Of course the more text there is in the game, the highest the chances that the text is compressed in one way or another. Even a very simple compression scheme may well be very hard to figure out using a hexeditor or even a disassembler.
