How to edit roms.

[Captain Qb]

Ok, so my question is:

How can I edit roms, like if I would like to do more monsters on Dragon Quest 1 and change the text Japanese > English..
And have a good Easter everyones.

Thankey fer teh answers, - Captain Qb.

[Jorpho]

"More" monsters? What do you mean? Changing the encounter rate? Changing what the existing monsters look like? Changing the stats of the existing monsters? Adding entirely new monsters? Changing appearances is trivial; everything else is definitely not.

And what do you mean by changing the text from Japanese to English? Do you want to do this yourself, or do you want to use someone else's translation patch?

Whatever you're trying to do, http://www.romhacking.net has lots of quality documentation, as well as a few utilities for editing Dragon Warrior (which might very well work with Dragon Quest as well).

[Kid Ice]

sending this one over to classic gaming

[Ed Oscuro]

You gotta have a hex editor, and you need to be a pro with assembly/tracing routines if you want to translate, 'cuz you'll have to move around tons of hardcoded instructions and locations (as the text will be a different length). That could be a huge problem, and even the best amateur translators have trouble with games.

It's easier with today's games, usually just have to find some hidden resource files and translate them manually (not too hard if the Japanese text is in unicode or something, the English alphabet and character set doesn't need two bytes per character so you'll have space to spare).

So, essentially, it's IMPOSSIBLE to translate it yourself. :D

Encounter rate? Find out what routine calculates that and alter it. Shouldn't be too hard except you'll have to mess with tons of other variables that change all the time.

I felt skilled for being able to (temporarily) mess up the sound in Getsu Fuuma Den, and that stuff is beyond my ability level.

Good luck if you're thinking about getting interested in ROMhacking. I know some people who have some good ROMhacking links, and there's a newly established ROMhacking wiki out there somewhere.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Okay, first my post didn't go through, and now it did. Argh. I removed my previous post since I hadn't seen the link to the same site above.

Anyway...

Why do you want to hack the Japanese version of Dragon Warrior? Why not the US version? The things you want to do are very difficult to do without enough assembly experience.

[Jorpho]

You gotta have a hex editor, and you need to be a pro with assembly/tracing routines if you want to translate, 'cuz you'll have to move around tons of hardcoded instructions and locations (as the text will be a different length). That could be a huge problem, and even the best amateur translators have trouble with games.

Well, it's not necessarily that difficult. Translation docs will tell you that many games back in the day used a "pointer table" that indicated the locations of all the text blocks within the ROM, and changing the pointer table is a cinch. If there's a big hunk of unused space in the ROM, then the job is even easier. In some cases you can do the whole thing without knowing one whit about assembly!

Anyway, there's also a completed translation patch for the Dragon Quest I+II double pack for the SNES. See http://romhacking.deadbeat-inc.com/?page=translations&transpage=337 .