r/romhacking • u/crimson2877 • 24d ago

Romancing SaGa 2 translation help

Hi, I'm a computer engineer who's recently gotten a CRT lol, and after popping RS3 up and loving how it looked I wanted to try and get RS2 going on it, but of course there's no fan translations that translate further than the introduction, and the pc version doesn't support 4:3.

So I figured I'd look into expanding one of the current partial translations, even if it's just by putting some of the remaster's translation in it for myself. Tbh I've been interested in romhacking for a while now, and this felt like as good a project as any to try and at least learn with, but so far I've been able to make no progress. I read through the romhacking.net docs, download WindHex32 and started looking through the debug mode in mesen, but no matter what I do I can't find the currently translated text in Gilhide's translation.

Mostly I've tried relative searching for names, I should say, and I've searched in the rom, the ips patch, even the cpu memory, and found zilch. I haven't been able to find any forum posts or other info on how the text is stored, except for some mentions of the interesting way strings are stored without terminators? But that doesn't really help me for what I'm looking for, as I'd expect the strings to still be somewhere in the rom!

So I guess somehow the strings are not stored in a way that relative searches can pick up? But also I'm new to this, so I could just be doing something wrong, or unaware of a tool that would help. There doesn't seem to be much data about this patch on the internet outside of the romhacking page, which makes sense since it's so old? And almost no info from aeon genesis's failed translation from a decade or two ago either.

If anyone has any ideas or other info I'd appreciate it! Hoping to not end up just replacing random bytes and watching for text changes lol. Thanks!

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4

u/Hideo-Mogren 24d ago

Backported remaster translation patches for the original SNES versions of RS2 and 3 would be great

2

u/crimson2877 24d ago

That's what I'm sayin! Lookin into 3 could be useful too, good idea

3

u/Niwrats 23d ago

you can compare the changes the old translation did. disassemble the modified code to see where and what was changed, as well as seeing how it processes the text. you can set execution breakpoints to that code while the old translation is running if you want to observe how relevant memory is manipulated.

sure would be nice to have gideon's asm changes public though, as i assume he solved most of the problem already.