Japanese to English translation help

[Meri-chan]

Hello everybody, first of all sorry for my bad English.

I'm a complete newbie in this world, so sorry for my stupid questions.

The point is that I wanted to translate a Sega Saturn game called "Revolutionary Girl Utena - Four Days in Ohtori" from Japanese to English. I looked for a tutorial and downloaded a hex editor, but it wasn't able to read Japanese characters, I tried with other hex editors, but all of them had the same problem. I have all the Asian languages files installed on my computer, so maybe there's something I'm doing wrong. Can someone help me? I'm totally lost.

 

[ExCyber]

Hello everybody, first of all sorry for my bad English.

I'm a complete newbie in this world, so sorry for my stupid questions.

The point is that I wanted to translate a Sega Saturn game called "Revolutionary Girl Utena - Four Days in Ohtori" from Japanese to English. I looked for a tutorial and downloaded a hex editor, but it wasn't able to read Japanese characters, I tried with other hex editors, but all of them had the same problem. I have all the Asian languages files installed on my computer, so maybe there's something I'm doing wrong. Can someone help me? I'm totally lost.

You won't get very far with a hex editor alone. Games often use custom encodings (although some games do just use some variation of JIS or EUC), which means that you often need a separate (and usually game-specific) program to translate the encoding. Even if it's a standard text encoding, most hex editors will only display ASCII or CP437. RPGs and other text-heavy games typically have custom control codes ("stop and wait for the player to press a button now", "slowly draw this string one character at a time", "change font", "change color", etc.) also.

There is a series of documents here, but they are more of a starting point rather than something that is going to hold your hand through the whole process (which is not really possible because the exact process is different for every game). One thing to remember is that these were written before there were really good Saturn emulators, so the insistence on using an Action Replay is a little outdated (these days you can use e.g. the debug functions in Yabause instead). Some documents on more general game hacking techniques (not Saturn-specific and more oriented toward older ROM-based consoles) can be found at the docs section of romhacking.net.