Pro Action Replay

I know I can hook it up to my PC and see some stuff in memory or something like that. I'm wondering what good this does me for my translation project. Is there any way to tell what files that Saturn is accessing or anything? I'm having trouble finding what files the text for my game are in. Any help would be great. Thanks.
 
Well, you could potentially find out what goes where in memory, and if it was compressed in any way.

I don't know how useful it would be in practice.
 
There is a debugger for AR/Commslink hardware written by TyRaNiD. As far as I know, it's not necessary for the Saturn program to support the debugger, although in practice it could probably wreck some timing-sensitive routines. Also, it expects to send a program to the Saturn.

The debugger can be found at: http://members.nbci.com/Saturn_Cover/
 
Well, I am trying to use it for Snatcher translation related work. Actually finding the text in RAM, or dumping the RAM so I can do relative searches and analyze where this text came from (file names, etc)

Will post if I get any results...

Artemio
 
Actually, I found it quite useful for hacking snatcher... I won't say anymore then that unless told otherwise.

But for hacking in general, what i've seen so far, is that usually a said game will store a certain chunk of text in memory first before it actually displays it. So basically what you do is look through the work ram and look for areas that could be text, then randomly modify the data, and see if anything in the game changes. If you're lucky, you should find your text pretty quickly. Then it's just a matter of looking for that same data in the cd's files.

Cyber Warrior X
 
I am actually very interested on what you have done with Snatcher.... SInce I am actually playing a lot with that game in both the PSX and Saturn Versions. Please give me some info on what you did.

thank you very much

Artemio
 
Well, first of all, just for the fun of it, I was looking through 0x200000-0x2FFFFF. Most of the first part was 00's until I found what looked like it could be some kind of shift-jis characters, popped them into my shift-jis viewer, and amazingly, it was the text that was currently on-screen in the ram. But considering that snatcher text isn't stored in shift-jis, I figured the real stored unconverted text must be close by. So I looked for any particular patterns... And at around 0x2E8000 I noticed a number of byte-strings ending with 00. Just for the fun of it I tried changing a couple to see what they did. That's when I noticed a few characters had changed when I was going through the various dialogue. Also at about this time, I figured the text appeared to be in 2-byte patterns, so I tried changing the bytes accordingly, and yes, more success! To make a long story short, I basically made a small table based on my findings. For whatever the reason, konami decided to store the text in reverse order. Here's an example of what i'm talking about:

some game's text:

0054 = A

0055 = B

0056 = C

0057 = D

etc.

etc.

For Snatcher, it goes like this instead:

7E87 = Z

7E88 = Y

7E89 = X

7E8A = W

etc.

It also is easy to create a table since it has the same order as shift-jis, but in reverse. I also noticed a few special codes, one for a newline, the second one for changing color text so look out for those. Anyways, I hope you or anyone else finds this info helpful.

Cyber Warrior X
 
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