How to change in-game text?

[Tyraxx]

Hi everyone,

with so many games being released at C87, it's a good chance to start translating these games.
So I was wondering, how does the in-game text changing works anyways?
I would love to translate the Touhou Puppet Dance game and maybe also some other games.

PS: I really don't know if I'm in the right forum, so pls forgive me

[ed]

Many translation hackers prefer to just "stare at the data" until it makes sense. Basically start with the obvious, look for single-byte or two-byte XORs (easily spotted by repeating patterns / long stretches of similar-looking bytes). Then after masking those away, start looking for dialogue in the data files... Basically cross your fingers while searching for a line of dialogue in the data files, hopefully encoded as Shift-JIS or UTF8. If you get lucky you'll find the text in plain sight. And if you're even luckier, it turns out that it's easy to change the length of the dialogue line, otherwise the translation will have to be shorter than the original sentence. For this game in particular, the length is conveniently right next to the sentence itself (the pink-shaded value), but in other games it might be stored in a table somewhere, complicating things a fair bit.

So all in all, it really depends on the game. Some are easier to translate than others, and you never know 'till you try!

Best of luck 

[Tyraxx]

OK, first of all, thank you for your reply.
So I tried to open the gn_dat.arc files of this game with the HEX-editor, but unfortunately the text is just shown as gibberish.
Is it possible that Japanese can not be correctly displayed?

I use "NEXT-Soft Hex-Editor MX" and my system language is Japanese.

[Validon98]

For Fantasy Puppet Dance Performance, there is stuff related to translation and the extracted gn_dat.arc files here:

http://thpp.supersanctuary.net/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=4e8c911f2e4edc193eb2af154fc25a1d&board=15.0

[Tyraxx]

Wow, didn't expect such a hype of translation.
Usually doujin game translation projects are not very active but OK.
I think there's no need for me to translate if there're already so many ppl doing it.

[Your Everyday NEET]

For a famous games such as Touhou Puppet Play Performance, you don't need to wait for a long time. Just wait for a while and voila, everyone can play it.

[Phasm]

Wow, didn't expect such a hype of translation.
Usually doujin game translation projects are not very active but OK.
I think there's no need for me to translate if there're already so many ppl doing it.

Well altough the more people working on the translation, the faster it will be done. Heck, even i have finally decided to study Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana to translate videogames, and, if i was a pokemon my nature would be: lazy ( unless i am really focused or hyped for something in which case i just research it )

[shurcle]

OK, first of all, thank you for your reply.
So I tried to open the gn_dat.arc files of this game with the HEX-editor, but unfortunately the text is just shown as gibberish.
Is it possible that Japanese can not be correctly displayed?

I use "NEXT-Soft Hex-Editor MX" and my system language is Japanese.

Its gibberish at first glance, but patterns will come up and you'll get all sorts of clues on how to get sensible data out of it!