A while ago I spent some time on patching Virtual Fishing. The project came to a halt as I needed a break. However, I’m planning to get back to it. So I figured I should share what I have done so far.
The goal of the project obviously is to replace the Japanese text with an English translation. The main problem is that the 16×16 Japanese characters use allot of space on the screen and can not simply be swapped to lain letters. So the plan is to add an 8×16 Latin alphabet, change the text drawing method to support the smaller letters and then patch in the translated text.
Some of that I already did. Well, the first thing I did is reverse engineer how the game draws the text and where the Japanese alphabet is stored. The attached image has been exported from the rom. As you can see there are already Latin letters in the rom but nothing I want to use.
I then patched in a Latin alphabet by overwriting some of the Japanese letters. I also changed the method that draws the text to use 8×16 characters. The resulting rom is of course messed up as the sentences themselves are still Japanese.
I located some sentences in the rom for testing purposes. Unfortunately, there are no big pointer arrays that point towards these sentences. That makes it a bit more difficult for me to dynamically replace them.
The next step will be to clean up what I did so far and make it more generic. After that I will start replacing sentences.
Right now I’m using some translations provided by awesome person Benjamin Stevens. I know Wyndcrosser was also working on translation, so there should be plenty of sources when it actually comes to translating.
