Romhacking - Pointer help

[Kuroikaze]

Hey, I'm trying to do a hack of FF5, and part of this hack deals with editing text. I'd rather not be limted to the original character length of the text already there. I was wondering if anyone knows the hex offset of where the Text Pointers are, so I can edit them, or at least a way for me to find them.

I've tried several programs to do relative searches, but they never turn up anything. I'm also positive that FF5 uses pointers because I've tested it using the "end section" bit for FF5, 00.

This is fairly difficult for me due to the complete lack of information about FF5 and the fact that I've just started getting into romhacking a week ago.
I've gotten the hang of editing graphics and menu items and whatnot.
I'm still working on ASM hacking some of the attacks to act differently, and this text pointer issue.

any help anyone could give me would be much appreciated.

[Joe Camacho]

Have you tried looking for help at the whirlpool?

[Kuroikaze]

What's the whirlpool?
I've never heard of that before.

[Joe Camacho]

What's the whirlpool?
I've never heard of that before.

You really need to go there, if you want to do something related to rom translations...

http://donut.parodius.com/

They can tell you stuff and send you to other sites, which I don't know.

[Kuroikaze]

Whirlpool's discussion board is closed off to the public, and they don't have any technical documents either.

Any thing else? I've also got something posted on Acmlm's board.

[creaothceann]

Well, Zophar's domain & google should give you some links... don't hesitate to use specific keywords.

[Nightcrawler]

Hey, I'm trying to do a hack of FF5, and part of this hack deals with editing text. I'd rather not be limted to the original character length of the text already there. I was wondering if anyone knows the hex offset of where the Text Pointers are, so I can edit them, or at least a way for me to find them.

I've tried several programs to do relative searches, but they never turn up anything. I'm also positive that FF5 uses pointers because I've tested it using the "end section" bit for FF5, 00.

This is fairly difficult for me due to the complete lack of information about FF5 and the fact that I've just started getting into romhacking a week ago.
I've gotten the hang of editing graphics and menu items and whatnot.
I'm still working on ASM hacking some of the attacks to act differently, and this text pointer issue.

any help anyone could give me would be much appreciated.

Whoah there, your spinning your wheels and getting nowhere fast.

For starters.. go to http://www.romhacking.com and READ, READ, READ! There are many documents there.

Get used to having no information on a particular game. That's how it works. It's your responsibility to learn how the game works yourself! Very few games are actually documented. Either pick one that is.. or learn about the one you picked.

You do not understand what relative searching is. It has nothing to do with pointers. Relative searching is used to help locate text in games and build a font table. This is all basic and covered in the docs at romhacking.com.

It's been several years since I looked at FF5, but I'm confident if you find a text block and go the beginning of it, you'll find a pointer table.

You may have chosen a game too difficult for your skill level. Perhaps you should play around with an easier to hack game so you understand what's going on.

You need to be able to find pointers yourself. So, get reading and come back here and ask questions after you've done all you can do on your own. You have demonstrated you don't have the base knowledge yet to be further assisted by me.

[Louis Cypher]

Whirlpool's discussion board is closed off to the public, and they don't have any technical documents either.

Donut's board is open to the public. The public just needs to email (wraith) with a username and password! It was set up this way to prevent spammers and such, no hard feelings or anything.

Also, FF5's pointer table starts at $2013F0, and are your generic 24-bit hirom pointers. They're jury-rigged in _the_ most hacky way I've ever seen though -_-

[Kuroikaze]

Whoah there, your spinning your wheels and getting nowhere fast.

For starters.. go to http://www.romhacking.com and READ, READ, READ! There are many documents there.

Get used to having no information on a particular game. That's how it works. It's your responsibility to learn how the game works yourself! Very few games are actually documented. Either pick one that is.. or learn about the one you picked.

You do not understand what relative searching is. It has nothing to do with pointers. Relative searching is used to help locate text in games and build a font table. This is all basic and covered in the docs at romhacking.com.

It's been several years since I looked at FF5, but I'm confident if you find a text block and go the beginning of it, you'll find a pointer table.

You may have chosen a game too difficult for your skill level. Perhaps you should play around with an easier to hack game so you understand what's going on.

You need to be able to find pointers yourself. So, get reading and come back here and ask questions after you've done all you can do on your own. You have demonstrated you don't have the base knowledge yet to be further assisted by me.

Thanks for your reply, but no thanks.
Your elitist attitude is really stand-offish, and offensive. Instead of telling me I'm ignorant, you should have asked what I do know.

Relative searching can in fact be VERY useful for finding pointer tables by using the offsets of where each section of text begins, then using a wildcard inbetween each one, since pointers are usually 2 bits. Searching for 3C * B0 * D2 * F3 * 13 * 26 on a good relative searcher will get you to the text tables in FF5.

In fact, I did find all the pointer tables a day after I posted this. Turns out the pointer tables for FF5 are all seperated by E1 in hex.

[Kuroikaze]

Donut's board is open to the public. The public just needs to email (wraith) with a username and password! It was set up this way to prevent spammers and such, no hard feelings or anything.

Also, FF5's pointer table starts at $2013F0, and are your generic 24-bit hirom pointers. They're jury-rigged in _the_ most hacky way I've ever seen though -_-[/quote]

that's just for the first block of text.
The rest are:
Dialog bank 1:

PT 2015F0 202060
TXT 210200 21FE16
-----------------
Dialog bank 2:

PT 202061 202B13
TXT 220200 22FDFD
-----------------
Dialogue bank 3:

PT 202B14 202F3F
TXT 230200 2374B6
-----------------
Namescreen offset: $00F610
(Not extracted)
-----------------

Inserting for Item descriptions:
-----------------
PT 114200 1142FF
TXT 114300 1151FF
-----------------

Inserting for Battle dialogs:
-----------------
PT 10F200 10F3D3
TXT 273D00 2752FF
-----------------

Inserting for Battle messages:
-----------------
PT 113BA9 113DA8
TXT 272960 2730FF
-----------------

Inserting for Menu Data:
-----------------
PT 00FB87 00FC9C
TXT 273100 27358F
-----------------

Inserting for Location names:
-----------------
PT 107200 107347
TXT 270200 270AFF
-----------------

Inserting for Ability descriptions:
-----------------
PT 117340 117449
TXT 11744A 117E9E


By the way, Nightcrawler, you see what I did there? I shared the wealth. Instead of being an uptight arrogant asshole, I helped out. Imagine that.

[Joe Camacho]

Hey man, you are the translator hacker guy that doesn't know about The Whirlpool, which is the biggest site/hub for this kind of stuff, that can make people think that you don't know much about this scene.

Also, can you imagine the amount of people that come here, asking for help when they know close to nothing about translating/hacks?

I don't see NC advice as rude or elitist, he was just working with the information that you gave him, and the rest of us. That's the best advice someone can give to a guy that's just starting, and you made it look like that.

I'm quite sure that he would answer something else if you would include all that information on your post and *then* ask for help, with it.

Asking you what you know? Why didn't you show it first, so people could help you as fast as they could, instead of having to ask *if* you know something, at all.

That is all, carry on.

[Nightcrawler]

Whoah there, your spinning your wheels and getting nowhere fast.

For starters.. go to http://www.romhacking.com and READ, READ, READ! There are many documents there.

Get used to having no information on a particular game. That's how it works. It's your responsibility to learn how the game works yourself! Very few games are actually documented. Either pick one that is.. or learn about the one you picked.

You do not understand what relative searching is. It has nothing to do with pointers. Relative searching is used to help locate text in games and build a font table. This is all basic and covered in the docs at romhacking.com.

It's been several years since I looked at FF5, but I'm confident if you find a text block and go the beginning of it, you'll find a pointer table.

You may have chosen a game too difficult for your skill level. Perhaps you should play around with an easier to hack game so you understand what's going on.

You need to be able to find pointers yourself. So, get reading and come back here and ask questions after you've done all you can do on your own. You have demonstrated you don't have the base knowledge yet to be further assisted by me.

Thanks for your reply, but no thanks.
Your elitist attitude is really stand-offish, and offensive. Instead of telling me I'm ignorant, you should have asked what I do know.

Relative searching can in fact be VERY useful for finding pointer tables by using the offsets of where each section of text begins, then using a wildcard inbetween each one, since pointers are usually 2 bits. Searching for 3C * B0 * D2 * F3 * 13 * 26 on a good relative searcher will get you to the text tables in FF5.

In fact, I did find all the pointer tables a day after I posted this. Turns out the pointer tables for FF5 are all seperated by E1 in hex.

Joe Camacho pretty much summed up what I wanted to say in my defense. But, I'll add a few things.

I never called you ignorant. If you knew much about me, you would know I have dedicated many hours of my time to helping other hackers. Often times I spend more time helping others than working on my own projects. I have helped many hackers get to the next level before. But in order for me to help someone, I need to know they already pocess the ability to self learn(absolutely required for romhacking) and help themselves because thousands of people constantly ask for help when they can obtain the information they seek readily available and easily by reading some documents(which I helpfully point them to, but romhacking.com just expired unfortunately!) And tons of people choose a game beyond their skill level. So, I need to be sure that they understand the basics and have read and learned something on their own and that they are not trying to acheive something beyond them. I acted on what information you presented to me. My time is limited, but I realize I have alot of valuable experience and advice to offer up and coming hackers to achieve things that aren't found in any documents. I'm willing to share those things with others just so long as I know I wouldn't be wasting my time with them. For every serious romhacker, there are hundreds who quit. I'm only interested in helping people with serious interest. Surely, you can understand that.

I commend your success in a rather creative use of relative searching to find the pointer tables of FF5, but you're going to find out that's not going work most of the time for many games. From a more experienced perspective(and I'm not trying to be offensive), I tend to rule out 'trial and error' methods of discovering things. My honest advice would be not to be reliant on that method to find pointer tables.

The pointer tables may not reflect the absolute offsets at all. They may be completely relative to other pointers. The game may have 8-bit(the rest of the address is calculated by some other means) 16-bit pointers, 24-bit pointers or even 32-bit pointers. The SNES may only address 24-bit addresses, but I have seen games with 32-bit pointers(dummied MSB) nonetheless. The game may have NO pointers(in the standard sense) whatsoever. Some games use scripting blocks and/or streaming text, or string counting to get to what they need. Several games have substrings and subpointers. They can even have their own set of virtual opcodes.

Based on this knowledge and experience, relative searching in it's use for finding pointers is extremely limited and thus not something I would consider using or advise anyone else to use. My examples were also completely ignorning any game that uses any type of compression.

The E1 you see seperating the pointers is the MSB of the full 24-bit pointer or 'bank' byte. You should see some E2's or E3's farther down the list as I believe FF5 contains much more text than can fit in one bank.

You might want to do some reading on SNES addressing if you haven't already. You should know that every address in the SNES is effectively a 24-bit address. This applies to all ROM and RAM addresses aside from a few exceptions which I won't get into.

Usually if an SNES game has 16-bit pointers, the rest of the address is made up from the current bank byte (DB register) or a fixed bank byte stored in RAM. I'm sure that's probably getting ahead of your level though so that's all I will say.

[badinsults]

By the way, Nightcrawler, you see what I did there? I shared the wealth. Instead of being an uptight arrogant asshole, I helped out. Imagine that.

Haha. Just so you know, pretty much every regular on the zsnes board is an uptight, arrogant asshole. For future reference.

[Kuroikaze]

What you were saying is not "Above my level".

My first computer that I did any programming on was an Atari XL with a Turbo816, which was an add-on that plugged into the 6502 slot and was a 65816 processor. The SNES isn't too far removed from that.
I'm familiar with 6502/65816 ASM, and the register/memory/databank setup of the SNES, I didn't just dive right into this without reading and researching first. I've in fact done quite a bit of ASM hacking to FF5 to change how several things in the game work.

And yes, I know that a relative search doesn't always work, but it's worth a try anyway, it will at least let me know if they aren't using generic 16/24bit pointer tables. Eliminating possibilities helps narrow your search, especially in a game like FF5 with very little to no documentation to help guide you.

I'm sure you can understand that.

[Coolanm60000]

can you post a new link to romhacking.com? that site doesn't work anymore.

[Nightcrawler]

What you were saying is not "Above my level".

My first computer that I did any programming on was an Atari XL with a Turbo816, which was an add-on that plugged into the 6502 slot and was a 65816 processor. The SNES isn't too far removed from that.
I'm familiar with 6502/65816 ASM, and the register/memory/databank setup of the SNES, I didn't just dive right into this without reading and researching first. I've in fact done quite a bit of ASM hacking to FF5 to change how several things in the game work.

And yes, I know that a relative search doesn't always work, but it's worth a try anyway, it will at least let me know if they aren't using generic 16/24bit pointer tables. Eliminating possibilities helps narrow your search, especially in a game like FF5 with very little to no documentation to help guide you.

I'm sure you can understand that.

Not really. If you're so familiar with 65816 and the SNES, why wouldn't you just run a quick trace of the font routine, take a peak at where the address comes from and you've got your pointer table or any other form of getting to the text in a few minutes in most cases? 100% garunteed to work everytime. Why waste time with any trial and error method that has a high chance of failure if you have the skills and knowledge to use methods with a 100% success rate?

I'm not going to argue about your level, but you still seem a bit green when it comes to SNES romhacking. You're attacking the advice of somebody who's been doing this for almost 10 years, helped many hackers, and garnered some respect from fellow veterans and key players in the scene. That doesn't happen from being an arrogant asshole and being wrong. It comes from working together, being helpful, and being a decent human being. Obviously you don't want any advice from me, so I shall learn my lesson and stop giving any to you.

On a side note, sharing pointer locations to FF5 is not 'sharing the wealth'. Nobody else was looking for them. Sharing the wealth is assisting somebody else to learn something new and how to it themselves, or overcome and solve a problem.

It seems you and I are just not meeting on the same maturity level.
End of discussion.

[Nightcrawler]

can you post a new link to romhacking.com? that site doesn't work anymore.

The link is not wrong. The problem is the site went down for whatever reason.