The basic tool of choice is a so called tile editor. Various rip out and stuff in (no translation is ever likely to be the exact same number of characters after all) and you can see why pointers get broken and need to be fixed when editing text. I usually liken them to contents pages in books - rip out a bunch of pages and count the number of pages it should be normally and you will be ahead in the book, stuff a bunch in and now behind.

For this you have values somewhere in a game that tell it, point the way if you will and thus we have pointers. Games don't read text like modern text viewers, browsers and whatnot and thus need to have something tell it where everything is and by extension how long it is. Relative search is what most start there with Roman alphabet games (Japanese, Chinese and other such languages can be harder here as relative search is of limited use) This data is collected into a file called a table file that various tools beyond that can use to view, extract, edit (or at least attempt to edit) and reinsert. then games often use their own rather custom setup here and the would be hacker tends to then have to figure out what a game (or indeed section of game) used. If you have ever used a code like A=1, B=2, C=3.

There are also things the devs can and did do that might make a game harder to hack than a simplistic ideal or some other games.įor text then most usually start with learning to make tables. You can do a lot without going into the code world but the best hackers will be able to manipulate that. Games typically have text in them, graphics (which can be some text representations and also what you will likely be looking at when it comes to editing a font), audio, gameplay and some code linking it all.

How to play rom hacks on a genesis