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Emulation & ROM Hacking

Pokémon Ruby Debug Rom research thread - Page 1

Pokémon Ruby Debug Rom research thread

Posted by: Prezwalski
Date: 2014-07-06 10:47:40
See: http://tcrf.net/Pok%C3%A9mon_Ruby_(Debug_Version)

There is still a lot unknown about the Debug Menu (yeah, I'm looking at you, TOMOMITI-menu), so I thought it would be good to continue the research. I am not a ROM-hacker or something, but I'd like to help. A thing I discovered this morning was that in-game flags are indeed controllable via the TOMOMITI-menu. For example the Regi-event: I changed all the flag values in the TOMOMITI-menu to their opposites (zeroes in ones, ones in zeroes) and the entrance to the Regi-chambers appeared. I am not really sure which flag caused that, so I think that'll be our main goal: finding out what flag is in charge of what event.

Second question: the ROM is in German and unreadable Japanese gabberish. How do I translate the strings from the game to English? I can read German, so that won't be the problem, but I have no idea how I translate a Pokémon ROM. Any suggestions?

Re: Pokémon Ruby Debug Rom research thread

Posted by: Ryccardo
Date: 2014-07-17 18:08:36

finding out what flag is in charge of what event.

Second question: the ROM is in German and unreadable Japanese gabberish. How do I translate the strings from the game to English? I can read German, so that won't be the problem, but I have no idea how I translate a Pokémon ROM. Any suggestions?


1: I played with it for hours. Most of the interesting things are indeed not very "advertised", and the menu navigation is quite nightmarish when you have to deal with over 2-3 menu levels… though I had fun setting the cycling road speed record to 10 seconds and 50 crashes. Also had quite some fun with the changing men in the Mauville Pokemon Center…

2: I don't think A-Text has headers mapped for this ROM, and EliteMap wouldn't help too much as the interesting stuff here is not a sign or NPC… assuming the text isn't compressed, you could do it with an hex editor that supports "table files" (files that define the mapping of hex to the rightmost "text view" column). May or may not already exist, may or may not be possible to load 2 tables at once for the German font and the Hiragana one…

It miiiiiight be interesting to diff the debug ROM from the official one then apply the patch (minus headers and other things that are unrelated) to a commercial English/whatever version… I'd be pretty amazed if it even booted afterwards