DKC's Wonky Font Format

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DKC's Wonky Font Format

Postby The Kirby » November 22nd, 2008, 2:32 am

I've been attempting to change the font of DKC because I'm working on a translation of the English script to Brazilian Portuguese with a couple of my Brazilian contacts. But, Portuguese uses extra characters that aren't included in DKC's font, so I want to replace the unused characters with the accents.

But, I ran into a problem...
The Font.PNG
Top: The entire font displayed in RAM, Bottom: The font as it appears in the DKC 1.0 USA ROM.
The Font.PNG (3.46 KiB) Viewed 11630 times

This is of the main font, which I want to focus on at the moment, seeing as it's the meat and potatoes of the translation.

The bottom part of the screenshot displays the font as it appears in ROM, yet it looks really weird, but it doesn't seem to be compressed in any standard way (the "!" doesn't look like it was compressed at all). The font characters in ROM seem to retain the same basic shape as they appear in-game, and some characters are missing, which I assume are rendered by flipping other characters ("b" becomes "d", for example). Although, I'm by no means technical about this stuff, I'm going to guess that the font graphics are mixed with "non-graphical" data that does other things to the font, for example, when I edited the "o" to look the same, it ended up changing every instances of "n" into "o" while the "o" looked the same.

Any help on this would be appreciated, thanks.
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Re: DKC's Wonky Font Format

Postby Raccoon Sam » November 22nd, 2008, 4:03 am

I can almost guarantee you that the lower 'glitched' font is the same font, but loaded in the 4bpp format.
If you get a chance, whether was it in Tile Molester, YY-CHR, or whatever tile editing tool, try setting the format to 2bpp. It will be the answer to your problem.
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Re: DKC's Wonky Font Format

Postby The Kirby » November 22nd, 2008, 4:29 am

Oh, wow! It was that simple?! :shock:

Thanks a lot. :D
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Re: DKC's Wonky Font Format

Postby Kiddy14 » November 23rd, 2008, 9:25 am

That sounds cool (the translation part).
I'd like to see a Latin American Neutral Spanish translation of the game.
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Re: DKC's Wonky Font Format

Postby Blaziken257 » November 23rd, 2008, 10:58 am

Kiddy14 wrote:That sounds cool (the translation part).
I'd like to see a Latin American Neutral Spanish translation of the game.


This topic actually gave me an idea to do a Spanish translation of the SNES version of DKC3. Since there's not much text in this game, it won't be as hard as some other games that I've done... I just hope hacking the text is easier than it is in the Japanese version of DKL3...

And yeah, that Game Boy-style compression confused me a bit, that took me a while to figure out how to see the font properly. Ha ha.
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Re: DKC's Wonky Font Format

Postby The Kirby » November 24th, 2008, 2:11 am

I would eventually like to give DKC2 and 3 a shot with translation, but I'm not sure if I'd be able to fit the text all in the ROM without overwriting the other languages' texts, but I haven't checked them out too much, so I could be wrong about this. It might work if you could somehow remove the language select, but I don't know how to go about doing that...

I'm doing this translation on a DKC 1.0 (U) ROM, which has German text for the main and level name texts, which I assume is never used, since the American version of DKC doesn't give you the option to switch from English (It's missing the French text, however.) So you've got a lot of extra space for your translation.
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