Ugly Joe
New member
I was trying to put a DTE hack into a game yesterday (which turned into me figuring out how to expand a mapper 1 game to make room for a DTE hack...) when I got an idea for an text hooker. A text hooker, or at least what I'm calling a text hooker, is a program or function that hijacks the text output of a game (in realtime) and outputs somewhere else so that you can copy/paste or whatever you want with it. What I would want to do is hook the text out of a Japanese NES rom so that you could copy/paste it into a translator (or have the program do it automagically).
Whenever I try to put in a DTE hack, one of the first steps is finding the place in memory where the game stores the address of the next character to be outputted. This location is usually read by some function in the game that takes that byte and outputs the proper tile onto the screen. The DTE hack would change that address to what it wants the game to output. Hopefully that makes sense to anyone who's done it before.
How I figure the text hooker would work would be that you'd have to provide to it:
1) That memory address containing the address of the next character.
2) A table file (or files) for translating the byte at that address to a character.
The text hooker would moniter that address and, whenever it changes, look up the corresponding character in the table and output it to a textbox.
Before I start poking around with fceuxd's source code, I wanted to get some input from everyone else. Does it sound possible? Does it sound easy? Any potential problems (I'm sure there is..)?
Whenever I try to put in a DTE hack, one of the first steps is finding the place in memory where the game stores the address of the next character to be outputted. This location is usually read by some function in the game that takes that byte and outputs the proper tile onto the screen. The DTE hack would change that address to what it wants the game to output. Hopefully that makes sense to anyone who's done it before.
How I figure the text hooker would work would be that you'd have to provide to it:
1) That memory address containing the address of the next character.
2) A table file (or files) for translating the byte at that address to a character.
The text hooker would moniter that address and, whenever it changes, look up the corresponding character in the table and output it to a textbox.
Before I start poking around with fceuxd's source code, I wanted to get some input from everyone else. Does it sound possible? Does it sound easy? Any potential problems (I'm sure there is..)?