Translation text query

[megatron-uk]

I'm poking around inside the old strategy game 'Lord of War' in the hope of translating some of the menu items - nothing adventurous, just what some of the in-game menu commands, for now.
Being an older CDROM^2 game I thought I'd try my hand at just doing some direct text changes in the iso image on existing-english menu text to see if it would work.

I can see virtually all of the text from the game via windhex and the aid of the sjis table - I've also dumped most of the plain SJIS text using SJIS_dump from rhdn ; I can see from just a manual google translation of maybe a dozen longish sections that the campaign text ('Attack the tank factory'), status messages ('Commander attack experience UP!) and unit information are all in the clear.

There's also quite a bit of the menu and unit names in English so I tried a simple edit of what I believe to be the english text for the main menu ('New Scenario', 'Load Scenario' etc..), but nothing appears to change. Dumping the text from the game I find the following instances of 'Load Scenario':

Position : 1050b | Bytes : 13
LOAD SCENARIO

Position : 2050b | Bytes : 13
LOAD SCENARIO

Position : 2a5f6 | Bytes : 13
LOAD SCENARIO

Position : 3a5f6 | Bytes : 13
LOAD SCENARIO

(Position is relative to start of track 2). Even changing every single instance of 'Load Scenario' to be a different string doesn't show any change!

It shouldn't normally be the case that a game would have clear-text dialogue and compressed, should it? If I change every instance of a piece of text and it still doesn't display differently that would seem to imply that it's set somewhere else.

[Bonknuts]

The problem with CD games, is that there tends to be a lot of garbage in between the used areas in the data track. It can be old code, other game code, even 16bit wave data. This is very common.

 Anyway, the point is - set a break point for the Get_Font bios call, and step back to the code that called it. Trace that back to where it reads the SJIS string. Also, dump CDRAM and look for sjis in that. It makes it easier to identify/match up in the ISO, so you know what points in the ISO to edit.

[megatron-uk]

Ah! So it could actually be garbage data from the original mastered image? Interesting! Once I get further with the everdrive stuff I may take a more detailed look at this as there's a couple of older games I've had sitting on my shelf I've never bothered touching because of basic menu and navigation translations.

[Bonknuts]

Yeah. The dev kits used HD's and a simulator program to run the data tracks. But for some strange reason, when making the master - the they always did a binary dump (probably to a tape device). You'll find all kinds of weird things in the unused areas. I've found partial source code to games, other game data, beta stuffs, work in progress stuffs, etc. One game even had whole compressed archives of the game development in there; that was pretty incredible to see (especially since it was an arcade card game, and you got to see early states of the Arcade card - which had very slow access).