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ROMHacking and translations

ROMHacking and translations

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Once I got into programming and I started wondering what was inside of video games, I tried to “open” them to see how they were made. I started modifying Pokémon games in order to add more trainers, to customize my experience playing them or to be able to catch every pokémon in the same cartridge. So yes, I started this journey doing some “pokehacking”.

Nevertheless, the biggest project I accomplished in this field was the complete localization of the Nintendo DS game The World Ends With You. We opened the game, translated the text, images and even dubbed the videos in Spanish. If you want to know more about this, I made a Twitter Thread explaining it.

The complete translation of the game included:

  • Translation of all in-game text
  • Localization of images and graphics
  • Complete dubbing of videos in Spanish
  • Extensive testing to ensure quality

More information: romhacking.net/translations/1662

I worked together with the ChronoSpTeam to translate this classic RPG to Spanish. It was a collaborative project that required coordinating efforts between several translators and programmers.

More information: romhacking.net/translations/2251

I started working on this project doing reverse engineering of the game, but I gave up because I did not know Japanese at all. Even though I managed to access the game files, without knowledge of the language it made no point to continue with the translation. It was eventually fully translated by Artema Translations.

In this case I didn’t do a complete translation, but I changed the font of the game. The original typeface had the problem that some letters could be easily confused with each other, which made reading difficult. The new font significantly improved readability. You can find information about the fixed font on GBATemp.

If you’re interested in the world of ROMHacking, here are some useful links:

  • ROMHacking.net: The largest ROMHacking community in English.
  • Tradusquare: Spanish video game translation community with active projects and resources.

Note: All these projects were done for educational purposes and cultural preservation, to make games accessible that never received official Spanish translation.