Some FE4 Hacking questions/help

[Leif]

Alright, in the past (before my last computer died) I used to hack Fire Emblem 4 roms with nightmare and do simple edits like changing classes, editing enemies, etc. However, I wanted to go a step further. First of all, I have no idea how to change portraits for characters. When I mean change portraits, I don't mean inserting my own. I just want to switch some of them around (for both enemies and allies alike) and have the edited portraits appear in cutscenes, etc. Also, I thought it would be interesting to change the dialogue, some names of the characters, and some class names. Is this possible to do with the translation patch (I would like to have the edits done in English)?

Finally, I would like to know (forgive this stupid question) how safe it is to do this hacking on my computer. I want to be careful with my new laptop, so are there things I should watch out for when downloading the roms and emulators on my new laptop?

[Celice]

If you're still interested shoot me a PM and I'll explain some of the stuff sometime in detail. If you're not it saves me time from writing it out anyways :/

[Leif]

Thanks! I sent you a PM.

[Celice]

I'm suddenly lazy. I'm sorry :(

It's safe, there's nothing you'd be different than typing on this forum. You're just doing things in a different way, so to say. The danger is about the same.

And you can do all the rest. How you do it depends on the game. I don't remember, but for some reason I think Twilkitri's patch used dictionary compression, which means there's a list of words in the game, and when sentences are read to be displayed on the screen, it's not letters, but whole words. So rather than spell out the word 'hello' with five separate characters, there's an ID for the word hello that's used instead, saving space.

Someone made an ASCII patch for FE4's translation a while ago, but I don't remember the specifics, and that kinda negates the dictionary whatever, as far as it existing would be. I dunno :/ But I'm lazy too.

Sorry :(