Changing the text

[T.W.]

After finishing Fire Emblem Awakening, I wanted to go back and play the games that never made it out of Japan. I noticed though, that no one has set up a patch to alter the character names based on their new official localization. So decided to learn how to edit ROMs myself. Starting with Gaiden (it seems like the simplest), this worked fairly well when the transition was one letter off (Valencia to Valentia or Doma to Duma).But when I come to characters like Valbo to Valbar or Noma to Nomah, I cannot find an explanation of how to add space for the new letters. It seems that every tutorial says it is possible, but to look it up in a different tutorial. I'd also like to know how to shorten names for later on, like Shiida to Caeda. Does anyone know how to do this?

[Klokinator]

Which games specifically are you wanting to edit? Only one of them, all of them? Give specifics bro.

[Lamia]

adding space requires the modification of pointers, essentially bytes in a list that 'point' to other data, in this case names that have variable length

I don't know anything about FE1-3 though so I wouldn't know how to help there

Edited April 23, 2013 by Lorena

[CT075]

on a more general level

if you know where the data already exists then you can find a pointer (well, if you know what a pointer looks like), then you can change that pointer to some free space which will contain your new data

admittedly it might be more difficult if the NES does something dumb like having all pointers be relative; i haven't had a whole lot of experience with those games so I can't tell you for sure

for making names shorter, there's got to be some sort of placeholder or space character that you can insert at the end (ie, "shiida" -> "caeda_")

Edited April 23, 2013 by CT075