RetroSubs Maker Guide

General procedure

The usual process consists of 4 steps:

1. Text extraction (not really required, but recommended)
   • Recommended tools: an hex editor with custom text encodings support like ImHex. Other common romhacking tools.
2. Find the RAM areas to hash
   • Recommended tools: Mesen2, and its excellent Tile Viewer (makes it very easy to find where the text is rendered in RAM).
3. Dialog design, translation and hashes generation
   • Recommended tools: BizHawk and the RetroSub Maker script, your favorite graphics editor (used to find the correct screen coordinates and colors).
4. Testing and release
   • Recommended tools: BizHawk and the RetroSub script (enable debug mode and manually reload after every change, check the console for errors), your favorite text editor with markdown support.

Tip

For an easy start look at the examples.

Adding text to an incomplete retrosub

1. Load the RetroSub Maker script in BizHawk, then reach a point with untranslated lines. Save a state.

2. Paste the translated text, and try rendering it. Add <br> newlines if necessary and then append to the retrosub file:

3. Repeat the process to add more lines. When the section is finished, load the savestate, and reload the RetroSub script to test it.

4. if more corrections are necessary, open the .retrosub file in a text editor. After saving your manual edits, reload the RetroSub script in BizHawk to test each correction in real-time.

Tip

If there are duplicated hashes, you may need to change the hashed memory offset and regenerate the affected lines. (Use Mesen Tile Viewer to find the correct offsets)