Tutorial: HP PP text box graphics
If your language has a different name for "Hit Points" (HP) and "Psychic Points" (PP), then you might need to change the little letters that show up in Battle, which we'll call HP/PP box. (This box also appears when you press the B button in the overworld along with the Cash text box).
However, if you try to edit the letters found in the "WindowGraphics" folder of your CoilSnake project, you'll notice that, if you change the first "P" letter, when you look at the HP/PP box, the second "P" in "PP" will also be changed to the letter you wrote instead of the first "P".
So we are going to HEX edit our ROM (or create a custom CCS file) to fix this little problem and switch how the game reads the "H" and the "P", along with changing the Windows.png images inside "WindowGraphics".
- Credits to Akira76, the creator of the French translation of EarthBound for this particular fix!
1. Change the letters position
For this, we have two choices:
- Use a HEX editor to manually change the position.
- Use a CCS file with a one line code for this fix.
The latter is the easiest as fastest to accomplish, since it only requires you to basically copy-paste the one line code into any CCS file (or a new one if you want to keep everything organized).
1.1 Using a HEX Editor to switch the position
To start off, we are going to open the Base ROM with any Hex Editor (i.e. HxD). Then press Ctrl+G to open up the Offset Finder. Here, you're going to enter the following addresses (depending on your ROM):
- Headered ROM = 0x03E5FC
- Unheadered ROM= 0x03E3FC
Press enter and the HEX editor will take you directly to the desired offset.
Once there, we are going to write the following bytes in there:
0×08, 0×0A, 0×18, 0×1A
That will switch the positions of the letters "H" and "P" in the HP/PP window.
1.2 Add a one line code to a CCS file
All you gotta do is put this line in any CCS file, or create a new CCS file with any name you want and include this line.
ROM[0xC3E3FC]= "[08 0A 18 1A]"
2. Editing the Window Graphics images.
This is the easiest part. All you gotta do is enter the WindowGraphics folder from your project and open each one of the following .PNG images with GraphicsGale (Recommended):
- Windows1_0.png
- Windows1_1.png
- Windows1_2.png
- Windows1_3.png
- Windows1_4.png
- Windows1_5.png
- Windows1_6.png
Each one of those images have a similar layout. The only part in which we should focus is the first row where the "HPP" letters are located. First, you're going to center the last "P" from the "HPP" arrangement.
After that, you should go ahead and modify the letters to whatever it is you need for your translation. For example, in Spanish it would be "PV" for HP and "PP" stays the same. So we end up with something like this:
(TODO: Replace the first two images, since tinypic has been shutdown)
And that's it.
Now try it out in-game and see your results.