Need help with editing text in Pizza Pop.

[usertheloset]

Hi, i'm new to romhacking so i apologize if it's a stupid question. I was trying to edit text in Pizza Pop for NES, but i can't seem to find any strings in hex editor. Is it compressed, or i'm just doing something wrong?

Edit: Thanks for help, i figured it out now.

[tepples]

Many games with a lot of text do use compression. Other games just use a character encoding that puts letters of the alphabet other than at their ASCII code points. For the latter, you'll need a hex editor that supports a "table" file, and you'll need to use a relative search to find this table. You might be able to construct this table using a debugging emulator by looking at the pattern table (also called CHR memory) while text is being displayed. In FCEUX, for example, use "PPU Viewer".

[usertheloset]

I tried to use that method but it still doesn't work. There is not much text in the game so it's probably not compressed.

[JLB]

If you just want to play in English, it looks like there is an English patch on Romhacking.net.

Otherwise, I did look into this a bit. I'm not particularly experienced with this, but It seems the game has no dedicated text rendering code. A section of PRG contains sets of 4 CHR values which are drawn in order:
01
23
, to make 16x16 metatiles.
I think the maps are a list of pointers to which metatiles to use.

So there isn't going to be anything that is easily identified as text strings, and any editing (especially changing from 8x16 kana to 8x8 alphabet), I think, will require at least making new metatiles or possibly changing the render code.

Editing an English patched ROM may be easier though.