Just taken a look on the WinAPE debugger but no luck in finding the text
Hi again, I will give you some pointers on how to proceed, but keep in mind that translating a game like this without some knowledge will be a LONG task, anyway, here it goes:
First of all, the main tool I use for these kind of works is Windhex, a pretty old hex editor but i find it easy to use and very robust. I will show you an example of localising some random text and some tidbits about hex editing.
After downloading windhex and running it, you will have a completely black main window, then press:
File -> Open file for editing ; and select the SECOND dsk for Iron Lord, you'll be greeted by a screen full of bytes on the left side of the screen and their "ascii interpretation on the right"
Then press File-> Open Table File -> File #1 and open "iron.tbl" (I will provide this file)
Then press File-> Open Table File -> File #2 and open "ironB.tbl" (I will provide this file)
With this, you can already start looking for text, we are going straight to a section of the dsk for ilustrative purposes, press CTRL+G (Go to) and enter: 2f090 and press enter, this will move the editor to that position in the file and you will see this:
As you can see, I have already localised some text (but it won't be like that on your file, it'll still be French), in this editor, you can switch between editing the left and right side by pressing TAB, this is mandatory as you will have to manually enter line jumps and the position of the text, this first image also has highlighted the FF byte that, as you can see, marks the end the sentence. Where this byte not present, the program would keep drawing on screen all the characters in the file until it finds the FF byte.
So, you already know about the end byte, next is the line jump, that forces the program to start drawing in the next line provided:
As you can see, after the <nextline> mark, there are two bytes prior to the text, these two bytes determine the X and Y position of the line that follows so, in this particular example, if you wanted to draw the "on your old" line further to the left of the screen you should change the highlighted 70 on the LEFT to a lower value, keep in mind that it is hex and not decimal so 70-2 (for drawing 2 spaces to the left) would be 6E and not 68. The Y or vertical position can also be changed but I did not do enough testing as to have a clear idea on how it works. Also, let's say that you edited the PREVIOUS line "in the castle" and left just "in the", after the "the" you should switch to the left side of the editor by pressing tab and manually enter the line jump and the position of the line that, in this case, would be 00 70 C1, then, switch back and keep editing, OR, if you feel that the space is enough for you without moving line jumps, these control codes could be ignored and just overwrite the french text.
This last picture, shows how do the MASSIVE uppercase at the start of some text work, they are stored in memory as TILES, and in this particular case, those big letters are formed by 4 of these tiles, two on the upper line and two on the bottom one, you can see that 90 91 forms the UPPER (Y-) part of the letter and 92 93 the BOTTOM (Y_) part, they are shown as Y- and Y_ for simplicity's sake. So, say you would want an X instead of the Y, just open the IRON.TBL file provided with some text editor and just find the code for the letter you want, (X- BEING 88 89 and X_ being 8A 8B)
The last thing I will mention is why two table files (IRON.TBL and IRONB.TBL), I am not very familiar with this game but it seems that it has several ways to show text so one tbl file may not be perfect for every situation so, if you find text that has a dot instead of an space between words, just switch tables (ctrl + 1 is tbl 1 and ctrl + 2 is table 2) this is mandatory because the position of some uppercase letters is also changed between game styles. Also, one of this game styles' text only uses ONE byte to mark the position of the text and, as I am very unfamiliar with the game, have not been able to test it.
So, now you should load the first dsk, load the tbl files and start looking for the text and localising it, then load other dsk, rinse and repeat.
I hope I have been clear enough for you to understand, if you have any questions that I am able to answer, I will gladly do.
Good luck!
