Table of Contents:
What is a Text Dump?
A text dump contains all the text in a video game, ripped straight from the ROM. I use a script to convert the ROM code into formatted, readable text, in either TXT or HTML format. Why is this useful? It is often useful, when theorizing about Zelda, to have quotes handy, so the text dumps put all the text in the Zelda games at one's fingertips.
Different File Formats
For each game you will see several file types available for download:
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How Do You Make Text Dumps?
If you don't understand the following, don't worry. I'm just including the information for those who are curious.
The first step in making a text dump is to have a copy of the ROM. Then, if you have a quote from the game, you can search for the text. Newer games (like OoT, MM, and LA) use standard ASCII values for raw text, so it is possible to find the text using any common text editor. Older games (like LoZ, AoL, and ALttP), unfortunately, don't use ASCII standards, so it's necessary to do a relative search using a hex editor like Thingy. Then you can make a translation table that will allow Thingy to translate into standard ASCII values.To make things even more difficult, some games compress the text. For example, in OoS
the hex value 02 0E translates to "Twinrova." ALttP uses text compression, and doesn't use
standard ASCII values, so it's the most difficult one to dump. OoS and OoA use ASCII standards
but have text compression. Fortunately, I already have TBL files for both these games, so
dumping won't be as difficult as it could be.
After you have found the text (and you're sure you've found ALL the text), copy and paste all the text you can find into a new file. This is what my DMP files are: just all the text I could find, copied and pasted. Once this is done, I write a PHP script to parse the DMP file and translate everything into a readable format (TXT or HTML). This is the easiest thing to do in the long run, because it takes a while to find out what all the code means. Using the standard Find/Replace function of a text editor is too much work if what you're searching for constantly changes.