GuestLog in

This is excellent, it lists out the dialog strings in the order they appear in the ROM, so you don't have to go mucking about with maps like you have to do in Temporal Flux. Also unlike Temporal Flux, it has a SEARCH FUNCTION! Hallelujah! This makes it possible for the user to play the game, see a line that needs changing, search for it, and change it. It's amazing!

It does have quite a few flaws though. Like Recca mentioned before me, you have to be careful when you're formatting your new dialog. Chrono Trigger uses what appears to be the variable-width "Mac Chicago" font, but this program displays everything in Courier New. You do have the option to change the font (another unique feature!), but then you have to be extra-careful. Chrono Trigger doesn't have a text wrap-around routine like Final Fantasy 6 or EarthBound, and if one of your lines is too long, it'll just keep typing stuff offscreen. If I knew how to program, I'd fix this by making an interface similar to FF3USME, where it uses the ROM's font information to preview what you're typing on top of a screenshot of the game.

Another thing I noticed is that when you edit certain non-dialog strings (Enemy names? Item names? Chapter titles? I'm really not sure), it corrupts the text that gets displayed when party members level up.

Also, it doesn't have a freakin' TASKBAR BUTTON! This also means that it doesn't show up when you press ALT-TAB, so you have to minimize all of your windows and click on it to bring it back if something covers it up. This may sound really trivial, but you have to do it A LOT if you have other programs open besides this and your emulator.

I can tell from the title bar icon that this program was written in Visual Basic 6, which was released in 1998. It would be absolutely lovely if the author made this open-source, which would help a lot of people learn about what kind of logic goes into coding their own ROM editors. This would also encourage people who *already* have the technical know-how to port it to a modern language, and make improvements.

Just wanted to add some quick notes that aren't mentioned in the (minimal) readme file that accompanies the program.

• As far as I know, this is the latest/last version of the program available.

• The program is within an installer file (WHY!?).
• Luckily, you can extract it with 7-zip and move the $SYSDIR files to the same directory as the executable and it will run fine in Windows 7 in a 'portable' fashion without installation.

• This is a very minimal program, but I wish Temporal Flux had a better Text Editor (plugin?) and then something like this wouldn't be needed.

• Your ROM extensions need to be .SMC (Super Magic Copier) rather than the proper format of .SFC (Super Famicom).
• If you've renamed them to SFC using byuu's SNES Purify utility, then you'll need to rename them back in order to use this program.

• In another unexpected twist, your ROM needs to have a header (again, WHY!?) so you'll need to find a utility like NSRT that can add a header for you.

• Finally, this will only work properly on the original US ROM and will be nearly unusable if you aren't familiar with where text strings are located.

Chrono Trigger Texteditor is an easy and very useful utility to use for editing the various in game text found in Chrono Trigger or translating to another language. It offers text expansion and even has a compression function of its own build in when saving to Rom. Although you still have to be careful when editing text since expanding it would mean that the text might come out of the border. An example of this is the screen when switching party members. You may not want to expand the text in that too much...

This utility supports English, French, German letters and a few from other European languages as well. Examples of supported unicode letters: the Acute and Circumflex accents on "a", "e" and "i".

To be able to re-name characters and have it properly displayed in the game, the Hex bytes for them have to be known and used instead of the game's default names. Luckily, I'm going to save you guys some time and add them in this review as well:

• Crono - {13}
• Marle - {14}
• Lucca - {15}
• Robo - {16}
• Frog - {17}
• Ayla - {18}
• Magus - {19}
• Epoch - {20}
• Party character #1 - {1B}
• Party character #2 - {1C}
• Party character #3 - {1D}
• Cro (Crono's nick name which was change to Crono in the English version. Not at all useful since it will just display "Crono".) - {1A}
• Nadia - {1E}
• Music sign (Used by Gato.) - {EE}
• Hearts (Used by Flea.) - {F0}

Special thanks to justin3009 from the board for pointing out a lot of these to me when I had just begun using this program! There's a few more, but they don't seem to have any visual effect in the game. I may be wrong though so experiment with them!

Overall, this is a very simple and effective utility for editing or translating the text found in Chrono Trigger. It's a great program to use for those who are new to romhacking or for those who are just lazy to use a general hex editor such as myself! Give it a try, you won't be disappointed!