How to localize Visual Basic 5.0/6.0 games?

[Jacklack3]

Kairosoft created Game Dev Story on the PC a long time ago and made a sequel but it never got a translation. I was able to use a program and I found out the game was made in Visual Basic 5.0/6.0. I tried to use some VB decompilers but they didn't work or the project file wasn't able to run/compile back. Is there a way I can edit the forms in the binary itself or change the text itself? It doesn't appear in hex by the way so that doesn't work. Thanks!

 

[FAST6191]

How well do the decompilers handle packing/encryption? A lot of such programs won't do much. http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/626/ will hopefully tell you a bit more here.

Simple hex viewing is not likely to do much -- compression, not being ASCII encoded, split up a bit... the list goes on.

You can start with a resource extractor https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/resources_extract.html
They are typically aimed at general windows programs but visual basic still conforms to that in most ways that matter here.

http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/ is another, the classic tool people use for debugging which could also tell you something is ollydgb http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/625/

While getting stuff to decompile and then recompile is a feat did any of your decompilations yield any useful info here? If they tell you where you should be looking for a more typical hacking approach then so much the better.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Kairosoft created Game Dev Story on the PC a long time ago and made a sequel but it never got a translation. I was able to use a program and I found out the game was made in Visual Basic 5.0/6.0. I tried to use some VB decompilers but they didn't work or the project file wasn't able to run/compile back. Is there a way I can edit the forms in the binary itself or change the text itself? It doesn't appear in hex by the way so that doesn't work. Thanks!

That's the thing with decompilers, the code rarely compiles without changes. You'll have to correctly edit all the errors so they compile and work.

 

[Jacklack3]

How well do the decompilers handle packing/encryption? A lot of such programs won't do much. http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/626/ will hopefully tell you a bit more here.

Simple hex viewing is not likely to do much -- compression, not being ASCII encoded, split up a bit... the list goes on.

You can start with a resource extractor https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/resources_extract.html
They are typically aimed at general windows programs but visual basic still conforms to that in most ways that matter here.

http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/ is another, the classic tool people use for debugging which could also tell you something is ollydgb http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/625/

While getting stuff to decompile and then recompile is a feat did any of your decompilations yield any useful info here? If they tell you where you should be looking for a more typical hacking approach then so much the better.

All those tools just show me metadata stuff about the EXE. Also I found the decompilers don't really decompile since it can't translate machine code into Visual Basic. There was a failed translation before and they seem to make a tool that would create a save for you in english. Though when I ran the broken decompiled VB project the text was in the forms and there's no external save data file.

 

[Kwyjor]

Since this is a Windows program, you could conceivably write something that hooks into the process while it's running and replaces the text in RAM, sort of like a fancy cheat engine. I expect someone out there must have done something like that with a Visual Basic program before, though of course editing the data files themselves would be a much more elegant solution.

 

[Jacklack3]

Since this is a Windows program, you could conceivably write something that hooks into the process while it's running and replaces the text in RAM, sort of like a fancy cheat engine. I expect someone out there must have done something like that with a Visual Basic program before, though of course editing the data files themselves would be a much more elegant solution.

After this post was made I was able to contact a dude who tried to do a translation and did this. Though how exactly do you do it? Not much helpful resources to help me know where to start.

 

[Kwyjor]

Though how exactly do you do it? Not much helpful resources to help me know where to start.

Well, you'll need to know a heckuva lot more about Windows programing than I do. :-P

I did a Google search for "rewrite a visual basic program in ram by hooking into the process" (no quotes) and found
https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/w-p/sy...-To-Inject-Your-Code-Into-Another-Process.htm .

Apparently O'Reilly has a whole book on it.
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596001186.do