The Legend of Zelda/Tutorials

Editing the Storyboard

Original Text

    MANY  YEARS  AGO  PRINCE
    DARKNESS   GANNON  STOLE
    ONE OF THE TRIFORCE WITH
    POWER.    PRINCESS ZELDA
    HAD  ONE OF THE TRIFORCE
    WITH WISDOM. SHE DIVIDED
    IT INTO  8 UNITS TO HIDE
    IT FROM   GANNON  BEFORE
    SHE WAS CAPTURED.       
      GO FIND THE  8 UNITS  
        LINK  TO SAVE HER.  

Interpretation

Each value generates four different colors and splits them among eight different letters. For example, the value B6 would result in this:

    <Red><Red> <Blu><Blu>
    <Grn><Grn> <Red><Red>

If this hex value was applied to the first two lines of the original prologue above, it would apply color in this way.

    MANY  YEARS  AGO  PRINCE
    DARKNESS   GANNON  STOLE

Color Code Chart

Editing in-game text

Special Characters

The hex value 25 is a <BLANK> letter - if you start a message with a bunch of them, you won't hear the game typing out spaces, but you can still use them to center your message.

The hex value EC is interpreted as a period and tells the game to stop interpretation.

Interpretation

The way the game interprets text is strange. There is a range of hex values for normal characters (00 to 2F), and there is a second range of hex values for the last letter of a multi-line message (80 to AF). This means that if you write a message that is two lines long, the last letter of the first line has to be written using the second set of letters so the game doesn't keep typing stuff offscreen.

If you programmed your table file to have capital letters be mapped to the first range and lowercase letters be mapped to the second range, the code from the RO< would read like this:

    (ROM Offset 418B)
    <BLANK><BLANK>BUY MEDICINE BEFORe<BLANK><BLANK>YOU GO.

Following this logic, there is probably a third set of hex values for three-line messages.