- Hacking method: FEBuilderGBA
I wanted to repoint all the text that is system-reserved (like tile types, menus, UIs, and all that) to the top of the text list, so that I have more space to work with when editing text for my romhack. Is there a way to do this?
The first 0x100 entries are mostly reserved already. Past that you can rearrange things if you know where the various tables are. For example, $16E4C points to the weapon text id table which has a bunch of text ids like 0x505 0x506 etc. that you could change, but it is not worth the hassle. You’d have to find where each text id is used and change them yourself.
You can just expand your text table to well above 0x1000 and have as many text IDs as you want. Vanilla uses less than 0x1000 entries / #4096, while 0xFFFF / #65535 is the max. I don’t think you’ll need more than 61,000 text IDs, so you probably shouldn’t worry. The space used by repointing the text table to say 0x2000 entries isn’t significant.
A significant amount of the system-reserved text is hardcoded by ID rather than being a table somewhere, without precise locations documented. It is easier to keep the text table layout through triangle attack dialogue, which is the last piece of system-reserved text. Overwritable story text begins at 0x903, there are over 1000 text entries from there through the end of the table without extending it, and you can extend it for even more if needed as mentioned above