#variable width fonts

Here's a common one that you're likely to see in Japanese role playing games on the SNES that never got an official translation.

If the game is popular enough, at some time a couple guys will try to create their own translation. And that's very nice of them because Japanese is really hard to read.

Something nice about Japanese is that on the whole, most characters are the same size. Usually square, which means that it's pretty much trivial to display Japanese text on a tile-based system like the SNES.

Western writings, on the other hand, tend to have varying widths for each character. And that's why we have VWF engines. So when a game is officially translated, the translation team often drops in a VWF engine to make things look nice. Of course, so do the hackers.

The only difference is that a lot of these fan translations are tested on inaccurate emulators. Emulators that do things like allowing the game to write to Video RAM while the screen is still being drawn:

  There's palette effects and wavy backgrounds, and there's changing the actual tile data. The actual SNES doesn't let you do that, for its own safety. On an actual system, the text would be broken in some stupid way:

So yeah. Those hacks aren't gonna be playable for long. The stupid thing is, there's plenty valid ways to do it. After all, official translations have the same hurdles to overcome. There is no excuse!