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binpatch — zero.exe patches for halfwidth mode

Five tiny binary patches (1–3 bytes each) for the Steam PC port of Trails from Zero. Tested against build 1.4.13. Byte offsets may shift on other builds — see PATCHING_NOTES.md for how to find them.

When you need this

Only when running ../dt-tools/ in halfwidth mode.

The game itself works fine without these patches — the stock build runs, 2-byte passthrough mode runs, you can play the game. But the moment you switch ._dt files to 1-byte halfwidth encoding, you'll notice that some letters disappear in specific places (quest log preview, item descriptions, memo entries, town list, etc.). That's not a font problem — those are 5 separate ASCII gates inside the engine's text formatters that silently drop bytes outside the 0x20..0x7F printable range, even after the outer halfwidth gate has already accepted them. These patches widen each of those 5 gates by 1–3 bytes apiece.

If you stay in passthrough (2-byte SJIS) mode, you don't need these patches.

The five patches

ID Address (VA) Bytes Function What it fixes
P1 0x140078936 80 F9 C0 → 80 F9 FF FUN_140078850 (encoding detector) Kills false UTF-8 detection of halfwidth byte pairs.
P2 0x1401ce6c9 73 09 → 90 90 FUN_1401ce2b0 (item desc renderer) Lets halfwidth bytes through ASCII gate (no more infinite loop on item descriptions).
P3 0x14028caa5 5F → BF FUN_14028b700 (single-line truncate, .. marker) Widens "printable" range so halfwidth bytes survive truncate (quest log preview).
P4 0x14028b2b3 5F → BF FUN_14028aac0 (multi-line formatter) Same fix as P3, applied to memo / book formatter.
P5 0x14028a443 5F → BF FUN_140289a30 (rich multi-line formatter #C/#I/#R) Same fix as P3, applied to town list / battle-notebook widgets / font-scale squeeze paths.

P3, P4, P5 are the same byte fix at three different sites. A signature scan (research/ghidra_scripts/find_all_p3_gates.java) confirms those are the only three occurrences in zero.exe.

Usage

Edit apply_patch.bat and set EXE to your zero.exe. Then:

apply_patch.bat              :: apply all (P1..P5)
apply_patch.bat dry          :: dry-run, no writes
apply_patch.bat revert       :: revert all
apply_patch.bat P3           :: apply only P3 (or P1/P2/P4/P5)
apply_patch.bat revert-P3    :: revert only P3

A backup zero.exe.utf8patch-backup is created on first apply and kept.

Direct CLI:

python patch_zero_exe.py path/to/zero.exe              # apply ALL
python patch_zero_exe.py path/to/zero.exe --revert     # revert ALL
python patch_zero_exe.py path/to/zero.exe --dry-run    # report only
python patch_zero_exe.py path/to/zero.exe --only P3    # one patch

Files

  • patch_zero_exe.py — Python patcher (P1..P5).
  • apply_patch.bat — Windows wrapper.
  • PATCHING_NOTES.md — full technical notes (Russian): function map, hypotheses ruled out, Ghidra-script index.
  • research/ghidra_scripts/*.java — Ghidra Java scripts that found each patch site. Useful only if you want to redo the analysis on a different binary. Not required to apply the patches.

Platform

PC (Steam, x86-64) only. Switch / Vita builds use different binaries; these byte offsets won't apply there.