Changing Languages of FF7 / FF8

[Alhexx]

I've just been emailed today by a russian who has a problem.
In Russia, you can only buy FF7 and FF8 in english and russian. However, the russian version is crap and he does not understand english very well. But he understands german.

So the question is:
Is it possible to buy an original FF7, let's say english, and then simply overwriting/exchanging the language files?

(I'm sorry that you see me posting such questions - but I've been workin on model formats and not on text files...)

 - Alhexx

[Aaron]

I know the ff7.exe/ff8.exe files are actually different between language versions.

I don't know about the field data files, and I also don't know if say the German ff8.exe would accept the Russian FF8 CD-ROMs.

[Colly]

In FF8 I think it's possible, but you'll must exchange .exe file too.

If you want change all texts, you must change texts' files in field, main, menu, battle and world + files in main folder of the game (I don't know whether 'publish.pak' is different for every language versions .)
You can send this files with Garden and some FF8 archiver.

In FF7 - I don't know

[EmperorSteele]

I think someone else made a post before about changing all the text.  It's around here someplace.  It's as easy as opening up the text files with one of ficcy's proggies, editing it, saving, and voila.  ... i think... not sure =/

[Borde]

Changing the language is easy as long as you have the two versions. I don't remember which was exactly the file which contained the text but I remember it was a large one. You can overwrite that file on a full instalation and have the text in the language you want. I did it for the english version (in order to convert it to spanish) and it worked fine.

NOTE: Some of the names of the files end with the country code (_sp for spain, _us for US, etc.). In order for the exe to recognize files which don't match it's version you must change the name of the file to that expected by the exe.