Troubleshooting - MX-Futhark/hook-any-text GitHub Wiki

I want to use HAT because I can't read Japanese, and yet it expects me to write Japanese to use it...

This behaviour will be fixed as soon as possible, but keep in mind that HAT is still a very young project. You indeed need to write one line in Japanese every time you need to use HAT with a new game, but the task is not as daunting as it sounds, even if you can't read moon runes. There are several solution to your problem:

• The easy way: ask someone who can write Japanese. The translation section of visual novel forums is generally a good place to start if you explain your situation.
• The other easy way: use an optical character recognition system. Take a screenshot of the line you want to use, crop it, and feed it to an OCR. This one is free and works pretty well, provided the character are well defined.
• The hard way: try to copy a sequence of hiragana visually using a virtual keyboard. Be careful, some of these characters are pretty similar to one another.

I followed the user manual perfectly, and I can't seem to find a good address.

Your game might not yet be supported by HAT. You might have better chance with a different text hooker. All games known not to work with HAT are listed here.

Some dialog seems not to be recognized by HAT.

HAT uses a parameter called "strictness" which defines at which point a string is considered garbage. Currently (v0.7.0), the default value is 50, but you can change it here: Tools > Options > Convert.
The new value may be negative.

Weird characters show up before or after of the dialog.

The issue is the opposite of the above. Increase the strictness.

Weird characters show up in the middle of the dialog.

These characters are formatting information used by the game. You can remove them on a game-by-game basis using pattern replacements.

The dialog is sometimes entirely replaced by a bunch of incomprehensible characters.

The encoding detection may have failed. Currently (v0.7.0), HAT does not require the user to inform it of the encoding used by the game, and proceeds to detecting the right encoding by itself. The method is not flawless, though, and you might want to fix the encoding while playing. Open Tools > Options > Convert and change the value of the line called "charset".

There delay before a line is recognized is too long to my tastes.

You can fiddle with the values contained in Tools > Options > Memory, but I don't recommend it. These values are pretty interdependent. The easiest way to achieve what you want is to choose the "basic" strategy, but you will probably see the line being constructed piece by piece, meaning that the line history will be polluted with incomplete lines.

HAT doesn't work, and en error message pops up when starting Cheat Engine: "Error in native thread called Unnamed::... (x86)\Cheat Engine 6.5.1\autorun\selectionConverter.lua:196: attempt to call a nil value (field 'getn')"

You must be trying to use HAT 0.7.0 or lower with Cheat Engine 6.5 or over. Try installing HAT 0.8.0 instead.