Adobe/Macromedia Director text injection

Hi. I'm a long-time user of the site, first-time poster to the forums. I have a bit of a technical question to ask, and perhaps this isn't quite the right place. But I figure many people here are probably very familiar with games made with Adobe/Macromedia Director, and there might even be some who have experience with modifying games built on it for modern compatibility purposes, etc. So, this is a bit of a shot in the dark, but I've run out of ideas. I'll start with a little backstory.

A couple years ago I was extremely lucky to get my hands on a badly water damaged, but still fully functional copy of Garage. If you're not familiar with the title, it's a 1999 Japanese adventure game for PC/Mac which is known for being released in extremely limited numbers, with an estimated 3,000 copies sold. I was drawn to the game both by its status as an obscure artifact of the adventure genre and its unique style, which is a fusion of Japanese surrealism with Giger-esque scifi horror. However, aside from its rarity, there's another issue: The game is exclusively in Japanese, and there is no English fan-translation at this time.

For a long time, myself and a Japanese-speaking friend of mine have been extremely interested in taking up the task ourselves. However, we ran into a roadblock. Like many other adventure games from the era it was made using Macromedia Director, and while there are tools that will allow us to extract some assets from the game (including text assets), we have no way of actually modifying the game to inject our own text via a patch. So, actually translating the game isn't the issue. Rather, the issue is finding a way to actually put the translated text into the game.

So, with all that out of the way, here is my question: Is anyone here experienced with injecting custom text into Adobe Director games, or modifying Adobe Director games in any way?

Again, if this is not the correct place to post something like this, I apologize. Feel free to remove my post if you deem it offtopic or unacceptable in any way.

EDIT: I guess I should mention that I do have programming experience, although it's small (a couple years of classes plus some tinkering as a hobby). We've played around with hex editing the game files but have found no way of changing the text, as it appears to be encypted in some form and we have no clue how it works.

Hi veo and to GameBoomers.

This is a really interesting story you have to tell and I hope that you will get some suggestions in terms of what you might be able to do.

I see that MobyGames has it listed here. A rare find indeed!

Thanks for the welcome! Like I said, this is probably a weird place to ask for this type of advice, but I've spent hours researching this myself and asking around with no luck. I just figured if I'm trying to find people experienced with tinkering with Adobe Director games, well, just maybe there might be someone here. There are so many dedicated adventure game fans here, and many adventure games from the late 90's and early 00's used Director.

Hopefully someone will have some experience. You won't know unless you ask!