Detective Conan vs Kindaichi Translation (NDS) Disable the Select Button?

[View Spoiler: The correct input to the recognition is:]

Meitantei Conan & Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo
232/752 script files translated as of June 20, 2011.

February 4, 2012
I have decided to fake the handwriting recognition. It actually works pretty well in game.
Anyway, the translators were asking if it was possible to disable the Select button, because they don't want to translate the "story progression scripts" that periodically get updated as you progress in the game.
After you finish an episode, only one version of the complete story is displayed. Hopefully I can figure out something to solve this.

Also, have to find out where this missing graphic is.
1) L:全体 in bottom left of this picture:


June 21, 2011
Fixed the font problem:


However another problem has come up;
Handwriting Recognition!

This scene is the only one in the game that uses hiragana recognition, the rest use only numbers.

For testing and tweaking attempts, here is a patch that will take you to a little bit just before the screen once you start a new game: http://www.mediafire.com/?59u3505m0pmiprj
What I need help with is changing the hiragana recognition to alphabet letters. The game font does not contain ASCII, only SJIS full-width JASCII. Also, capital letters and lower case letters should go to the same SJIS code (i.e., A and a both could point to the character code 82A0).
The recognition information is probably stored in one of these two files:
dltjdb.zzz: contains dbtag Nintendo_non_kanji. Made by Decuma.
dltjdb_jis0big.zzz: contains dbtag Nintendo_jis0. Made Decuma.

View Spoiler: The correct input to the recognition is:

けいこ

Ideally, I would like to change the input to (see spoiler),

View Spoiler:

ＫＥＩＫＯ
if not possible, then ＫＫＯ

but as can be seen in the following image, combinations of 5 or more characters cause problems:


If I can't figure out how to change the recognition information, I will have to fake it by keeping hiragana recognition but putting the closest matching letter over it.

June 20, 2011
Ran into a slight problem:


As you can see in the picture, the font is spaced apart. In the untranslated rom, it looks something like this:
ゆ う や み 小 路

In the translated version, spacing remains the same, which with English characters doesn't look very good:
Tw il ig ht  L an e

Hex characters before the screen loads looks like this:
70227021700a000070180402701b0a00077018041c701b0a000a70180402701b0b004270055f700a0001

Similar problem is here:


At this part, the game script is like this:

View Spoiler:

70227021700a0000700701017018020e700c0464700b000901701b05000a700a0601701c14701200
Where are you thinking of?
7022701201
Twilight Island Folk Museum

7022700a0600701d061400007023701c15700a1900700a000070070101701803f5700d10700a1301700a1401701803ef700a1300700a14007004015d11027018041a7004015d1103701803f57019000d701c00701c16701115700a1900700a000070180402700a0201700d10700a1301700a1401701803ef700a1300700a14007004015d11027018041a7004015d1103701803f57019000d701c00701116701202
Lighthouse

7006007022701b0700687021700a000070111c70111a701203
Coal Blue

7006007022701b0700687021700a0000701122701120701204
Gift shop "Fukado"

I was hoping the spacing issue would have to do with the hex preceding the text, but it looks like that is not the case, so the spacing is probably stored elsewhere in the rom somewhere, so I'm thinking I will need help from someone with knowledge of ASM to remove the gap between characters in these specific instances. If anyone wants to help, the first screen is taken from the beginning of Chapter 1 in the game, so from the beginning of Chapter 1 (after the prologue), just by pressing A through the dialogue and then clicking the first icon to talk to the first character two times in a row will get you to that first screen. I can provide a complete Desmume save so you can skip to Chapter 1 if needed.

June 28, 2010

As you can see by this image, new font has been added. Due to problems with VWF hack, this is just fixed-width with two-character combinations.

June 2, 2010
Progress has begun smoothly with text translations and graphics. However, we still need a VWF hack for English characters!



Feb 7, 2009

So I have the game script ready for translation. Unfortunately the font is in tile format with four fonts on top of each other separated by palette, and are all fixed-width. There is no support for standard ASCII characters, only JASCII and other SJIS. If anyone would like to help get a VWF into the game I can get this project started.

Check the font file.

In Death Note: The Kira Game, there's a table after the font data giving the widths of every character. If there's a similar width table in your game, you might not have to do any hacking at all to implement a VWF (or at the very least a nicer-looking FWF).

Here are the files in the common folder in rom order. The extension zzz means they're lz77 compressed, so I uncompressed them to view their contents.

Font_Set12_4.zzz: contains the font tiles, 4 separated by palette. 270336 bytes uncompressed.
dltjdb.zzz: contains dbtag Nintendo_non_kanji. 28576 bytes uncompressed. Made by Decuma, so most likely handwriting recognition.
dltjdb_jis0big.zzz: contains dbtag Nintendo_jis0. 305944 bytes uncompressed. Made by Decuma, so most likely handwriting recognition.

What would the width table happen to look like?

Hmm. Maybe I'm wrong.

If all the fonts are the same size, then there might not be a width table. However, depending on the width of the existing font, adding a VWF or a FWF may be easier.

If the font is an odd size already - such as the 11x11 used by Death Note - then we already have some of the infrastructure needed for a VWF in place already, since the tiles have to be shifted in order to be displayed.

If the font is a multiple of 8 in size, like 16x16, then it will be harder to implement a VWF, but in either case it should be almost trivial to implement a reasonably-sized FWF.

I'm still working on Breath of Fire 2, and I've got Death Note: The Kira Game lined up next (plus who knows how many other projects I've promised but put on the back burner), so I can't help you with programming, but I can give you hints as to how to proceed. You do have no$gba, correct?

Yes, I have NO$GBA, the NO$ version though.

Looking at the tiles, there are least these widths:
11x11
13x15
14x15
15x15

Hopefully there is a width table in here somewhere, that way I can just overwrite the letters and numbers and just change the width.

Hmm. Is there any data in the font file that you haven't figured out? I know they individual fonts are padded with palette data, but are there any other bytes in between that seem to follow a regular pattern but aren't part of the palette or font data? The font files are the obvious place to find the width tables, but if not...

Worst-case scenario, the width might be hardcoded and there's nothing for it except ASM hacking. Thankfully, changing a single value might give you the leeway you need to at least fit a better-proportioned 6x11 font (of the variety used by Death Note and many other games).

Find where the characters get written to in VRAM, set a write breakpoint for the start of a block of text and trace through. You may have to repeat this multiple times if there are multiple print routines.

Everything's running smoothly in the project, the only thing needed is VWF to change the English character widths, so please let me know if you can help.

I'm currently in the middle of orchestrating the BoF2 beta and I've promised the world I'd get back to work on Death Note: The Kira Game next.

I will, however, give you another tip: if you have trouble finding space for any VWF hacks - Death Note uses the space immediately after the code as scratch space - find the end of said scratch space, expand the ARM file beyond that, and tack your hacks onto the end.

Apparently the font uses dual tile encoding, anyone experienced with this?

DTE is just a specific kind of dictionary compression. Of course, the first thing you'll need to find is the dictionary. :3

(It also helps matters that once you've worked out the DTE system, you can then use it to your advantage.)

If you can, figure out where the script shows up in memory and set a read breakpoint for one of the DTE codes. When it loads it, you'll be able to trace through the code and figure out where it loads the dictionary from. Mind you, that won't tell you on its own where to find the dictionary...it might, however, be stored in one of the code files, come to think of it (Death Note stores a lot of commonly-used strings there).

Still need someone with an NDS debugger for help with DTE.

Youtube video showing current progress:


Still need help with the font width.

I had a look, and as far as I can tell, its got a hardcoded width of 12 and apparently it uses that width of 12 as some sort of check to see if it should do those lil kanji descriptor thingos, so trying to simply halve the width meant it turned out like this:



So, you'll probably need a custom VWF code. If you feel like taking a crack at it, I've traced it as far back as 0x0206D524 which is where the width 0xC gets input. Which then branches to 0x206D63C which is (I think) the text reading routine that pretty much draws it into RAM and so on. Btw, those addresses are RAM addresses.

Thanks for finding that. The data is taken from the overlay files. Unfortunately, I do not have much of an idea how to write the VWF code needed. Hopefully someone who does will come up.

I am willing to pay $ via Paypal for someone to write and insert the VWF code needed.