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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Atelier Elie + Marie (ps2) translation

« on: May 27, 2014, 10:34:39 pm »

The hacking itself proved to be a bit difficult for me (the game was very hard to crack) but user RyleFury (http://www.romhacking.net/community/2985/), who hacked Atelier Iris and translated it into French, managed to figure out how to do it! Once he's completed the hack, he's going to send the script files to me and I think the plan is for us to each work for a version in our own languages. It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm looking forward to dedicating a lot of time to the project this summer.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Dealing with an unusual file type: MFE

« on: April 29, 2014, 06:15:27 pm »

Thank you for the document suggestion. I looked it over and I think I've made some progress, but I'm still struggling. I know that the MFE file is the virtual file system. There are two other files (and a folder called 'modules' filled with irx files) in the ISO. One, system.cnf, is the CD and boot data. The other is slpm_661.40, which is the game's product number (like the US has SCUS numbers).

the slpm file is almost 2 MB, which makes me doubt that it has the pointer info. I've looked it over in my hex editor, though, and I've found that it has some interesting text toward the end of the file. A lot of it seems like file or function names (c_set_game_mode_elie, c_set_game_mode_marie, etc.) and system messages (a lot of "[name] does not terminate" and other things). There's also reference to the irx files. This seems promising, although I'm not sure what to make of it; the names just run together without any in between data that might be a pointer (although that would be nice).

Since I'm not seeing any evidence of pointers elsewhere, I've begun looking more at the MFE file itself, hoping to find any numbers divisible by 2048 (as suggested by the guide) or otherwise indicative of pointers. The top of the MFE file has some non-text hex values, but some are duplicates (which I believe rules out sector based positioning) and none of them are divisible by 2048 (ruling out byte positioning). So, once again, I feel like I've hit a brick wall. It doesn't help that a lot of these guides I'm using seem to only skim the surface of what they want to teach me.

Of course, maybe I'm also confused by the concept of pointers themselves. I've encountered them in programming before, so it's possible that somewhere I'm mixing up the idea of c++/java (etc) pointers with hex based data pointers.

Honestly, the idea of wading through all these numbers is more daunting to me than the prospect of translating thousands of lines of Japanese. I'm pretty sure I'm still in the 'easy' part, but I get so frustrated when I can't figure something out. I'd rather spend 50 hours struggling to do something I know how to do than spend 10 hours trying to figure out how to do something with seemingly little to show for it.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Dealing with an unusual file type: MFE

« on: April 27, 2014, 05:22:43 am »

I've recently started working on a translation patch for Atelier Marie+Elie (PS2). In opening the ISO, among the elf and irx files, there's a file significantly larger than the others with an MFE extension. I've looked it over with a hex editor, I've run it through some extraction programs, I've tried opening it with standard decompressors, but nothing seems to be working.

I'm assuming that this file contains the game data (images, music, script, etc) and that I'd be able to start on the actual translation work if I could just crack it open. Anyone know of any fancy utilities that might help me? QuickBMS looks promising, but it requires scripts to run, and there doesn't seem to be anything geared toward this particular file format.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Atelier Elie + Marie (ps2) translation

« on: April 18, 2014, 07:30:44 pm »

As a huge fan of Niponichi and Gust, I've wanted to play the original atelier games for quite some time. Since there's no translation patch and no official translation, I've decided to attempt to translate these two games for myself and any other fans. This will be a daunting project as a first time iso patcher,  but I have extensive experience programming in multiple languages. I have several friends with Strong knowledge of Japanese (I'm rusty and struggled with classes, but I'm eager to relearn and expand my knowledge) so I feel like I can handle this project, especially as I will be building off of the work of former attempts to translate these games. I'll likely start getting hacking tools together tonight after I get out of work and begin learning the process of making a translation.