[archedmaid]

I am curious if there is a way to decompile the .DAT files from a Gamecube game?  I am attempting to translate a game and a fair amount of the text was just in regular txt files but mostly just descriptions.

[FAST6191]

DAT is something of a generic extension across computing and used for any number of formats.

A name of the game or a file sample (probably a sample would be better as GC isos are not so readily found and grabbed as other systems).

When you say regular txt do you mean actual .txt stuff? If so nice assuming it is actually in the game (it could have been something the devs left in from building the game).

[henke37]

*.dat files are always in a custom format. There isn't a standard format that uses the extension. It is one of the extensions informally reserved for custom formats.

Anything goes when it comes to custom formats. It can be an archive, it can be compressed, it can be encrypted, it can contain game specific data, anything!

[archedmaid]

The game is Zoids Vs III and yes they are regular .txt files.  If I knew how exactly to post a file sample I would.  What makes this game fairly easy to translate is that its disc is setup near identical to Zoids vs II, or Zoids Battle Legends in America.  The descriptions for just about every thing are in the txt files which from what I have transferred are exactly the same.  The only thing is once I extract them I cant just transfer them over they have a bunch of blank spaces I needed to delete or shorten the text in some way.

Below are the original English and Japanese wp001.txt texts.

it is in Shift-JIS.

Spoiler:

ƒJƒmƒ“ƒg[ƒ^ƒXê—p‚Ì•‘•B@@@@@@@
’P”­‚Ì’·‹——£ƒLƒƒƒmƒ“–CB@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Spoiler:

Cannon Tortoise's armament.             
A long-distance single-shot cannon.     
                                       
                                       
                                       

Edit: I guess my new question is if any one can tell me how to properly edit a .bin file from a Gamecube game.  I can open it in note pad as gibberish and I can open it in notepad++ as shift-JIS, but if I edit it it messes up in game.  I also tried looking at it in a hexing program but its kinda hard cause it doesn't convert right in that language.

[henke37]

And you are sure that it is actually sjis and you aren't just misinterpreting garbage as text in a language you don't understand?

As well as you being sure that just because you can read text it means that the entire file format is text?

[Revenant]

And you are sure that it is actually sjis and you aren't just misinterpreting garbage as text in a language you don't understand?

This is what it looks like when displayed correctly, i.e. as SJIS instead of latin1 (and yes, it matches the English text more or less):

カノントータス専用の武装。　　　　　　　
単発の長距離キャノン砲。　　　　　　　　

Even without checking, I would have guessed it was SJIS just because such text being displayed as latin1 tends to have a whole lot of ƒ and other such characters that appear in archedmaid's post

[archedmaid]

It is SJIS because I have already translated more than half of the descriptions in the game.  386 Files came from Zoids Battle Legends pre translated, and I have done 81 more files on my own using Google translator and arranging the text appropriately to the pre existing.  I have a couple hundred more to go probably.  I also translated a Whole sheet of Zoid names, but the txt file did nothing in game that I can tell.

This is a link to the files that go to the menus of the game.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/h7alj8j5e155q9l

The .bin file effects what you see in most of the text.  I am not sure if the .txt file effects anything.
I am not sure what the .hed file does, maybe positioning.

Edit: I figured it out I have translated most of the general text in game with no problems.