[TheMuffinsAvenger]

Hello everyone. I am new to this website and while I am not entirely new to working on translation projects, I am very new to working on PSP / console translations. I was wondering if anyone had any pointers for a small project that I am working on. After watching the anime 3 times, I have decided that I really want to finally play the original visual novel. The game is a bit of a throwback: Kamigami no Asobi for PSP. I was hoping that it would get a 3DS port one day since they seem to be easier to work with, but no luck it would seem.

I have ripped the game apart and located what I believe to be a large number of the files that I need, but I have gotten a bit stuck. Everything is in .txp or .did (Haven't looked at this one yet), and I haven't found any useful headers to indicate where to go from here just yet. I have attempted to convert the txp into gim to see if I could convert them and take a look, but I haven't been successful. I have also attempted to use different tools available to take a peek at the txp, but so far I have come up empty. I don't know if anyone here can give me any leads, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. If anyone has any tips or pointers, I would greatly appreciate it!

[FAST6191]

I don't have anything for txp but I can't say I have particularly looked.

If you can't find something and you made it far enough to get this far I will assume you are competent with a search engine though.

At this point sounds like you get to fiddle with the files to see what does what -- swap files around (or possibly even use umdgen's relinking feature) to see what changes in the game. Once you know what at least a handful of files do (this is text for this section), even if none of the formatting you get to figure out the formats themselves.

Visual novels are a curious thing in ROM hacking in that they are some the of last things to use bitmap images for fairly bulk text use (technically some are a slideshow you enter a password to get to the next slide for), and can also go right up to being full bore markup supporting scripting engines. You can usually tell from some gameplay which it is but not always.

Anyway I would usually analyse the files and compare a bunch to see about header sections or something, and then fiddle with the data parts of it. Should be fairly apparently quickly there if it is text or graphics (though the size might give it away). Text also "looks" different in hex to markup (if you have a 16 bit Japanese encoding and it is mostly kana it is going to have fairly similar start bytes with similar ranges for the rest while any markup or pointers will be something else that is not that, though maybe subtly) so there is that.

[Risae]

Hi TheMuffinsAvenger,

I took a quick look at the game and its files so i can give you some pointers:

1. To dump the contents of the ISO you can use UMDGen: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1218/
2. To decrypt the eboot.bin you can use PPSSPP: https://forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=15456
3. To dump the game's .DAT archives you could use quickBMS: https://aluigi.altervista.org/quickbms.htm
    You should ask in the forum for assistance on how to use quickBMS to dump the .DATs. If i see correctly, there is           
    file information on the top of the .DAT files: https://i.imgur.com/wer9RHD.png
    But it seems like you already managed to do that since you have the .txp and .did files.
4. Figure out what kind of encoding the script files use, since it doesn't seem to be SHIFT-JIS.
    The program "WindHex32" supports the use of custom encoding table files.
5. After you know where the script files are, you can use abcde's "Cartographer" and "Atlas" to dump the script from
    the script files using the text pointers: http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1392/
    It takes some time to learn how to make a script for Cartographer and Atlas, but once it works it makes life so
    much easier.

Good luck with your project and have fun!

[TheMuffinsAvenger]

Thanks so much! Yeah, the encoding I think is a big problem for me right now because unless I can figure out that, I am going to have a difficult time figuring out if I'm actually in the right location or not. Same with the TXP files. I think they are the right images (this game was nice enough to give their files useful names), but I can't confirm unless I can take a peek.
October 29, 2020, 09:20:55 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)Hey guys I'm back again! So, this is about as far as I have been able to get. As with many Japanese games, I have run into font width problem. Any tips on getting started trying to fix this? I don't think that implementing a VWF is something I can figure out just yet, so any suggestions would be helpful.