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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Super Robot Wars Compact (WonderSwan Color) Hack

« on: March 03, 2022, 03:32:31 am »

Hi kikeroga!

Looks like you're working a lot lately in Super Robot Wars!

I know it's against the rules of this forum to ask people to do things for you, but seeing that you are documenting SRW games I have a bit of a request / suggestion: could you also find the offsets for one example of battle text (example: Breast Fire!) and another one for text used during a stage (example: Kouji talking to Sayaka)? In the thread for SRW 64 you already found an example of battle text.

With one example of each, anyone who set out to translate these games would have a very convenient starting point.

And that's my selfish request, feel free to ignore it if it's out of the scope of what you want to achieve. In any case, thanks a lot for your work!

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Choujikuu Yousai Macross - Super Dimension Fortress Macross PS2 Translation

« on: February 28, 2022, 05:15:12 pm »

I've never worked with PS2 isos but I just googled "romhacking rebuild PS2 iso" and found this thread very quickly: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=31603.0

It seems to have all you need.

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Super Robot Wars W (NDS) translation released

« on: February 28, 2022, 03:54:23 pm »

I have yet to try this one but in the meantime, congratulations on finishing this and thanks for sharing

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Choujikuu Yousai Macross - Super Dimension Fortress Macross PS2 Translation

« on: February 23, 2022, 02:53:46 pm »

As a matter of fact I can tell at a glance that the text in Japanese in your screenshot is the same text you can see in English, so it most probably is actual text you see when playing the game, just not the one you're looking for.

The way the files are structured inside the ISOs vary depending on the console, the game, the company and even the team that took care of making the game. If there's another game developed by the same team for the same system AND someone has already figured out where everything is and how everything is stored, then you can contact that person and maybe get some insight on this. The possibilities of this happening are slim most of the time, I won't lie to you.

I'm afraid at the moment your only option is figuring everything out (which is essentially what every romhacker ends up doing). You can now see the Japanese text inside the files, so that's your starting point. When you finally locate the text you want to translate, you'll have to figure out how this text fits in the structure inside the files, so that you can modify that text without your changes breaking everything up.

Most typical structure is having a table of offsets (typically 4 bytes per offset) at the start of a file, each offset pointing at either the start of a line of text or some additional data right before the line of text (example of additional data: portrait ID, voice clip ID, etc). Look for patterns.

Easy trick to find Japanese text in these files: find the hex code of one very common Japanese symbol, like は, then just search this hex with the built in search function of the editor.

And I think that's the basics. It's probably gonna take some time but it's doable. Good luck with that.

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Choujikuu Yousai Macross - Super Dimension Fortress Macross PS2 Translation

« on: February 23, 2022, 08:16:11 am »

I see you're using a modified version of MadEdit. What Risae meant with using SHIFT-JIS encoding is simply selecting that encoding in MadEdit. In the menu, go to View -> Encoding and select SHIFT-JIS from the available options. If there's any Japanese text coded in that format inside the file, you should be able to spot it at a glance after that.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [NINTENDO64] About Super Robot War 64

« on: February 12, 2022, 01:27:43 pm »

Hi kikeroga,

I'm unable to paste hex code taken from the editor (using MadEdit) into your tool (it always pastes the text version). Not sure if you're copying the hex code by hand or there's a trick to it that I'm unaware of. So far I've copied everything by hand, which is less than ideal.

I ran a little test based on your screenshots and I think it's pretty safe to say that scenario / battle text can be found with relative ease by searching for characters DC 00 and DD 00:
https://mega.nz/file/zgtwRCzC#PxaoDrNpIk4bUZJiPLuYsGfXCLfXSy2Cgs_tDdxvPxs

Although looking at other lines, I'm inclined to say these characters should be 00 DC and 00 DD.

This is really asking for a tool, but at the moment I'm busy with another project and can't really help much here

Here's hoping this thread piques someone's interest in the game.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [NINTENDO64] About Super Robot War 64

« on: February 10, 2022, 01:59:53 pm »

I understand your tool encodes SJIS text to hex code that can be recognized by the game, am I right? And the tool even has conversion sets for several other games, that's pretty neat

I've noticed many western characters don't seem to be mapped yet: https://mega.nz/file/28tmXKRA#iatD28DXPLkJ5mDxI7ibGo4liDuVl6Q6vmy0FNrhCx0

Maybe it's because the order of these characters in the font is a bit weird, hopefully this helps: https://mega.nz/file/eh8mWSbS#4ZbIX0MbrwXuWMiUnGgDpx_uigvm3lgvIDj9MsQYIxU

Before you ask, I didn't extract the image and have no means to extract or insert content from / into the game. I understand the rom is compressed in LZSS, but if you already got to the point of mapping hex to characters you don't need me to tell you.

If you manage to extract files, I'd love to take a look at the animation mapping files. Seeing how characters like Master Asia are animated means it should be possible to add animation to any unit in the game (with a ton of effort).

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [NINTENDO64] About Super Robot War 64

« on: February 09, 2022, 08:28:43 am »

I for one would love to see a translation of 64 happening, more even than one for R or even D. The scenario branching makes it really interesting, despite its flaws.

Once you have some progress, I'd recommend you check your notes with Zoinkity, since he started checking the game some years ago. Please note that his comments on how the text is accessed in the game were along the lines of "whoever designed this should be shot".

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: First bugfixed translation of Dragon Quest III (SNES) to Spanish

« on: September 12, 2021, 05:18:56 am »

Congratulations on a job well done!

I'm in the same boat as aqualung here, also native Spanish speaker used to playing in English. This will be my go-to version from now on for me and my family / friends.

I'll start the round of dreaded nitpicks that Choppasmith mentioned by taking the classic one out of the way: spell names. I'm one of those whose first contact with Dragon Quest was the TV show Dai no Daibouken (Las Aventuras de Fly) where spell names were not translated at all, so in my head all spells are variants of Mera, Io, Bagi and so on. Imagine my shock when I picked up my first DQ game.

That being said, I don't need the original Japanese spells in every DQ game just because of one TV show and I don't think anybody would need that either, so hopefully nobody bothers you with that. If they really want them I guess they can create their own addendum.

So anyways, congratulations and thanks for your work!

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News Submissions / Re: Translations: Bahamut Lagoon version 1.2 -- Remembering Near

« on: June 29, 2021, 06:07:55 am »

RIP Near and thanks for everything.

I can only hope that this whole story is an elaborate ruse for you to get off the grid, away from the people who had no right to make your life miserable.

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Personal Projects / Re: Super Robot Wars GC English translation (now with actual hacking)

« on: October 12, 2020, 12:53:12 pm »

Hi there.

Sorry for disappearing, many things happened.

The bad thing is that this project topic is officially abandoned (surprise, yeah), so if any moderator feels like closing it, please go ahead.

The good thing is that one of the founding members of the project, Oppai Missile is continuing it, in case you never found out like I did until today. Find the project topic here:

https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=29971


I think I've been out of the scene for about... 4 years? I can't apologize enough to the people I've let down. I don't think I'll become active again, as I have very little time to spare, but I'll be around.

See you guys and thanks for the great work as always.

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Personal Projects / Re: Super Robot Wars GC English translation- nearly done!

« on: October 12, 2020, 12:38:40 pm »

Hi there. I'm alive.

Sorry for disappearing. Many things happened, suddenly got way too many things on my hands and was pretty burnt out, so I quit in the most unceremonious way possible, letting down many people in the process. Again, sorry about that.


I just found out that Oppai had resurrected the project and I'm extremely happy for it, but noticed the graphics he and AI injected are the old ones Steve created back when we were applying them by replacing textures with the emulator.

Turns out the last thing I worked on for GC was recreating and injecting the graphics and was about to upload them to Bring's mediafire folder when my computer decided to die on me. I guess now is as good a time to share them as any, so there you go:

https://mega.nz/file/79NFCIrb#RHI9f45x-0CAesaMDNlftbi_Za4yp_41GAGaPVdLbio

This should translate every image except the in-battle notifications (like "CRITICAL"), as we couldn't figure out how to decrypt those. The text is a bit more polished than the old ones, but there's at least one error when assigning a pilot to a unit (it reads "selecteed pilot", pretty ugly). Check the file and see what you can / want to use.

You will want to skip at least the graphic for the title screen since it says "version 0.6" (I believe it's 3466.SPR), and whatever file is used for the in-battle notifications (I imagine that AI knows which one it is).


And that's it for my little contribution, I'll go back to being part of the audience now. Congratulations on a job well done (I've read on /m/ that you are on the QC phase already) and hope everything goes well for you all.

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Personal Projects / Re: Super Robot Wars GC English translation (now with actual hacking)

« on: January 04, 2016, 02:55:09 pm »

I guess it's a good time for updates. After all, it's been like... whoa, more than a year since the last update.

It's been a tough year for us and our productivity has decreased significantly, but we're slowly coming back.

Stuff that has already been covered:

- VWF (mostly, there might be some issues with the way the game centers text in stuff like the scrolling intro text)
- All battle dialogue (in need of some editing)
- Most of the menu text (that is actually text), not including Robot / Character Library
- A considerable amount of bugfixing.

Here, have a screenshot that showcases at least the two first points:



Missions translation hasn't progressed much... or at least we haven't heard much of our translator lately. He's been known to disappear for a series of months and come out with a lot of stuff done before, so I want to have faith in him.


We're currently taking on two things in the game:

1) Editing graphics. This game uses SO many of them to write stuff in style. See the untranslated stuff in this screenshot?



All graphics. And that's just a part of it.

We got that covered, but it's going to be a lot of work.


2) Understanding the compression routine. Which we need because of MORE graphics. And the font, which is also graphics. Bring is currently having a lot of "fun" with it after implementing VWF into the game, so I guess he'll welcome any technical help (as I've been taking forever to look at some stuff he asked me to... sorry, man).

And that's pretty much it for now. Not releasing anytime soon, but we're getting there.



@Gohdan: Honestly, the best tools you can have are a hex editor and a tile viewer, no matter what you're dealing with. For the game you mention, you might be good with just the hex editor, lots of observation, some patience and basic knowledge of how SJIS text works in hex in comparison to ASCII.

I'd say first you'd need to get a minimum grasp of Japanese (katakana and hiragana) so that you're at least able to write some basic stuff with whatever means you're comfortable with (I'm lazy and use google translate). Then you can go extracting game files with GCRebuilder and search for the stuff you want to replace inside using the hex editor of your choice (MadEdit for me). If you're lucky and the game's text isn't compressed (and most probably inside Start.dol), then you can change stuff to your liking until the game doesn't decide to crash horribly.

Hope that helps.

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Personal Projects / Re: Super Robot Wars A Portable (PSP) English translation project

« on: August 25, 2015, 12:17:52 am »

Ah, had the exact same crash with battle quotes in GC. One less problem to worry about!

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Personal Projects / Re: Super Robot Wars A Portable (PSP) English translation project

« on: August 23, 2015, 04:15:42 am »

Oh boy, congratulations!

What was causing it in the end? How did you find it?

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [PS1]ACE COMBAT 3: text replacement (Jpn.->Eng.)

« on: June 28, 2015, 02:55:47 pm »

Amazing job, congratulations!

And thanks, of course

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Programming / Re: Programming game editor in java, event listener and copyright questions

« on: May 17, 2015, 04:19:19 am »

Every time a user selects a different item int the top-left combo box, the rest of the GUI in this tab needs to be updated to reflect the entry in the item data table for that item.  What should I google to learn more about this?

If I understood this right, it's a matter of creating an event for the top-left combo box (most probably actionPerformed) in which you send messages to all the objects you want to be affected (setSelected = true for example).

How you decide what to assign to each object will depend on how you're storing the data of each item ID, of course.

I think I'll have a dictionary/map that where the key is the item name (a string) and the value another dictionary/map that is all of the bytes for that item's entry in the item data table.  That way when I need to read from it, I input the item name and then the index of the byte I want to get, and I have a bunch of switch case statements and whatnot for updating the gui elements that represent the state of that item's entry.  When I want to write to it it's the same, except when I'm only writing a single bit in which case I need to do a bit of math.

This sounds like only one dictionary/map to me. The key would be the item name / number and the value would be the byte array (or even just an int or a long, if you store the data as bits).

Does this sound sane?  I could also do it with an array (or an array of arrays) but I want to do it in the easiest possible way to maintain and focus on performance once I have all the features I want.

I would advise to get rid of the bunch of switch-case statements. Most of your options are radiobuttons, which only need a 0 or 1 value you can get via bitwise operations.

I would also recommend finishing the GUI before going into functionality. Most GUI editors for Java are a bit of a bitch if you decide to change something later.

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Programming / Re: Looking for rom hacking tools written in Java with source code available.

« on: February 25, 2015, 06:47:27 am »

Most of the tools I've written for Ace Combat 3, SRW GC and SRW MXP are available in github here:

https://github.com/DashmanGC

They deal with files extracted from isos instead of full roms, so it might not be what you're looking for. Some of them might require that you read documentation about the structure of the files.

My programming is lazy, very inefficient most of the time and I know for sure that some stuff is plain wrong (in some of the MXP programs at least), but I think the code is pretty easy to follow and can be used as an introduction to Swing. You might be more interested in getting started with JavaFX though, considering it's becoming the new standard.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: [PS1]ACE COMBAT 3: text replacement (Jpn.->Eng.)

« on: February 25, 2015, 06:37:40 am »

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to extract the stat textures from the US version and replace the JAP ones. There's a chance they're in the very same location and are exactly the same size.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: How do I convert XAS (not XA) sound files from a PSX game to WAV files?

« on: February 09, 2015, 04:03:29 am »

Maybe those XAS files are just XA files packed together into a single file? Take a look at the beginning of the file to see if there's anything resembling a pointer table. There could also be another file giving the offsets for the tracks inside the files if this was the case.