1

Personal Projects / Shiren the Wanderer 4 Plus (PSP) - English Translation [WIP]

« on: August 29, 2020, 12:54:24 pm »

Hey there, it's time for another Mystery Dungeon post!
So this Shiren 4 project is partly why the Asuka Kenzan translation has been on hold, and it's far enough along now that I think it's time to share some of the progress.

The project started when someone who goes by DhrGR managed to write some scripts to handle text extraction & insertion for the game, and I've been working on the translation for a few months now. (Menus, signs, dungeon messages, tutorials, main story events/scenes, and some monster descriptions and other bits and pieces are translated).

Some screenshots, showcasing both PSP and DS versions:

(Main menu)


(Village)


(Monster library)

And a video of the intro, if you want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcEGtXPyCw4

Exciting stuff, yeah? But unfortunately, it's not all smooth sailing. We've encountered a number of issues that need to be solved on the hacking side, which we could use some help with.

1. "「" needs to be changed to ":" when characters talk.


2. Either the font width needs to be narrowed a bit, or window sizes need to be expanded a bit.


3. The control character to make a line break to a new line on a word doesn't appear to be working as expected on the DS version.


4. And most severely, the game now crashes at the title screen on the PSP version, making the game unplayable.
Video of the crash: https://youtu.be/p_x6TC6asSc

What we think is happening for No.4 is that English text takes up more space than Japanese text, so when it gets read into memory, it's flowing over/overwriting other things, making the game crash. The current idea we have is to somehow make it so that the game uses UTF-8 or ASCII instead of UTF-16LE, since we don't need the Japanese characters in the translation. But we don't exactly know how that could be accomplished.

example: Currently "E" = "45 00" when it could just be "45"


So yeah, there you have it. Thanks for reading, and please let me know if you'd be interested in helping solve these issues.

2

Newcomer's Board / Decompressing & Translating Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Wiiware Games

« on: March 10, 2019, 06:29:40 pm »

A bit of backstory: I was chatting with someone who is also really into roguelikes, and they mentioned that there are three smaller Wiiware Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games that were only released in Japan, and that they also apparently haven't been translated.

I'm busy with my Asuka Kenzan translation project right now and won't be able to work on other stuff for a while in the technical department, but if someone gives me the script / text to translate, I'd be willing to do a quick Japanese to English translation. (I'm assuming there isn't much in terms of story since they're Wiiware games)

Though note that I'm not super familiar with Pokemon games outside of gen 1, so someone would likely want to double-check names for stuff like items, moves, English pokemon names, etc.

So with that said, if anyone is interested, I took a quick look at said Wiiware game wads:

You can extract the files with ShowMiiWads and unpack 00000002.app with the "Unpack U8 Archive" option, and the text data and whatnot should be in data2_WPAJ.bin (WPAJ is the title id for Ikuzo! Arashi no Boukendan, the other two games are data2_WPHJ.bin and data2_WPFJ.bin).

However, that binary file seems to be further compressed as well (I recognized some pokemon names while examining the binary file in a hex editor, but it was garbled), so I think it needs to be decompressed first. I came across this guide while searching around a bit - https://smashboards.com/threads/mdl0-files-from-non-brawl-games.263127/#post-9415800

And that thread lists some of the common compression types for Wii/Wiiware games and tools that can be used to decompress them (not sure if any of these apply to these games, but worth a try?):

Alternative model previewer: BRRESViewer
ARC file extraction: U8Tool (Google it.)
AFS file decompression: AFSExplorer
CPK file decompression: UTF_Tab Suite
FPK file decompression: FPKTool
LZH8 file decompression: LZH8_CmpDec
YAZ0 file decompression: SZSTools
NTCompress: Google it -- it's an SDK program that can't be linked to for legal reasons, look for the latest version.
QuickBMS -- (For use with the scripts below.)

Also just for reference, here are the three full names for those games:

[WPAJ] Pokemon Fushigi no Dungeon - Ikuzo! Arashi no Boukendan (Japan) (WiiWare)
[WPHJ] Pokemon Fushigi no Dungeon - Mezase! Hikari no Boukendan (Japan) (WiiWare)
[WPFJ] Pokemon Fushigi no Dungeon - Susume! Honou no Boukendan (Japan) (WiiWare)

So yeah, just throwing that out there. I likely won't be too much help beyond that on the technical side of things since I want to remain focused on Asuka Kenzan until it's completed.

3

ROM Hacking Discussion / Creating a Patch for a Dreamcast Game (GDI format)

« on: February 21, 2019, 01:02:26 am »

I'm currently working on an English translation for the Dreamcast version of Asuka Kenzan, but I noticed that the file size for track 3 was significantly larger after rebuilding with GDIBuilder when preparing the files for a patch using xdelta. (see: https://i.imgur.com/aGz23pI.png)

Is it normal for rebuilt games to have that large of a difference? And if not (I assume it's not), could someone point me in the right direction for preparing Dreamcast files for a patch / how that process goes?

GDIBuilder page for some additional context, if it helps: https://projects.sappharad.com/tools/gdibuilder.html

4

Newcomer's Board / Translating Mystery Dungeon: Asuka Kenzan! (Released for Dreamcast & PC)

« on: February 07, 2019, 12:45:01 pm »

Hi everyone, I'm new here. I apologize in advance that this post is a little long-winded.

I recently came across a turn-based roguelike RPG (https://www.giantbomb.com/fushigi-no-dungeon-furai-no-shiren-gaiden-jokenji-/3030-42973/) that was released in 2002 for Dreamcast and PC only in Japan. It's one of the best roguelikes I've played with 31 unique dungeons (ranging from low floor counts of 5~15F all the way up to 99F for the post game / brutal ones, and one massive 9999F dungeon that I'll likely never have time to play through).

The only issue is, it's so old and obscure that I haven't been able to find much discussion about the game, which is a shame... so I'd love to do a translation for the PC version (PC includes an expansion not available for the DC release) so that it can potentially be played by others. I'm fluent in Japanese so the actual translation of text isn't an issue (easiest part), but everything else is new to me. I found a thread over at RPG Codex (https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/want-to-translate-a-psp-or-a-pc-game-heres-how-you-begin-with-links-to-all-of-relevant-utilities.107721/) while googling how to go about things, and have also skimmed through the getting started section on this site.

I opened the .bin files of the game in a hex editor called wxMEdit (since it supports Shift-JIS encoding) and I found that one of the .bin files contains NPC dialogue, and I can edit that to have it show up in-game (Thankfully the game already supports English characters, so I don't need to add that to the game). Here's an example of what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/4JCRMjb.png

But I couldn't find text for other things like items, player stats, option selections, etc. in any of the .bin files, so I'm guessing they might be compressed or something. (This is where my knowledge falls short).

I also learned while googling that hex editing is probably not the best way to do a translation for a RPG game, because you're limited by character counts having to match the Japanese counts, and it's a chore (though I personally don't mind hex editing, just happy to be able to translate at all, though I'd need to find where item text is for the game to really be playable in English). This thread on romhacking.net in particular stood out to me regarding that: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=21821.20

I've tried to hunt down various tools for extracting the .bin files like UniExtract2 (failed) and quickbms (couldn't quite figure out how to use it) but haven't had any success with my attempts, so I feel like I've hit a wall on what to do next. Does anyone here have experience with this type of thing where they could offer insight / advice? I'd greatly appreciate any help.

Perhaps I should also mention, I tried searching for Japanese text for items in cheat engine (カタナ - Katana - E3 82 AB E3 82 BF E3 83 8A ) for example, but it didn't find any matches even in memory, though perhaps that's due to my settings / cheat engine not supporting Shift-JIS or something?