NDS Rom Translation Hacking Help

[kungpow12345]

Hello Everyone!

My name is Kungpow and I am part of Miss Dream, a fan community that translates all things Sailor Moon. Yes, I realize that the subject is very vague, but I have a few areas that I want to address.

The game we're working on translating is Sailor Moon: La Luna Splende. Now, I've managed the extract the DS rom's content and located all of the text from the various cutscenes in NUTR files so that our team can translate the dialogue, but one thing that has eluded me is the "compression" of some of the pictures in the game.

Here's an example from the first cutscene in the game:



In this picture, Makoto (Jupiter) and Usagi (Moon) are talking to each other. Now...using the drama_000.NUTR file as my guide...



This file calls for drama_face_d_0001 (Makoto), which is...



Here. Now, here's what gets me, there is both a TPL file and a TXR file which I haven't been able to find information for as far as "extracting" the image out. This is critical in our patch process because some of the pictures contain embedded Italian text that we need to edit into English.

For example:

From what I can gather, the TXR file is the actual image and the TPL plays some kind of role in loading the image. I've been trying to run the TPL file through various programs to get any clue as to what's there but all of them are having issues even loading the file because it "contains more than one texture". 

The main things we want to try to figure out is:

1) How to extract these TXR files so we can get the rest of the dialogue extracted and translated.
2) Does some kind of program exist that can be used to compress an edited picture to the TXR format?
3) What program can we use to edit the NUTR files? I'm using Console Tool as my viewer for most of the dialogue available to us but when using a few Hex editors, the NUTR file turns into gibberish which makes it harder to keep the dialogue straight.

If we can get any help on this or could get assistance from another translation group that has dealt with DS roms, that would be great. We have plenty of people who can translate the game, but we need the technical know-how, which sadly we lack. 

Thank you for your help!

[Ryusui]

If I were to hazard a guess, "TXR" is "Texture Resource" while "TPL" is "Texture Palette". So yeah, the TPL file does play a role - it's the color information the associated file needs to display properly.

[kungpow12345]

I'm back! Since I posted, I've stumbled upon a few things that helped me learn about tables and WindHEX.

At this point, I'm more worried about trying to change the font in the game than I am changing the embedded italian font in the TXR files. I'm at the point now where if I make any changes to a NUTR file after applying my table file, it crashes the rom at the exact spot where I've tried editing the game text.

When comparing my opened file to Consoletool, some of the offsets don't look right. I've highlighted the lines that I'm concerned about: (This is after my custom table was applied)



Could this be causing my issues?

[jjjewel]

Here's a tutorial for TPL and TXR graphics.

https://sites.google.com/site/otomegameguide/tutorials/txr-and-tpl

Your NUTR scripts files are also compressed. You can use BatchLZ77 (the same tool in the graphic tutorial) to decompress the files.

[kungpow12345]

Holy crap! This is amazing thank you! ...and this is from the game we're trying to translate! You have definitely made my night/early morning 
May 10, 2011, 03:04:25 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Finally, I'm making some major progress:



As you can see, I'm having some "fun" with the text but that's because I don't know exactly how much room I have to play with. I know what's coming next...and that's scripts. Of course, I'm not sure how I'd even start one. 

Would a script be the best way to go in this case or is there an easier way to easy to edit the text? i.e. How can I add a [blank space] area to the NUTR file so I don't have to fill in what was in its place?

[jjjewel]

Not sure what you meant by "script", but you might look at the utilities for text extraction/insertion.

The text file format looks quite different from other Japanese NDS roms that I've seen, so I don't really know how it works. But I guess the codes at the end of each file are what control the length of the text. (Just my guess though.)