Author Topic: Is this Displaying Right (Read 11225 times)

Bob Liu · « **on:** January 09, 2014, 04:37:22 pm »

Is this displaying right because I don't know, I set Japanese on my pc and that other stuff but what exactly am I looking at. Have people done any tutorials on this stuff before because people should share the know how.

Spoiler:

VicVergil · « **Reply #1 on:** January 09, 2014, 09:49:54 pm »

That's not Japanese.
No idea if you're using Shift-JIS (most likely way for Japanese to be stored in a PS2 game, but not the only one), but the part to the right is illegible.

wyndcrosser · « **Reply #2 on:** January 10, 2014, 07:31:13 am »

Quote from: Bob Liu on January 09, 2014, 04:37:22 pm

Is this displaying right because I don't know, I set Japanese on my pc and that other stuff but what exactly am I looking at. Have people done any tutorials on this stuff before because people should share the know how.
Spoiler:

Probably shouldn't be demanding anything lol. You're verbiage doesn't quite say "please and thanks".

Yes Ghanmi is 100% right. How are you trying to display the hex, just opening up a hex editor and a file doesn't make it japanese. Are you using a SHIFT-JIS table? Where did you get it? Are you sure that file holds the text you're looking for?

Zoinkity · « **Reply #3 on:** January 10, 2014, 08:52:03 am »

That's not Shift-JIS. There's a stack of invalid pairings in there,
If you know absolutely this file contains your text, then it's either compressed or stored in some other format.

Also, there are relatively few hex editors that display multibyte encoded text, mostly because of the technical difficulty. The text displayed is typically not affected by the system's language, as the "character field" is set against internal character tables. Every editor I've seen supports ASCII in its ANSI and IBM variations as well as EBCDIC.

Bob Liu · « **Reply #4 on:** January 10, 2014, 11:58:37 am »

Im using Shift-JIS in madedit to view the file, I don't know which files hold the games text so I just opened up a random one. The games files are mostly in IRX or Dat, I have my pc set to japanese and I set the encoding to japanese language or was there something I did wrong. Has anybody had any experience of translating japanese ps2 games before as someone with knowledge would really help.

Jorpho · « **Reply #5 on:** January 10, 2014, 06:29:47 pm »

Quote from: Bob Liu on January 10, 2014, 11:58:37 am

I don't know which files hold the games text so I just opened up a random one.

Well, this isn't the game's text. Nor should you necessarily expect the game's text to be in ordinary, uncompressed Shift-JIS.

Quote

The games files are mostly in IRX or Dat

Those are meaningless, especially .DAT. These files could contain just about any kind of data in any kind of format.

Zoinkity · « **Reply #6 on:** January 10, 2014, 07:21:38 pm »

Although it's handy for other purposes, having your computer's language set to japanese won't affect the displayed language in the char field of a hex editor.

The way these display characters is by using each byte as an index in a map of characters. Displaying multibyte encodings is much more involved, which is why many hex editors don't try or only permit it as a special exception. The difficulty arises because plain bytes offer no reference as to when a character may start or end, or if it's even a character. In fact, you could have a valid shiftJIS string that would appear as nonsense just because it was preceeded by random data that happened to make it look like it was the start of a char.

The big problem is that text and binary are probably muddled together. There's the blind luck method of poking around different files hoping you see something resembling text, or tracing loaded files. You could also use something like xsearch to search for the hex version of a string you know is present in all the files in a directory. Unless they did something fun, it would be either shift-jis or one of the unicodes. 3-4 searches.

henke37 · « **Reply #7 on:** January 10, 2014, 11:58:33 pm »

I find that variable length encodings tend to resync quickly by dumb luck.

Bob Liu · « **Reply #8 on:** January 11, 2014, 10:35:40 am »

Quote from: Jorpho on January 10, 2014, 06:29:47 pm

Well, this isn't the game's text. Nor should you necessarily expect the game's text to be in ordinary, uncompressed Shift-JIS.
Those are meaningless, especially .DAT. These files could contain just about any kind of data in any kind of format.

So what are I meant to do in order to get it to appear properly.

Zoinkity · « **Reply #9 on:** January 11, 2014, 12:42:27 pm »

Typically when you locate the text you'd extract it from the binary into a text file or other easier to manage format. The reason is twofold: organization of course, but especially to remove all the non-text binary from where you're working.

Extraction can be as complicated as writing a program or script to do it for you, or as easy as opening the text file in the hex editor and copying from one window to the other. Matters how much you have to deal with and how easy it is to clip strings out. In other words, it's game-specific.

Bob Liu · « **Reply #10 on:** January 11, 2014, 05:03:15 pm »

Ok lets say I did that and I replaced the Japanese text with English text, would the game load the English text or would I have to do something else to get it to appear. Also have people shared how they have done stuff like this before like tutorials because I haven't found any.

Jorpho · « **Reply #11 on:** January 11, 2014, 06:37:16 pm »

Quote from: Bob Liu on January 11, 2014, 05:03:15 pm

Ok lets say I did that and I replaced the Japanese text with English text, would the game load the English text or would I have to do something else to get it to appear.

It depends on whether or not the game already includes a useable English font.

Quote

Also have people shared how they have done stuff like this before like tutorials because I haven't found any.

Hacking games for a system as complex as the PS2 is not easy, and there are no techniques that can be easily applied to every game. That is why there are not very many PS2 translations.

Bob Liu · « **Reply #12 on:** January 12, 2014, 10:41:53 am »

Im just gonna guess that's a no since it's a Japanese game, I have read about others translating games and when they added English text it was in a mess and I guess that's because there isn't an English language ready for use. Do any of you guys know how to get files out of the dat files as I would like to see the games files such as images and the like, I don't know if this is possible though. Also since the Japanese text didn't appear properly could you guys show me an example of it appearing correctly. Thanks guys for your help so far.

Jorpho · « **Reply #13 on:** January 12, 2014, 11:10:13 am »

Quote from: Bob Liu on January 12, 2014, 10:41:53 am

Im just gonna guess that's a no since it's a Japanese game, I have read about others translating games and when they added English text it was in a mess and I guess that's because there isn't an English language ready for use.

What exactly were you reading? It seems to have given you the impression that this is a lot easier than it actually is.

Quote

Do any of you guys know how to get files out of the dat files as I would like to see the games files such as images and the like, I don't know if this is possible though.

It's probably possible, but it's probably not easy.

Bob Liu · « **Reply #14 on:** January 12, 2014, 04:30:46 pm »

Just a forum topic somewhere on this site, can't remember which category though. If possibly do you or anyone know how to open the dat files as I remember searching the net before and never found any answers.

mz · « **Reply #15 on:** January 12, 2014, 04:36:25 pm »

Quote from: Bob Liu on January 12, 2014, 04:30:46 pm

how to open the dat files as I remember searching the net before and never found any answers.

There is an answer in this old post at Romhacking.net: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,17542.msg255033.html#msg255033

Bob Liu · « **Reply #16 on:** January 13, 2014, 11:03:52 am »

Quote from: mz on January 12, 2014, 04:36:25 pm

There is an answer in this old post at Romhacking.net: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,17542.msg255033.html#msg255033

Yea except he didn't say how to open a dat file, there is a difference you know. It's not like you just rename it a rar and then it opens because I have tried that, yes they could contain any data in any format but the thing is how to open one. Your not helping and if you even thought about what you said before posting you would know that.

mz · « **Reply #17 on:** January 13, 2014, 11:28:22 am »

OK. I'll explain to you what "Those are meaningless, especially .DAT. These files could contain just about any kind of data in any kind of format." means, since they've already told you a half-million times already.

First, these are the facts that you will find:
- You will never find on the Internet how to open a DAT file.
- No one will ever tell how to open a DAT file.
- No one knows how to a open a DAT file.

And this is the explanation:
DAT is just the extension of the file; a VERY GENERIC extension. The extension could be ".random_data" and it would be the same. You can open a DAT file, like you can open any file; but to extract any meaningful data of it, you will have to study it first, and know quite a few things that seem to be very far of your reach at the moment.

I hope you understand now why there's no magic program like WinRAR to open .dat/.random_data files: it is not a standard file type.

Bob Liu · « **Reply #18 on:** January 13, 2014, 04:50:04 pm »

Yea I kinda guessed you can't open them and see what's inside like a rar but I just wanted to keep my hopes up encase someone knew how to, anyhow could you guys show me a pic of what a file should look like when the japanese text appears.

Jorpho · « **Reply #19 on:** January 13, 2014, 08:36:01 pm »

Why not just download a document written in Shift-JIS and open it with your hex editor?

Here, I copy-and-pasted some text from jp.wikipedia.org into JWPce and saved it as Shift-JIS.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35903326/example.sjs

Here's the same text in Unicode.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35903326/example.txt

Mind you, JWPce supports seven other encodings and it is entirely possible that this game will not use any of them.