Basically, parts in game that you equip all have individual stats. I'd like to change the stats of individual parts so that they have different attack/ammo/defense values.I don't see this as being much more complex than, say, translating english text to Japanese text in-game. Many PSP games have issued fan patches that translate the text, however I can't find any information on the tools used to modify it.
So far all I can do is try to de-encode the AC.BIN file in UMDgen that seems to contain the game information, but it's a wall of unreadable text. If I decode the eboot.bin file using JIS-Shift I can get a few legible words out of it, so I assume that's the encoding they used. That doesn't work for the AC.Bin file, however. All the other game files are audio or video resources, so I assume AC.BIN is where the game data is.
I can also try to identify the values in Cheat Engine to create a CWCheat for it, but I can't identify individual part values/addresses and the ones I can identify (such as total defense, which is a character stat added up from multiple parts you equip) don't seem to change when I apply a cheat to them.
I wanted to avoid posting this as personal project since the rules for that board say you need some real progress, and so far all I've managed to do is learn a bit more but not make any actual changes to the game.
I've made some progress with discussing the various tools to use (here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/52qyth/tools_for_making_a_community_patch/ ) it seems like there's an unpassable wall between having a binary and being able to read it. If that's true, how do people release translation patches?
In this case it wouldn't be strictly text assets, but the "ammo" and "power" and "defense" etc. stats of each item/weapon in the game. All of those stats are displayed as text in the game, however. It seems like audio and video resources are stored in their own format separately (there are distinct folders for them filled with .at3 and .pmf files)
Opening the AC.bin file in hex view shows that almost every line is 2 values followed by lots of 00s. Here's the first few lines of the file:
01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 89 00 00 00 1F 00 00 00
02 00 00 00 1F 00 00 00 05 00 00 00 02 00 00 00
03 00 00 00 21 00 00 00 05 00 00 00 02 00 00 00
04 00 00 00 23 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 01 00 00 00
a bit further down the file it turns into lines like this for the remainder of the file, before going to all 00s near the end.
69 A4 67 B8 DD 54 58 58 24 2C C0 CE A2 06 F0 BE
61 4B 43 C0 F5 15 ED 6A DB 73 73 59 C4 72 15 9C
9D 42 82 59 76 EF 3D D5 53 D3 5E 96 63 B7 79 32
DC AF 45 45 FA F1 CF 67 08 EA 17 FF 7A FE E9 2C
So my question is how do I determine how and what to edit to change the in-game values for those parts?
For example, one weapon has an attack power of 3050. 3050 is not used as a stat for any other part in the game, so converting to hex (BEA) and searching for that yeilds a lot of results that I can sift through but I have no idea how to tell which results correspond to that weapon or not.
EDIT:
I think what I'm basically looking for is a game decompiler/disassembler for PSP files, or some way to read/organize assembly code, right? I've found a few examples of such a thing online but they usually have broken links/downloads and are from 2007 or so, such as:
http://forums.qj.net/psp-development-forum/116729-release-psp-easy-disassembler.htmlOr, ideally, pre-compiled source code for the game.