Translation of Galleon (Xbox)

[RickTM]

Hi guys, could someone explain me how to translate Galleon for Xbox to Italian?

[FAST6191]

Asking to translate a specific game, saving where there is an existing tool or you are asking someone that did it for another language (neither of which are likely for an obscure xbox game at this point in time), is a bit like asking them to do all the work for you.

For the most part it will be the same as anything else that has a file system (all files generally considered individually or maybe with the files in the same directory as opposed to one giant blob of a ROM, and with a binary/code what the CPU runs in memory rather than in the ROM with XBE* being the format). The xbox uses a somewhat non standard ISO format but there are a thousand tools that can handle it, and depending upon the ripping method might even come as files (though don't do this unless you absolutely have to). https://www.xbox-hq.com/html/downloads-cat5.html having at least the names of things to do a further search with there.

https://www.romhacking.net/start/ being the usual link around here, though more focused on the older binary blob approaches. https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,14708.0.html is more for the GBA and DS but the DS is a file system based affair so it covers that. I don't know if we have much in the way of specifics for the xbox beyond a few people making trainers and swapping some textures.

*a relative of Microsoft's PE format you more likely encounter in its exe or dll forms. Would also return for the xbox 360 in xex but different topic.

[RickTM]

No, I didn't ask for someone to do the job for me. I just asked for explanations on how to do, like "Yes there is this tool" or similar information.

I would therefore like to know if other translations have been made for this, or for other Xbox games.

Unfortunately I don't have the time and the desire to program a tool by myself and I wanted to know if there were already existing ones.

[Jorpho]

I would therefore like to know if other translations have been made for this, or for other Xbox games.

https://www.romhacking.net/?page=translations&genre=&platform=38&status=&languageid=&perpage=20&order=&dir=&title=&author=&transsearch=Go

So, yes. But the fact that there still aren't very many of them despite the passage of many years might indicate the level of difficulty involved.

If Retroarch supported the XBox, I would suggest using Retroarch's auto-translate feature, but if I'm not mistaken XBox emulation has yet to make significant progress (which is probably another thing standing in the way of translation efforts).

(ETA: The game is apparently playable in Xemu these days.)

[RickTM]

https://www.romhacking.net/?page=translations&genre=&platform=38&status=&languageid=&perpage=20&order=&dir=&title=&author=&transsearch=Go

So, yes. But the fact that there still aren't very many of them despite the passage of many years might indicate the level of difficulty involved.

If Retroarch supported the XBox, I would suggest using Retroarch's auto-translate feature, but if I'm not mistaken XBox emulation has yet to make significant progress (which is probably another thing standing in the way of translation efforts).

(ETA: The game is apparently playable in Xemu these days.)

To my surprise I found that CXBX now also works, which was not the case 3 years ago.
In fact I preferred to buy back the console 😁

Anyway, what I want is to edit the text file directly. We found a file called TextEnglish.pkg inside the copy found online. It contains dialogues but changing the number of characters in it, the game does not start.
By trying to translate, leaving the number of characters unchanged and saving the changes, they do not appear in the game and the subtitles remain unchanged.
By deleting the file, the game starts without texts even in the menu, but crashes starting the game.

So we thought it might just be a "referral" file, but the fact that editing or deleting it changes things, means it's an important file.

However it is only 180MB large and this is strange.
Should I extract it out of my physical copy?

[Jorpho]

However it is only 180MB large and this is strange.

Why is that strange? Is that too small? Or too large?

Should I extract it out of my physical copy?

I don't understand the question. Why are you asking? Why don't you try it and find out?

[RickTM]

Why is that strange? Is that too small? Or too large?
I don't understand the question. Why are you asking? Why don't you try it and find out?

Too small.

Because I'm not an expert. So if anyone has tryed before, I could save time.

[FAST6191]

180 megabytes for text is huge -- my ebook collection for about ten of my favourite fantasy authors (each having multiple books) might clock that and that is with modern formatting and nice images of the world maps, family trees, front cover, back cover and whatever else gets included in such a thing. A 2004 action game should have nothing resembling that, indeed even the crazy nigh untranslatable Japanese RPGs from a few years later where every NPC might as well have its own novel of random text would possibly struggle to get there. Outside exception if the game somehow uses graphical options to display text (if you see some of the texture translation things for the N64 and such like some of those might get there) which is not impossible but something I would associate more with puzzle games even back then. Could also be audio included but that would be a first.
Anyway if deleting it shows blank text (before a crash) then fairly safe for it to be what you seek. That many megabytes even if split between a bunch of languages (doubtful here if you are translating it to one of the usual multi5 languages) might mean multiple instances of the text within a file.
It crashing when you edit it, assuming you did not add characters or delete them, usually means you either overwrote some formatting, used an invalid character or there is compression (doubtful on a file that big but I have been surprised before) which effectively creates an invalid character when decompressed (assuming it can even do that). Start by finding something in there, hopefully having some idea of what it is*, and overwriting characters around it with the characters you find there rather than 00 or some random hex value that it might interpret as something else (or have no idea how to interpret and crash).

*relative search, frequency analysis, space analysis (you are rarely going to go more than 10 characters between a space and space is also usually the most common character within a body of text) or one of the other such methods,


Out of your physical copy. You can if you want. Some xbox games were ripped (in the classical sense of the term wherein files are removed, altered and compressed to drop space down). You might face issues releasing the patch later if it does not conform to the Scene version, or any redump that was made during the 360 era (where the original xbox could happily accept modified games in basically every flavour of mod then the 360 DVD flash mods could play original xbox games but needed call it 1:1 original copies rather than some of the xbox modding efforts. It can also cut the other way as well -- your nice open up the DVD drive in FTP on the original xbox and grab files is not always how the game holds it on disc, Star Wars KOTOR being a noted example of this. Such a thing tends to only matter when you burn it back to disc (running it from an internal hard drive partition does not face the same issues).

[RickTM]

180 megabytes for text is huge

No, 180MB for the whole game, that's the weird thing

[FAST6191]

Oh OK. That is nothing too unusual; PC games of the same era often still came on CDs, music and video being the main things to bump up sizes for a long time.
It being in one big archive file is also nothing too unusual either. Makes things a bit more annoying as you are going to learn how its pointer system works to do meaningful edits (you might be tempted to try to match lengths or pad things out but that never gets anywhere good).

[RickTM]

I extracted the game from my physical copy and examined it, it's bigger because it also contains files from other languages.
For the rest I don't see other "main" files regarding the dialogues.
I say this because someone had suggested to me that I was probably editing "referral" files.

I'm at a standstill at the moment, I don't know which file to edit because editing the English one for example and saving it, as already said, if you don't change the number of characters then the game starts but without making me see the changes.
If you change it instead, the game crashes.

[FAST6191]

If you change the number of characters then everything else following that change will be shifted forwards by however much you added (or deleted). This is a very quick way to break a game, even more so when it seems every file is contained within one big archive.
There will be some manner of determining where the files are housed within then archive. You need to discover this if you hope to make meaningful edits. Usually this takes the form of pointers either at the start of the file itself or in a helper file somewhere nearby (easier to read a few hundred kilobytes of helper file than do a bunch of reads of the large file). Sometimes you will get bonus data like names, compression status, directories, date created/written/read and whatever else you might imagine from a file system or PC style archive file but equally sometimes all you get are a list of file locations and have to calculate sizes from that (the game does not need names to run after all), or a list of simple sizes and have to calculate locations from that (by adding up everything before it). I doubt you will get anything particularly quirky in this like sector addressing; 32 bits (a very nice numnber for CPUs of the time to operate with/do maths upon) corresponds to about 4 gigabytes, also why your 32 bit operating system only does above 4 gigs of RAM with great frustration. This is OK for many files even to this day but when your dual layer DVD is better part of 9 gigabytes and even the puny at the time hard drive of the original xbox is 8 gigs (10 in some later models when hacked) then yeah this is why sector addressing happens.

If you edited something in place as it were and nothing changed then you were not editing useful data*, possibly just junk left over from development. Happens often enough. Find the real data instead. Might be in a different format to what you found so far.

*there are some esoteric things like hot restoration data (have same data in say 3 locations so if one corrupts you have the other two to restore from) but other than you also having fun with pointers (which you don't know at this time) none apply in this instance or to games in general, save perhaps the corruption check thing being a part of some anti cheat things you might encounter (never going to be in a text file in a game though).

[RickTM]

If you change the number of characters then everything else following that change will be shifted forwards by however much you added (or deleted). This is a very quick way to break a game, even more so when it seems every file is contained within one big archive.
There will be some manner of determining where the files are housed within then archive. You need to discover this if you hope to make meaningful edits. Usually this takes the form of pointers either at the start of the file itself or in a helper file somewhere nearby (easier to read a few hundred kilobytes of helper file than do a bunch of reads of the large file). Sometimes you will get bonus data like names, compression status, directories, date created/written/read and whatever else you might imagine from a file system or PC style archive file but equally sometimes all you get are a list of file locations and have to calculate sizes from that (the game does not need names to run after all), or a list of simple sizes and have to calculate locations from that (by adding up everything before it). I doubt you will get anything particularly quirky in this like sector addressing; 32 bits (a very nice numnber for CPUs of the time to operate with/do maths upon) corresponds to about 4 gigabytes, also why your 32 bit operating system only does above 4 gigs of RAM with great frustration. This is OK for many files even to this day but when your dual layer DVD is better part of 9 gigabytes and even the puny at the time hard drive of the original xbox is 8 gigs (10 in some later models when hacked) then yeah this is why sector addressing happens.

If you edited something in place as it were and nothing changed then you were not editing useful data*, possibly just junk left over from development. Happens often enough. Find the real data instead. Might be in a different format to what you found so far.

*there are some esoteric things like hot restoration data (have same data in say 3 locations so if one corrupts you have the other two to restore from) but other than you also having fun with pointers (which you don't know at this time) none apply in this instance or to games in general, save perhaps the corruption check thing being a part of some anti cheat things you might encounter (never going to be in a text file in a game though).

Unfortunately I don't really know how to proceed to do what you told me