Hacking Donkey Kong:Jungle Beat - JAP->English translation

dan8310x · Dec 21, 2008

Hi,
Since DK:JB is only out in Japanese at the moment, with no determined release date for USA or EUR. I thought id have a go at translating all the Japanese text in the game to English.

So far ive managed the following with no real trouble.
Have Disc Image, extracted directories and files.
Located 2-3 .arc files that I believe contain the text for the game;
These are: Font.arc, Home.arc and message.arc
Each of the 3 files are compresses arc containers, by viewing the files directly in a Hex editor - I can see they are Compressed with Yaz0.

Found a Yaz0 decoder and encoder at http://www.amnoid.de/gc/
My next step is to try and decode the files and see whats inside... ill update once i know.

*Update:
Well,I managed to decode the message.arc file, into a message.rarc file. using Yaz0Dec.exe
Then decoded the message.rarc file using RarcDump.exe, the output from this was 3 files
..\message.rarc_dir\jpjapanese\messageid.tbl
..\message.rarc_dir\jpjapanese\struct.tbl
..\message.rarc_dir\jpjapanese\jpjapanese\message.bmg

Is anyone familar with .BMG or .TBL files?

The 2 tbl files show nothing interested as the first few bytes in a hex editor.. whilst the bmg file shows 'MESGbmg1' as the first 8 characters.

I'l update when i know more... Please feel free to comment.

dan8310x · Dec 21, 2008

sorry to bump this forward like this.
I posted this earlier today, but due to all the repeat postings about people being unable to play this game, or backup loader doesnt work cause of x & y. the post ended up 3 pages back with no-one given a chance to read it.
Thanks,I really hope that there is someone on here who can offer some advise on taking this mini-project forward..As I can see this benefiting greater.

Play Lets Tap, DK:JB, and many others(including some only ever released in Japen Titles) in English for example.

RomMon · Dec 22, 2008

Dan,

Try at www.elotrolado.net. They already tried to translate some games to spanish.

They talk about the same files in the following:
http://www.elotrolado.net/hilo_Investigaci...pulacion_995554

Via translation:
http://translate.google.nl/translate?u=htt...nl&ie=UTF-8

Hope thats helps you.

dan8310x · Dec 22, 2008

Cheer RomMon.
Ive been reviewing the forums posts. some good stuff there... it will also mean i can disregard some file types in my search for the text strings.

Out of interest, ive managed to get as far down into the game as the textures for the backgrounds, objects etc... they are stored as TGA images, so can be modifed.. We could even retexture the game if we wanted ;-p

Right, anyway...onwards for locating the text...

Lazycus · Dec 22, 2008

Probably obvious but check the text in the GC versions (JAP and USA). I can't imagine there is that much different between the GC and Wii versions for the majority of the game, especially the levels that exist in both.

dan8310x · Dec 23, 2008

Lazycus said:
Probably obvious but check the text in the GC versions (JAP and USA). I can't imagine there is that much different between the GC and Wii versions for the majority of the game, especially the levels that exist in both.

I have the exact same message.bmg file from an English (EUR)version of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat Gamecube.
They are similar in that the file structure is the same. DAT1 & INF1 are present. However these seems to be a *lot* more 'strings' in the Wii Version than there is in the GC version. (Which I can understand due to the developers adding new levels, re-working the control method etc).

Im unable to copy/paste any of the english string to the Jap bmg file. As the japanese characters are still not showing up correctly, so i can not locate teh jap words, rady to replace with english.

Does anyone know how to show the Shift JIS or other japanese characters in a hex editor? (any hex editor)

RomMon · Dec 23, 2008

You might want to look here (not sure if it will help you):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

nIxx · Dec 24, 2008

dan8310x said:
Does anyone know how to show the Shift JIS or other japanese characters in a hex editor? (any hex editor)

Try Translhextion16c and then load the sjs.tbl (google will find it

)

Edit: I tried it with CrystalTile2 and it works you only need to load the sjs.tbl and under Attribut use Unicode (Big-Endian)

dan8310x · Dec 24, 2008

Cheers nIxx,

That worked, I can now see the Japanese picture characters instead of garbage.
Can not copy paste them out of the hex editor thou... I was originally planning on translating each character individually. by counting the most used characters and working down the list from the most used first... kinda like filling in a word puzzle

D?n83?0x (where ? are the characters I havent figured out yet)
The solution being Dan8310x (my username)

I also noticed that the japanese'd english words take up two bytes, rather than 1.

For example 00 57 | 00 69 | 00 69 = WII

In much the same way as the true japanese words also use two bytes

for example 58 34 | 54 08 | 30 6B = XXX (X shown because i can not paste in the actual japanese characters...but there was 3 of them)

Linuks · Mar 16, 2009

Sorry for upping the topic but has someone a link for rarcdump.exe?
I googled it and I just found this topic...

Hacking Donkey Kong:Jungle Beat - JAP->English translation

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