Digimon Story Lost Evolution Project

So, I'm a big fan of this series, and love the engine it runs on, and was saddened to see that there appears to be noone translating it. As such, I intend to attempt it. This thread will doubtless be changed substantially as the project progresses, but I'll start by introducing myself.

I'm a university student studying computer science, and have taken some basic courses in Japanese, and intend to improve at that. Also, I am rather good at English, so my translation should be very clear. I decided to start on this project in part to improve my knowlege of Japanese, and began, with a great deal of hope, to decompile the rom.

However, at this point I was in unfamilliar territory. After some careful research, I looked into various ds compression systems and utillities that might be useful. I was quite unhappy to realise that I was dealing with a rather rare and difficult situation;  crystaltile2's decompression simply crashes on any attempt to decompile the rom's numerous .pak files and .bin files. I searched for alternative programs, and had no better luck with any of them. I'm able to view the game text somewhat through the programs' hex editors, but that simply isn't a good environment for translation, as far as I'm concerned. The sound is the only thing that is in the standard format, and I wouldn't change that anyway.

So, as a favor to the (I'm sure) many people who would be grateful for the eventual completed translation, I humbly request that someone explain to me how I might begin, or lead me in the direction of an appropriate tool.

Best regards.

I have done some preliminary work on this, namely (a .pak unpacker/repacker) and some hacks to allow ascii instead of sjis for text. If anyone is interested I might publish the tools and the sources up on github.

Cool ive been waiting 4 sumone to do this. I can't im just in yr7 and do italian. IF you have spare time could u translate digimon xros wars ds to they came out recently

I totally support you on this but i dont have any experience with this kind of programming.

If you dont know what tools to use, ask one of the other translator guys, They will know.

why translate lost evolution when super xros wars red/blue are out?

Normmatt offered to upload tools for him already. It seems the OP hasn't responded to him (at least not in this topic).

I'd be glad to see a translation project of this though....




Older game that never made it across seas so it would be nice for those of us who can't understand and still haven't played it to get the chance to play it.

Edited by nebula91, 25 March 2011 - 09:22 PM.

@Normmatt: That sounds wonderful. Exactly what I need.

As for xros wars, I have absolutely no interest in it, or faith in its plot. Whereas Lost Evolution is quite interesting and has its own plot, not related to anything else, so it's in more need of it.

Looking forward to this, best of luck.

Also I'd like to note sunce Xros Wars is getting dubbed under the title of Fusion Wars or something, the chances the Xros Wars games will get localized have increased exponentially.

I Kinda Have Liked the Digimon Story Lost Evolution Plot,I am Awaiting the Day it will be Translated to English

I'll be cheering you from the sidelines man.

If you don't have any idea how to rom hack nor any arm assembly then having my tools wont help much other than getting you a script dump (you can reinsert it but it can't be bigger than the original nor can you use ASCII without some arm assembly hacks).

The main thing I'm interested in is the translation itself. I'd be happy to team up in some way. I know some assembly, but not much; I certainly haven't ever attempted a romhack before. I also doubt I'd do another. There's certainly no real guide, considering the one on this forum is several years old, has 90% broken links, and basically just says "If you know how to use a hex editor and program in assembly, you know how to hack roms."

I'm basically doing this for fun, and would like to at least be able to make an attempt, but its been rather frustrating, since you appear to be the only one in the world who has any of the needed tools.

now there's two people from the sidelines

I've decided not to release the tools just yet because its not quite as easy as i'd like to get it working properly. But here are the script dumps if anyone wants to start translating them.

Sweet; I'll start working on it sometime soon.

EDIT: Except that despite having the japanese language pack on my computer, all of these files are meaningless gibberish in notepad or even crystaltile.

Edited by MagusZero, 31 March 2011 - 06:23 AM.