Hacking 7th Dragon 2020 and font map question

[zero_g_monkey]

For my own personal amusement, I had been playing around with 7th Dragon 2020 in between as a break from other personal projects. Things are still new from the PSP side but have been doing romhacking for about 14 years. After discovering that you don't need an eboot hack to run the game with a re-packed cpk file I took more interest in it since there is no way to create a PGD file that I have found. On to my question.

The game uses UTF-8 for the dialogs and has support for the full width ascii/latin characters. You can input the half width and it won't crash the game but does not show up on screen. When doing tests on emulators (PPSSPP), since it changes the way you input names you have the option to use the half width characters. There is 2 font files, GIM format with I believe either 11 or 13 maps with the characters. Does anybody know how to add the half width characters in or if just editing the gim files to add them would work? GIM files aren't the easiest things to change around (though it can be done). Thanks in advance for any info or help.

font.gtb \ font.texb - GIM font maps (seems minor differences between two as far as header stuff - GIM are the same though)
init.tpk - contains a table of the font characters as well as the items
01000010.tpk - contains the opening dialog [#SCL(223 207 82 255) - just a font color change - nothing special]

My experience with translation goes up to the era with cartridges and editing internal stuff like fonts and creating massive tables. So all this is reasonably new in some aspect. Though I have worked on disc based stuff.

 

[ChepChep]

So did you get any further than what you posted?

I just finished up La Pucelle: Ragarnok translation and soon with Phantom Kingdom Portable. I am looking for another game to tackle and 7th Dragon 2020 is near the top of my list. I pretty much got everything decrypted and got the CPK unpacked. I can get everything packed back up and working in emulator and PSP. I have not messed around with font yet but I see many english latin characters being displayed so I assume they have to be in the font file someplace. May not be the standard UTF-8 encoding but some weird modification.

Anyways... just wanted to see where you are at in this. Also do you know if any other group is working on this game?

 

[Zack1995]

chepchep,go to cavespeak.org,he want to translate 7th dragon 2020 and suikoden(the guy who trnslate 7thdragon on nds

 

[zero_g_monkey]

I haven't looked much into the game lately. I have had a couple of people talking about it but I can't really say much more. The font thing though, basically I just tried to see if it supported single width latin and it does.... and it doesn't. The game will not crash if you input your translated stuff with them, they just won't show up. The big font map only has the double width latin (3 byte) kind. Since I am by no means a programmer of any sort, that is the reason I had posted this question originally to see if anybody had some advice on the subject. It isn't a project I am personally doing. I just like to mess around with games to see how they work. If the fellow who did the NDS game is gonna work on it, I say that is wonderful so that they will have some form of consistency. Sorry if I didn't answer your question. Life has been kind of hectic for me the past week and I have not had a clear thought in days.

 

[ChepChep]

Thanks everyone... just trying to "investigate" since I do not want to put effort into a game that another group is currently working on.

 

[Pokeytax]

Yeah, I talked with ChepChep about this a bit. I haven't announced it because I don't like to drum interest up before I'm really moving on something but I expect to be working on this in some capacity in January.

 

[Pokeytax]

Solid progress on this patch, still targeting a 4Q2015 release.

Right now, though, I am stuck trying to figure out the best patch distribution method. Repacking the data using CRIWARE was no trouble but recompressing has not worked so far. That means the ISO is > 1.5 GB and a simple ISO patch would be around the same size.

Probably the best compromise would be an autopatcher along the lines of the VC3 patch, which would unpack, patch individual files, and repack - it would likely take me a while to figure out how to do that, though. I'm not experienced at coding anything beyond straight assembly and I don't want to spend forever figuring out the ins and outs of whatever outdated CRIWARE version they decided to use this time.

If I can't figure that out, I'll have to ask players to unpack and repack themselves, which would be a major drag.

Any thoughts from people with experience patching compressed/encrypted ISOs would be appreciated.

 

[Scorp]

Solid progress on this patch, still targeting a 4Q2015 release.

Right now, though, I am stuck trying to figure out the best patch distribution method. Repacking the data using CRIWARE was no trouble but recompressing has not worked so far. That means the ISO is > 1.5 GB and a simple ISO patch would be around the same size.

Probably the best compromise would be an autopatcher along the lines of the VC3 patch, which would unpack, patch individual files, and repack - it would likely take me a while to figure out how to do that, though. I'm not experienced at coding anything beyond straight assembly and I don't want to spend forever figuring out the ins and outs of whatever outdated CRIWARE version they decided to use this time.

If I can't figure that out, I'll have to ask players to unpack and repack themselves, which would be a major drag.

Any thoughts from people with experience patching compressed/encrypted ISOs would be appreciated.

You can just write a bat file with needed criware tools and iso build tools, which will first extract all contents of ISO and after create new ISO. This would be the best method and as far as I remember it is used almost in all patches around.
If you need help with this, you can write me in PM, but it is really trivial.

 

[Pokeytax]

Thanks to everyone for their assistance. The patch has been released at cavespeak.org. While it's a version 0.90, it should be fairly stable. Please let me know if you encounter any issues!

 

[ChepChep]

I just tried loading it up on my PSP and the char input for characters names does not work on the PSP. I can only input blank char on PSP.

Not sure what is going on with it. Looks very different on the PSP vs PPSSPP.

 

[Pokeytax]

Yeah, something is going on on hardware - emulation does not duplicate the PSP OSK so I'm going to have to figure something out. What is needed is full-width Latin characters.

 

[ChepChep]

Somehow the ASM is "breaking" the input. I had something like that happen with PKP and the new UN-named project that will be out soon.

Do you have a PSP? This may be impossible to debug without some hardware...

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Turned out to be some function in the game was hard-coded in the ASM and when I changed it to latin text it broke things and took a while to figure it out...

Also had a fun bug where in the un-named game, the main character would instantly get the best weapons and armor and all the characters right before you get control of your character. Was a real pain in the neck to solve and was a overflow issue in the ASM.

 

[Pokeytax]

Yeah... I didn't change the font storage from Unicode in order to avoid these issues, but I didn't catch the font input problem due to testing on emulator.

I grabbed an unmodded PSP... it seems like changing language to Japanese and pressing select should allow access to the wide English characters needed, but I have a report that this isn't true in the game, so I'll have to look deeper.

 

[ChepChep]

It seems like I should be able to load the non-translated version and name the characters and then use the save file with the patch version and keep the names...

Do you know if this would work?

-ChepChep

 

[Pokeytax]

That will 100% work (although there's another naming instance a brief ways in as well, so play until you have to name something else).

I also have an untested fix up now, but it may take a few iterations before it's working right, so back up your iso!

 

[Pokeytax]

Okay, the hotfix seems solid, so anyone playing on PSP can download it and correct the name entry bug. Thanks for helping out with the beginning AND the end of the project!

 

[zero_g_monkey]

Congratulations on finishing the game. I enjoyed your work on the DS game and I'm looking forward to giving this one a try.