Gaming Antiphona no Seikahime, a few questions.

[Cargodin]

Hi there! This is my first post here on GBAtemp, and it's really a forward-- a question in regards to my failed attempts at digging into Antiphona no Seikahime, a super short JRPG for the PSP that works as a bit of a prequel for Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, Little Princess and Tenshi no Present and also has the same musical sing-a-long cutscenes therein. If anyone know of La Pucelle Tactics, it also exists in the same universe as that, yadda, yadda- jibba,jabba.

While I don't think anyone has started a project on the game, I wasn't sure if it was because there was something horrid happening within the coding/compression, which seems to be my problem. To be honest, it might be a really obvious issue, but I thought I would forward my question from over on Romhacking.I'm more of a translator, and hacking isn't a skill I have-- but I can dump text just fine and like to do that on occasion, even if I know jack all about reinserting it properly.

Anyhow, this is the issue I was having, which I'm forwarding from my post about a week or two ago from romhacking:

I've got a quick question/I'd like some assistance and am throwing out a hangup I have on a game that I've been trying to peek into just for the hell of it. While I have luck getting into other games on PSP for the sake of perusing viscera, I can't even get through the first brick wall after using UMDGen, and this is the game I was hoping to do a mere text dump of, despite being the middle of a couple translation projects already so the priority is like... non-existent.

The odi is 397 kb and the .DAT is 620MB, and it's basically the melting pot for all of the game files. Opened it up in a Hex Editor already so it's not like the text was haphazardly thrown in (which I know better than to expect, but never hurts to try?).

Does anyone perhaps have any experience with this particular game? I understand that odds are it's a custom format or it's compressed in some silly fashion. (the .odi seems to refer to other documents I can only assume are inside of the .dat)

Is this something that apparently sky's extractor could cover? On that particular side note, I've never been able to find a working download, but that's a different rant for a different day.

Thanks for your time to those who have read. Again, if anyone has any approaches for me to consider, I'd really appreciate the nods.
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I kept digging around and opened the .odi in a Hex editor, revealing that it's more of a file list/table.

To be honest, I have the DJMax tool on hand, but I don't think I'm particularly bent on extracting the media files (although I do have 7/9 of the songs completely translated, which I've just been doing on my own time), I'm a bit more interested in just having all of the blood and guts out on the table for me to dig around, dump text and what have you.

If anyone has any tips, tools or hints of the trade that I as a not-hacker may have missed, I would really like to know about it! Thank you guys very much for reading through this novella I've written, to boot.

 

[Rydian]

The data other than the padding and filename might be an offset in the .dat that the file starts at?
May need to be tried in both hex and decimal, but this assumes no compression.

Could also try searching through the .dat for file signatures of some formats you expect to be used.
http://www.garykessler.net/library/file_sigs.html

 

[omarrrio]

it took me 5 minutes to see the pattern OP, as Rydian said, the odi has the file facial informations, such as names, starting offsets in the dat, and their size, you just have to be careful, there are also folders there (like Voice for example), they don't extentions.

EDIT: there are three folders:
Voice (containing 8812 .at3 audio files)
q_ (containing 26 .p files)
MAP (contains many other folders)
...
Anyways, i'll try and make a tool to extract and repack everything.

 

[Cargodin]

Yikes, I didn't actually see that anyone had replied until I logged in and saw the alerts. (I'm super new to gbatemp, so the fact that there ARE alerts is pretty snazzidaisical.)

Could also try searching through the .dat for file signatures of some formats you expect to be used.
http://www.garykessler.net/library/file_sigs.html

Rydian, thank you for responding! I'm actually going to follow along the site and play with the different links/tools with packages from games I'm already familiar with and see where I can make the correlations. Like I mentioned, I'm not very savvy with this end of game translations and the like, so forgive me for this question. While I know that this isn't a pointer, is the .odi file there to act like one? As opposed to text and the like, is it a file exclusively made to sort out the different files/folders and such in the .DAT file? Or do they do something else?

it took me 5 minutes to see the pattern OP, as Rydian said, the odi has the file facial informations, such as names, starting offsets in the dat, and their size, you just have to be careful, there are also folders there (like Voice for example), they don't extentions.

EDIT: there are three folders:
Voice (containing 8812 .at3 audio files)
q_ (containing 26 .p files)
MAP (contains many other folders)
...
Anyways, i'll try and make a tool to extract and repack everything.

I DO think I saw those folder names throughout the .ODI, so this makes a lot more sense to me! Going through other files in a hex editor, at least when text-dumping, I picked up on the habito f ignoring little 1 or 3 character words sifted throughout (which I can see in file formats like this was really NOT the way to go around it, so I think I let the tl;dr get the best of me in this kind of file.
And are you sure? I feel like that would be a lot of work on your part. I know this is a bit of a weird offer, but is there anything you would possibly like me to do in return? I'm working on a couple of other projects, but I certainly don't mind doing a little translation or something for you on the flipside of this.

These were both really good answers for explaining just where I was looking at the file with the wrong lenses. Thank you so much for the explanation and the resources to better look this up as well. I really appreciate the responses, since like I mentioned, I feel I had hit a little bit of a dead end on

 

[omarrrio]

ahaha no problem mate, i do not require anything in return, i just want to see the maximum number of japanese games translated, it kinda forces the official owners to do a localization of the said game(s), anyways, i'll try to get an accurate file list and upload it here