gukid

I know most people won't have anything to complain about when it comes to the fonts in this game, but it seems lately companies are reusing each others crappy fontsets, the only thing that makes them playable for me is when I can break out NFTRedit and fix it myself.

So if you're like me, and want M's, W's and w's that look distinct from each other, as well as good looking periods, commas and aprostrophes (more like ATROCITIES! am I right?) just download this file, use DSLazy to unpack the rom and put the 2 files into /data/jp/etc/ and overwrite what's there.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?o0m2yzygzy2

These shouldn't cause any problems because the game never uses a full textbox anyway, so there's no chance of runoff. Why they used these bad fonts in the first place? Maybe the same reason exceed used them for Retro Game Challenge, and Konami used them for Suikoden Tierkreis...

Does anyone know if it's a bug that these don't delete themselves after you load them? Or is it just how the game operates?

Would kind of ruin the point of it being a tempsave, if it's really just a permanent "save anywhere you want to" alternate save.

I was just wondering if anyone was familiar with any way we could remove the intros of games that are non skipable.

The Japanese Castlevania (new one) has 2 screens, Konami and the Video codec one, the us one has 4: Licensed by Nintendo, Konami, Video Codec, Online ESRB Interactions warning. Not counting the warning that comes up on the DS, this is 5 timed intros you have to watch before the intro movie starts, which is getting more than annoying these days.

I think idealy, removing the licenced by nintendo, video codec, and online esrb warnings would be best, and leave the Konami logo as skipable by pressing a button. Unfortunately, this is probably some actual hacking, so I don't know the first thing on how to do this... but I'm sure someone does! Perhaps all these intros are built roughly the same way, and a general utility could be built?

I'm also wondering, if the files in the "overlay" have anything to do with it, because the US rom has a few bigger ".bin files" than the Japanese version, which I thought could be these screens. Maybe overlay is the collection of any full screen graphics? If this is the case, then maybe it would be even easier to identify them and remove them from the rom code.

Any interest in this at all? Or do you guys not mind waiting an extra 10-15 seconds to play a game?

Topic recreated in DS hacking where I mean to post this.

Of course seeing that all of the text was in ".txt" like files I thought this would be easy, but I'm obviously doing something wrong. The files are .MTP, with some sort of header, and then all of the text with control codes fairly easy to read. What I'm trying to do is change dialogue and well as spell/enemy/item names, town names, etc. (I'm a DW purist...)

When I make any changes at all to the files however, all I get are error messages. Say for example I change the file with items, any time I get an item, the item will be <ERR something>. It's also every item, not just the ones I've changed. I'm thinking there my be some sort of pointer table that would need to be changed as well? (I'm assuming now that this is the "header" that I'm seeing, which isn't plain text...)

If anyone can help point me in the right direction with this project, it would be greatly appreciated.

Edit:

Reading a bit more, about little/big endian, hex and how I would need to "byte swap" function the pointer table for it to make any sense to me, gave that a try with anything above the first text, and got something similar to this (excerpt):

UPDATED, now start of file:

(504D is just the file extension in ascii but messed up because of the swap)
504D 30 54 03 D4
0000 46 29 00 0F
46A5 00 0F 00 33
0000 00 20 00 00
0134 00 00 02 80
(new info on the line above, 0154 is where the data starts, says 0134 here. Another file is similar, where the data starts 20 more than what it says on this line... and oddly enough there is always a "20" in the line above. 280 appears to be the exact amount of characters in the data portion for this file.)

(these next lines are the pointer matched up with the data at the end.)
0000 00 00 00 04 @0M@
0000 00 01 00 04 @0F@
0001 00 02 00 0C @0M@1Ragnar@
0002 00 03 00 0B @0F@1Alena@.
0005 00 04 00 0B @0M@1Kiryl@.
0008 00 05 00 0B @0M@1Borya@.
000B 00 06 00 0D @0M@1Torneko@...
000E 00 07 00 0B @0F@1Meena@.
0012 00 08 00 0A @0F@1Maya@..
0015 00 0A 00 0D @0F@1Aigneas@...
0018 00 0B 00 0C @0N@1Healie@
001C 00 0C 00 01 @...
001F 00 0D 00 01 @...
0020 00 0E 00 0A @0M@1Fido@..
0021 00 0F 00 0C @0M@1Hardie@

...

(spaces and line breaks inserted for added effect and I also matched up the #s with the order of the text. I also apologize if posting a sample here against the rules as well, as it could potentially be "copyrighted"... If so, please delete the infringing portion of my post.)

Looks like the first value is an offset of some sort, which I can't figure out. The 3rd value is sequential numbering, sometimes goes up by more than 1 but never out of order. The 5th value turns out to be the size of the text, in hex.

You can also notice in the full string here, the first value 0M/F is for Male or Female, the 2nd 1name is the characters name. All of the files seem to have the data in this sort of structure so it might be easy to create an editor once this is all figured out...

Oh, and I also tried changing one character. In the file with the town names and chapter titles, it seemed to break it and give <ERR's, but I may have done something wrong because I also changed medicinal to mAdicinal and this worked.

Hmm, maybe I should retitle this thread... "An account of me knowing nothing trying to figure out how to hack the text in DS roms..."

Edit:

I think I may have figured it all out then... Would like to try some real editing, but it'll be hard in the format it's in. Is there by any chance any way there exists a program that can take the pointer table, and the text, and sort of generate a file that matches up everything as I have above, and then would be able to rebuild it (and recalculate some values, like the length of strings) once the editing is done? If not I suppose I'll have to get to work on something like that once I learn how to program...

Update:

Changed "Ragnar" to "Ragnary" (as a test) and put the 0C value to 0D and it seems to work... except that the "Bag" is showing an error so it more than likely means that everything underneath Ragnary is messed up. Guess I'll still need help figuring out what that first "offset" type value is...