Gaming PSP translation (.dat file related question, Corpse Party)

[mashpop]

Hi! I'm trying to translate the original Corpse Party from English to French. After many many hours of Google searches, I managed to extract the image.bin file which pretty much contains the entire game, including all the text which appear to be all .dat files for the most part. Opening them up with Notepad++ or MadEdit lets me see the text (and also a bunch of weird characters). Finally! I found text.

My question is this: can I now just replace the English text with the translated one? Or does the new text need to be the exact same length (number of letters) as the original one?

And if the answer is the latter, what's the work around to be able to translate it then? (since the new text will certainly not be of the exact same length)

(I hope this is the right place to post this).

 

[CrashmanX]

If you're just straight up editing the .dat files with the text and other characters in there, you'll need to make things the same length as what's there (I.E. if a line goes (null) WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS (null) then you'll need to fit your stuff in between the Null values (00) )

 

[mashpop]

If you're just straight up editing the .dat files with the text and other characters in there, you'll need to make things the same length as what's there (I.E. if a line goes (null) WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS (null) then you'll need to fit your stuff in between the Null values (00) )

But then how do fans translate games? Because obviously the (in this case French) translation of an English sentence will very rarely fit so perfectly.

 

[CrashmanX]

People sometimes write specialized tools to open files up and then allow them to be edited and re-built.
When you're hex editing you're not re-building the file, you're just editing the data that's already there into something else. If you're doing anything other than a menu patch you'll usually want custom built programs for the job. However if you look up the file type you're editing you might be able to find someone else who has done translations of similar games and find their tools.

Example being I'm using tools from the Magica Madoka game to translate Danball Senki BOOST because they're the same file formats (BTX, CSB, FNT, etc.). I've also done Hex Editing (Gundam AGE was full hex edit) and that works well if you can figure out the formats for the code and such. If you can figure out the coding then you're good and can do whatever you want. That just takes a lot more time.

 

[mashpop]

People sometimes write specialized tools to open files up and then allow them to be edited and re-built.
When you're hex editing you're not re-building the file, you're just editing the data that's already there into something else. If you're doing anything other than a menu patch you'll usually want custom built programs for the job. However if you look up the file type you're editing you might be able to find someone else who has done translations of similar games and find their tools.

Example being I'm using tools from the Magica Madoka game to translate Danball Senki BOOST because they're the same file formats (BTX, CSB, FNT, etc.). I've also done Hex Editing (Gundam AGE was full hex edit) and that works well if you can figure out the formats for the code and such. If you can figure out the coding then you're good and can do whatever you want. That just takes a lot more time.

(off topic: I love Madoka Magica to death and really wanted to play that game but don't know Japanese)

The thing is most of the files are .dat which is a generic file type and means they could be anything, and since the game got translated in English, there's no translation community around it. I was able to find this http://code.google.com/p/corpsepartytoolset/ which obviously helped a LOT but it's not a specialed tool, it just extracted everything in image.bin

Could you elaborate on how to "figure out" the formats for the code, since that (HEX edits) seems to be the only solution available from what I can tell?

Unless someone out there would want to help me with this! I don't think it's the hardest of games to work on.

 

[CrashmanX]

I'm afraid I can't. I'm only familiar with Level 5 games and the coding is usually pretty simple. 00 at the start/end of lines, \n for a new line, and things like <b1> for variables and such. It's very generic code that's used within the lines of text.
Other than that I'm afraid I can not help you without taking the game apart myself.
Sorry friend. =(

 

[mashpop]

I'm afraid I can't. I'm only familiar with Level 5 games and the coding is usually pretty simple. 00 at the start/end of lines, \n for a new line, and things like <b1> for variables and such. It's very generic code that's used within the lines of text.
Other than that I'm afraid I can not help you without taking the game apart myself.
Sorry friend. =(

It's okay, thanks for the extra info. I hope someone else can help me. (also I didn't know the Madoka game had gotten translated!)

 

[SkyBladeCloud]

Ohh! Yeah, this is the Blood Covered installment right? i know pretty much everything about this game due to some unlucky events...
And... It is not the easiest game I've hacked, but much easier than type-0 lol.

The main problem is that almost all is compressed in a LZSS variant, and protected with a CRC32 custom algorithm.

...

 

[mashpop]

Ohh! Yeah, this is the Blood Covered installment right? i know pretty much everything about this game due to some unlucky events...
And... It is not the easiest game I've hacked, but much easier than type-0 lol.

The main problem is that almost all is compressed in a LZSS variant, and protected with a CRC32 custom algorithm.

...

I literally have no clue what your last sentence means, but does it mean you could help me out? Or maybe point me in the right direction? I would really appreciate it.

 

[SkyBladeCloud]

If it is the Blood Covered installment I can give you some advice. I worked a lot with that game, however, as I'm so busy with type-0 I wont be able to help a lot. Also, didn't you use my tool to extract the Image.bin file?

...

 

[mashpop]

If it is the Blood Covered installment I can give you some advice. I worked a lot with that game, however, as I'm so busy with type-0 I wont be able to help a lot. Also, didn't you use my tool to extract the Image.bin file?

...

Yeah it's Blood Covered, the first PSP game. I will welcome any kind of help you can give me that can get me closer to finally translating text
OMG that tool was from you??? Wow the internet is a small place! Thank you so much for that.

 

[SkyBladeCloud]

I don't know, the only Image.bin (from Blood Covered) extractor that I know was made by me... I also posted the CRC and LZSS algorithms in a Russian forum, but I think they dropped the idea of translating the game into Russian. Anyway, are you OK with translating using the original text length?

 

[mashpop]

I don't know, the only Image.bin (from Blood Covered) extractor that I know was made by me... I also posted the CRC and LZSS algorithms in a Russian forum, but I think they dropped the idea of translating the game into Russian. Anyway, are you OK with translating using the original text length?

Is that the only way to do it? Because I don't think that's possible, translations will mostly be not of the same length, that's just how language is. For example: "View the chapter 1 opening" would be "Regarder l'intro du chapitre 1" which is longer, and I've already shortened "introduction" to "intro".

Unless I misunderstood your question.

 

[SkyBladeCloud]

No, it's not the only way, it's just the easy way lool, anyway, just to make sure, is this the tool you've been using? Because this one will correctly extract everything (with correct routes and file names).

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tgmxepgj564cf6o

...

 

[mashpop]

No, it's not the only way, it's just the easy way lool, anyway, just to make sure, is this the tool you've been using? Because this one will correctly extract everything (with correct routes and file names).

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tgmxepgj564cf6o

...

No this is what I used http://code.google.com/p/corpsepartytoolset/ (had to build it with Visual Studio).
Double clicking your .exe with image.bin in the same folder did nothing.

 

[mashpop]

No, it's not the only way, it's just the easy way lool, anyway, just to make sure, is this the tool you've been using? Because this one will correctly extract everything (with correct routes and file names).

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tgmxepgj564cf6o

...

Unless I used it wrong? Does it do something different than the link I posted?

 

[valyr]

its a command line program. Open command prompt navigate to the folder where cpt.exe and image.bin is and type

cpt -e image.bin

and it will extract the file

 

[mashpop]

its a command line program. Open command prompt navigate to the folder where cpt.exe and image.bin is and type

cpt -e image.bin

and it will extract the file

Thanks for that! So yeah it did the exact same thing the other tool did.

And yeah using the same length would make the translation really bad, might as well play the English version. I don't want to translate just a few things to make it kind of understandable by francophone gamers, I want to make a complete French translation.

I guess I'll need tools then, could anyone help with that?

 

[Plop23]

Hi, some time ago I was looking at me too trduirle game, I contacted Skybladecloud, but I left when I learned that you could not enlarge the size of the dialogue otherwise it things were happening rather weird.

SkyBladeCloud :
I also posted the CRC and LZSS algorithms in a Russian forum, but I think they dropped the idea of translating the game into Russian.

I saw it some time ago, but it seems that the site in question is closed, a developer has made tools to uncompress / recompress image.bin (thanks to you I believe, tools was made by teges) and edit the dialogue, (the site closed some time ago) but, I downloaded the tools.
If you want, I can upload them.

Sorry for mistakes, I'm french

 

[mashpop]

Hi, some time ago I was looking at me too trduirle game, I contacted Skybladecloud, but I left when I learned that you could not enlarge the size of the dialogue otherwise it things were happening rather weird.




I saw it some time ago, but it seems that the site in question is closed, a developer has made tools to uncompress / recompress image.bin (thanks to you I believe, tools was made by teges) and edit the dialogue, (the site closed some time ago) but, I downloaded the tools.
If you want, I can upload them.

Sorry for mistakes, I'm french

You have tools to edit the dialogue without the length constraint? Could you reupload them? That would be awesome. Also it's okay (and I'm French too)

EDIT: nevermind re reading your post, it looks like the tools still can't overcome the length limit.

What would we need to do to bypass it? Can't we take some of the NULL space?