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Gaming Makai Kingdom Portable

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No major updates... I am trying to get a KS4 compression working in a program so I can compress and files I change in the START.KS4 file format which has most of the game's story, script, NPC, items, skills and spells in it. It will be a while before I get this done. getting LZS compressor working for LPR was one of the major hurdles I had for that game and KS4 will be a challenge. I have a decoder working which helps. I will not start inserting Ps2 text until I can package the modified files back into an ISO and run it on a PSP.
 
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There already is a menu patch for this game and posted on this very board. It is not 100% menus but its enough to play the battles.
 
I have no plans to start until I solve this KS4 format issue. The menu translation should be pretty quick since most of the menu items are in eboot.bin in SHUFT-JIS format.
 
ChepChep, I think it is really cool how you are trying some stuff out with this game even while you're working on another. I'm looking forward to playing La Pucelle, as well, since I never got to play that one originally, either. Thanks for the awesome work!
 
Never under estimate what you think will be a simple task on the PSP. It will turn out to be a real pain. I figured that creating a packing script for DATA.dat that has 3808 files (all the files for the game) including the START.KS4 would be trivial since the unpack was simple. Boy was I wrong. I cannot seem to get the repacked DATA.dat file to even run on the emulator. The first thing I noticed is that every file in DATA.DAT has been padded with 00 to make sure every file length is a multiple of 256.

So I have it padding correctly but I am ordering the files in alphanumeric order whereas the original file is in some random order. I am really starting to think there may be some dependence of the location of the file in DATA.dat or some sort of checksum someplace else. I am also always getting a small file than the original but I am only missing some zero padding since I have the files in DATA.DAT in a different order. It is going to take some time to figure out and its a real pain since the DATA.dat file is so large 300+ MB.
 
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damn! never thought a game so similar to la pucelle would be so different inside T_T
 
Yea it is so true... I am completely stumped right now.

I have created two different versions of the pack/unpack and neither worked once they are packed back up. I have confirmed that I can get the exact same number of bytes comparing the original to the version created with the script. The only difference is the order of files in the package. I have packaged them alphanumeric whereas NIS has some weird order that makes no sense. I am concerned that there might be another file that is hard coding where a file is being looked for inside the DATA.dat.

Anyone seen anything like this?

Here is my code:
(PKP Code)

-ChepChep
 
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I got some good news...

I figured out a way to get this DATA.DAT packaging to work. Its a real pain but it is looking like 99% of the translation time will be in START.KS4 file inside the DATA.DAT file. So to get everything repackaged... I unpacked everything and then modified START.KS4 (added 256 bytes of 00) and then inserted it back into the original DATA.DAT package and and adjusted the table to reflect the new filesize of START.KS4. Amazingly it works and I can run the packaged ISO in an emulator. This should work for any modified version of START.KS4.

Here are the scripts I used:
DATA_DAT_Unpack_2.py: (Download)
DATA_DAT_Pack_v3.py: (Download)

Now I can finally get back to working on that KS4 format. It always amazes me the tangents that can be taken on a project like this. Little things always take so much longer than expected.

-ChepChep
 
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So I got some more good news on the KS4 file format compression.

I was able to re- compress the START.dat file into START.KS4 and insert it back into the DATA.DAT and run the PKP iso on the emulator and PSP. It is a big milestone since I may start working on the translation since I can get the major files inserted into the game.

I was able to use the uncompressed trip for KS4 and it worked amazingly. I tried it on LPR LZS format but it would not work there.

How I got KS4 compression working was I used the code "0X7F" that annotates that 127 uncompressed characters will follow and then wrote 127 bytes and then repeated until the end of the file. So I ran this over the START.DAT file and was able to insert it into DATA.DAT.

The code can be found here:
KS4_Compress_v2.py: (Download)

I am getting excited since there is not much stopping me from working on this game now. I will probably start with the eboot.bin first with all the menus.

-ChepChep
 
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It took me 6-8 months to get LPR base story playable.... This game will time as well.

xhai,

I am learning "old" tricks and discovering new tricks through LPR and PKP. It amazes me that more people are not working on PSP game since so far it has not been to bad... challenging though...
 
ChepChep said:
It took me 6-8 months to get LPR base story playable.... This game will time as well.

xhai,

I am learning "old" tricks and discovering new tricks through LPR and PKP. It amazes me that more people are not working on PSP game since so far it has not been to bad... challenging though...
Click to expand...

You should drag all your programmer peeps into PSP scene! :P
 
Oh dang, Chep, you're gonna handle Makai (Phantom) Kingdom Portable, too!? You're the best, man. I look forward to seeing this turn out!
 
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