ROM Hack Hayate no Gotoku DS - Translation help

suruz · Nov 15, 2009

I'm trying to figure out how to find the text in this game:
Hayate no Gotoku! Boku ga Romeo de Romeo ga Boku de
(Hayate the Combat Butler! I am Romeo and Romeo is I)

Basically, I didn't want to just request a game translation and hope that someone would pick it up.. Instead, I wanted to try and actively pursue a translation of the game. Any help with the following would be appreciated since I'm a noob when it comes to rom hacking.. I realise the game might not be everyone's cup of tea but I'm asking for help regardless.

I unpacked the rom using dsbuff, and got a variety of NFP files.. which I have no idea what to do with. I've tried googling the filetype a LOT.. after doing some research I figured out it's usually used to pack ps1/2 games :wtf:

I think hardly any ds games use it. I've read that it's possible to change the text wholely using a hex editor (i know what hex is but it wouldn't be the most efficient method..)

EV.NFP
SPC.NFP
Anyway, if ANYONE could try and help me extract the text from the game.. or something to that effect, it would be much appreciated.
The game seems to be a linear text-based game, and I have a couple friends who would be willing to do the translation (one of them is a fan of the manga), so that aspect isn't a problem. I would just love if someone could crack this filetype for me :/

FAST6191 · Nov 15, 2009

Wow, an early game that did not use the SDAT format straight up..... this is rare.

Anyhow as you suspect it is a large custom file format on top of the nitro rom file system, not unheard of but notable none the less.

Jumping right in, fairly tough one although a quick search says this is not the first time it has been used on the DS:
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=119880

It might be better to try and hit up someone from that thread as they are inevitably going to be further than I will get with 20 minutes of poking around.

Good news: basic header matches that thread as far as I can see.
Bad news: you have lots of compression to deal with (standard BIOS compressions located in a quick scan of the file- crystaltile 2 handles it well enough and poking around the binary I even see SWI calls to it all), I am looking at a nice 8 bit per pixel GBA format image though. Please forgive the awful JPG compression, I was too lazy to do it in anything other than paint.

I repeated it a few times and found quite a bit of stuff in various image formats. Some possibly interesting news on that front, I pulled a file from on the chr nfp file, uncompressed it and fed it into my tile editor. It was standard 8bpp tiles (looked like a character- think phoenix wright sort of thing: http://swizard.files.wordpress.com/2008/03...e-maskless.png) but it looked like it would have had a layout file with it.

suruz · Nov 15, 2009

FAST6191 said:
Wow, an early game that did not use the SDAT format straight up..... this is rare.

Anyhow as you suspect it is a large custom file format on top of the nitro rom file system, not unheard of but notable none the less.

Jumping right in, fairly tough one although a quick search says this is not the first time it has been used on the DS:
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=119880

It might be better to try and hit up someone from that thread as they are inevitably going to be further than I will get with 20 minutes of poking around.

Good news: basic header matches that thread as far as I can see.
Bad news: you have lots of compression to deal with (standard BIOS compressions located in a quick scan of the file- crystaltile 2 handles it well enough and poking around the binary I even see SWI calls to it all), I am looking at a nice 8 bit per pixel GBA format image though. Please forgive the awful JPG compression, I was too lazy to do it in anything other than paint.

I repeated it a few times and found quite a bit of stuff in various image formats. Some possibly interesting news on that front, I pulled a file from on the chr nfp file, uncompressed it and fed it into my tile editor. It was standard 8bpp tiles (looked like a character- think phoenix wright sort of thing: http://swizard.files.wordpress.com/2008/03...e-maskless.png) but it looked like it would have had a layout file with it.

First of all, thanks a lot for replying. Its good to know the format isn't unheard of, so theres a chance of being able to crack it.

And I get now that chr.nfp is the portion that contains the character portraits.

I tried playing the game though (=pressed A repeatedly) and the game is mostly text based, and there's very few graphics that need to be changed. The options menu is half in english already too, so I just need a text extractor (yeah that's definitely asking a lot, but I have no experience with hacking, just want to edit the text.. >

Out of curiosity, did u find which file contains the text, or is it too heavily compressed to know?

I'll try asking psycoblaster whether he's made any progress with the other game.. Thanks a lot for the help

psycoblaster · Nov 19, 2009

My advice, but you might want some help with the compression before anything else...
To me, it looks like FAST can help you with that, unless he is busy with his own work.
Crystaltile doesn't work on my computer, and I suck at compressions, too.
Looks like the pointer table part of the newer format is compressed or something. If I know how to decompress that, then building an extractor won't be too hard.

ROM Hack Hayate no Gotoku DS - Translation help

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