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Hacking Project Documenting an Obscure Japanese Wii Game – And-Kensaku

ViTaLC0D3R

ViTaLC0D3R

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I have been using Claude for the past couple of days this week to document and modify the TR2 game file format for an obscure Japanese-exclusive Wii game called And-Kensaku, or 安藤ケンサク. And-Kensaku is a game related to Googling. There are a few game modes, but the most famous one asks you a question and gives you two answer options, and you win if you choose the most popular Google search. I have been able to do the following: 1. disable signature checks on the files, and 2. allow edits to the Phrases.tr2 file, making it possible to modify the content of the aforementioned game mode. I wanted to go on this little adventure because reverse-engineering file formats is an extremely difficult (at least for me) and time-consuming task, and I wondered how well Claude would do at it. Right now, not everything about this game is documented, but I would like to fully document it and maybe release an English patch. I have provided a link to the project below, if you are interested.

https://github.com/TylerJaacks/AndKensakuResearch
 
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What an obscure game, never heard of that one before, thanks for sharing! Reminds me of the Everybody Votes channel. Do you have any screenshots of the patch so far?
 
jamyaro said:
What an obscure game, never heard of that one before, thanks for sharing! Reminds me of the Everybody Votes channel. Do you have any screenshots of the patch so far?
Click to expand...
Um, well, right now it isn't an English patch, so you have to know Japanese. But all you can do is replace the question and two answers and their hit count for one game mode. I was able to, with the help of Claude, disable the signature check for TR2 files and load new word lists. But that is as far as it has gotten. Also, based on testing, I'm not sure if replacing the Japanese with English will work without some severe modifications, as it seems to expect very specific text encoding (I think). Not sure if I want to continue down the AI route as it's really expensive, and I'm not an expert in PowerPC assembly.
 
I didn't know that the game had a signature check. I tried writing a script a couple years ago to translate the game based on what I could, but it's long gone, and the game crashed so that's why I couldn't load the translations. Since youre using claude, how about you ask it to translate it for you? iirc the file uses a table of offsets that can be used to access the string. This game had WiFi support which iirc could be used to distribute updates. All I could find is there was an update that had added something to do with English support. But I don't think that was saved before the shutdown because of the nature of the download service used in wii games. AltWFC saved all the DS content from it before shutdown, but not Wii. So I guess the only way to find it nowadays is if you get some save with it
 
Larsenv said:
I didn't know that the game had a signature check. I tried writing a script a couple years ago to translate the game based on what I could, but it's long gone, and the game crashed so that's why I couldn't load the translations. Since youre using claude, how about you ask it to translate it for you? iirc the file uses a table of offsets that can be used to access the string
Click to expand...

Well I speak/learning Japanese so I would rather translate it myself. But yeah it does have signature checks. Basically what happens when you load the game for the first time, it copies the word data to the NAND. If that data ever goes missing or fails the signature check it will delete all the word data from the NAND and copy it back from the disc.
 
ViTaLC0D3R said:
Well I speak/learning Japanese so I would rather translate it myself. But yeah it does have signature checks. Basically what happens when you load the game for the first time, it copies the word data to the NAND. If that data ever goes missing or fails the signature check it will delete all the word data from the NAND and copy it back from the disc.
Click to expand...
I actually paid for a month of Claude just recently and I find it to be super powerful for coding but yeah it's very token heavy. I use Antigravity for most of the tasks I do related to coding. I'm curious how you disassembled the DOL? Did you use Ghidra MCP, or some tool like objdump to dump the assembly of the DOL?
Post automatically merged:

Did you use Sonnet, or Opus?
 
Larsenv said:
I actually paid for a month of Claude earlier this month and I find it to be super powerful for coding but yeah it's very token heavy. I use Antigravity for most of the tasks I do related to coding. I'm curious how you disassembled the DOL? Did you use Ghidra MCP, or some tool like objdump to dump the assembly of the DOL?
Click to expand...

No I literally uploaded the tr2 files and told Claude to understand the file format and what the game was about and it was immediately able to create a parser and understood the format. As for the signature checks that took a while for "us" to figure out there was a signature check gave it the dol and it took several attempts and finally cracked it. The biggest limitation was that it would just randomly say I was breaking the ToS. I would then have to export the chat into a new session and explain the context.
 
Sorry you're really fast with responding lol, so my 2 points from my last messages still stand

1. Had you heard about the WiFi functionality?
2. Did you use Sonnet or Opus out of curiosity, and with what strength?
 
Larsenv said:
Sorry you're really fast with responding lol, so my 2 points from my last messages still stand

1. Had you heard about the WiFi functionality?
2. Did you use Sonnet or Opus out of curiosity, and with what strength?
Click to expand...

Opus 4.7 and yes I knew about the Wi-Fi stuff. Originally I thought it was required but it isn't. I haven't got to that portion yet. Mostly just the file format stuff.
 
I don't know, maybe not. But it's probably meant for Japanese text as Im not sure that other games use it. I know it uses it because of a string in the DOL (search for toshiba in all cap)
 
ViTaLC0D3R said:
I have been using Claude for the past couple of days this week to document and modify the TR2 game file format for an obscure Japanese-exclusive Wii game called And-Kensaku, or 安藤ケンサク. And-Kensaku is a game related to Googling. There are a few game modes, but the most famous one asks you a question and gives you two answer options, and you win if you choose the most popular Google search. I have been able to do the following: 1. disable signature checks on the files, and 2. allow edits to the Phrases.tr2 file, making it possible to modify the content of the aforementioned game mode. I wanted to go on this little adventure because reverse-engineering file formats is an extremely difficult (at least for me) and time-consuming task, and I wondered how well Claude would do at it. Right now, not everything about this game is documented, but I would like to fully document it and maybe release an English patch. I have provided a link to the project below, if you are interested.

https://github.com/TylerJaacks/AndKensakuResearch
Click to expand...
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