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Hacking How I decode this *.e files ? (Danball Senki BOOST)

MilsamFroste

MilsamFroste

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I was playing with the tools of the abandoned Danball Senki Boost English Patch and looks like that the files that contain the Story Dialogues but are in this strange .e format that i don´t know how to decode these. I tried to read the files with a Hex Editor (exactly, HxD) and i can notice that this files are the ones that make the entire story event but i can´t find the text of the dialogues even if in the files i can find a command like ¨Release all Text¨ or ¨Text End¨
i'm not a programmer or nothing like that (I don't event understand how the Hex Editor exactly works). I'm just playing with the game archives for fun and to learn a bit of this. But if someone can please help me with this i will be really grateful.
I will attach to this pos (if i can) some of these files so if you want to look these.
Thanks for your time.
 

Attachments

MilsamFroste said:
I was playing with the tools of the abandoned Danball Senki Boost English Patch and looks like that the files that contain the Story Dialogues but are in this strange .e format that i don´t know how to decode these. I tried to read the files with a Hex Editor (exactly, HxD) and i can notice that this files are the ones that make the entire story event but i can´t find the text of the dialogues even if in the files i can find a command like ¨Release all Text¨ or ¨Text End¨
i'm not a programmer or nothing like that (I don't event understand how the Hex Editor exactly works). I'm just playing with the game archives for fun and to learn a bit of this. But if someone can please help me with this i will be really grateful.
I will attach to this pos (if i can) some of these files so if you want to look these.
Thanks for your time.
Click to expand...
is this what you looking for
 

Attachments

  • Capture.JPG
    Capture.JPG
    107.5 KB · Views: 5
xhai said:
is this what you looking for
Click to expand...
how did you manage to get it decoded? i tried hex editor with shif-jis support but can't see any normal text.

1784212738495.png

Post automatically merged:

UPD: I checked those .e files in 3ds version of the game. Its dialogs are accessible via hex editor.

1784235770101.png


I changed a couple of letters and opened the game. Dialog that I edited didn't start and just stuck on black screen.
So I suppose that we also need a way to encode these .e files properly.
 
Last edited by Cherryoin,
_Metamo_ConnectBattle_FirstAlert.e
0x088f0 ＣＦシステムメッセージ

chagenge encoding to utf-16le
 
xhai said:
chagenge encoding to utf-16le
Click to expand...
thank you!! you are a lifesaver :)

1784295331037.png
1784295341005.png


Now dialogs are editable too.
Post automatically merged:

Now we have all tools and possibilities to edit most of Danball Senki resources (music, videos, textures, fonts, texts and dialogues) which is more than enough to translate the game.

The only thing we need is time and effort for that XD
 
Cherryoin said:
thank you!! you are a lifesaver :)

View attachment 582518View attachment 582519

Now dialogs are editable too.
Post automatically merged:

Now we have all tools and possibilities to edit most of Danball Senki resources (music, videos, textures, fonts, texts and dialogues) which is more than enough to translate the game.

The only thing we need is time and effort for that XD
Click to expand...

you still need to figure how to fix font width "vfw", also you need to understand how pointer works. utf6 uses two byes you'll run of out space for translation.
 
xhai said:
you still need to figure how to fix font width "vfw", also you need to understand how pointer works. utf6 uses two byes you'll run of out space for translation.
Click to expand...
I actually did not expect to someone anwsering my post. And is one of the guys that were present in the OG translation post in 2012!

I still don't understand how this thing works but, if we found the way to manually edit the Pointers (for what i know these works like "signals" to Say the Game were the dialogue should end) and width "vfw" we Will able to do a rough translation of the dialogues, right ?
Also, in this case, we Will need to build a program to easily decode and encode this archíves with the changes ? Because editing through Hex Editor is not very comfy and is pretty sensible to everything (because that limits a Lot of how characters You can put in any dialogue box)
 
MilsamFroste said:
I actually did not expect to someone anwsering my post. And is one of the guys that were present in the OG translation post in 2012!

I still don't understand how this thing works but, if we found the way to manually edit the Pointers (for what i know these works like "signals" to Say the Game were the dialogue should end) and width "vfw" we Will able to do a rough translation of the dialogues, right ?
Also, in this case, we Will need to build a program to easily decode and encode this archíves with the changes ? Because editing through Hex Editor is not very comfy and is pretty sensible to everything (because that limits a Lot of how characters You can put in any dialogue box)
Click to expand...
Imo, hex editors are already convenient enough. You can even add new text in the middle of the file without overwriting data next to it.
But problem of characters limit still persists. Even if I add a couple of new bytes in the file, game crashes.
Post automatically merged:

xhai said:
you still need to figure how to fix font width "vfw", also you need to understand how pointer works. utf6 uses two byes you'll run of out space for translation.
Click to expand...
as for the font width, I have an idea. There is Madoka Magica Portable English patch font. As you can see, it has fixed width and support of Spanish characters. I tested it a couple of days ago and it's completely compatible with Danball Senki (it even looks almost same). So we can use it as reference to draw custom font if needed.
 
Last edited by Cherryoin,
Cherryoin said:
Imo, hex editors are already convenient enough. You can even add new text in the middle of the file without overwriting data next to it.
But problem of characters limit still persists. Even if I add a couple of new bytes in the file, game crashes.
Post automatically merged:


as for the font width, I have an idea. There is Madoka Magica Portable English patch font. As you can see, it has fixed width and support of Spanish characters. I tested it a couple of days ago and it's completely compatible with Danball Senki (it even looks almost same). So we can use it as reference to draw custom font if needed.
Click to expand...
Spanish characters ? All right, you caught my interest with that (My native language is Spanish, so being able to use Spanish characters is great XD.)
But, how exactly we put the Madoka Mágica Portable Font in this Game ?. Also, what do you mean to use it as reference to make a custom font ? (I was not joking when I say that i don't know nothing about Rom Hacking. I'm using Danball Senki Boost how a way to learn about this and see if we can continue what the original Team left. Even if the patch cames out around 2050 lol)
 
Cherryoin said:
Imo, hex editors are already convenient enough. You can even add new text in the middle of the file without overwriting data next to it.
But problem of characters limit still persists. Even if I add a couple of new bytes in the file, game crashes.
Post automatically merged:


as for the font width, I have an idea. There is Madoka Magica Portable English patch font. As you can see, it has fixed width and support of Spanish characters. I tested it a couple of days ago and it's completely compatible with Danball Senki (it even looks almost same). So we can use it as reference to draw custom font if needed.
Click to expand...
did you swap the libfont,prx?.. if its compatible then it great... need to start the work using that custom font
 
xhai said:
did you swap the libfont,prx?.. if its compatible then it great... need to start the work using that custom font
Click to expand...
Here are the tools that you asked me for.
Sorry to pass them for here, but I can't post URL i'm direct message yet. So i will pass the Zip with the tools here (which is better if someone want to try to do something here. After all, all the tools used are normal programs and You can found easily in the web and nothing of them are made or modified by me).
https://www.mediafire.com/file/u8uhohhsyixngar/Danball+Tools+(improvised).zip/file
 
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MilsamFroste said:
But, how exactly we put the Madoka Mágica Portable Font in this Game ?.
Click to expand...
Replace it in game's files using UMDgen. Font file is stored in PSP_GAME/USRDIR/09_Texture folder of game's ROM.
Post automatically merged:

MilsamFroste said:
Here are the tools that you asked me for.
Sorry to pass them for here, but I can't post URL i'm direct message yet. So i will pass the Zip with the tools here (which is better if someone want to try to do something here. After all, all the tools used are normal programs and You can found easily in the web and nothing of them are made or modified by me).
https://www.mediafire.com/file/u8uhohhsyixngar/Danball+Tools+(improvised).zip/file
Click to expand...
I'll add some tools here too. This is tool I found on this github repo. It lets you convert .ttf fonts into .fnt fonts. Though it has different from Danball Senki format.
So, as workaround, I made custom script called senki.py (included in zip file that I attached). It doesn't encode font into .fnt and just leaves it as text file. So we can just copy and paste those glyphs into our font for the game.

We can fully automatize this process when we figure out how Danball Senki font works. I figured out only a couple of numbers yet.
For example, letter A in Danball Senki has this header:
0041 A027120 0 013012738 811 28 763 0 0 763 796 0 0 0
A unicode number and letter itself (for visual reference probableidk, probably a font atlas pageGlyph indexGlyph actual width in pixelsidkGlyph actual height in pixelsidkY-offset of the letter. I figured that out experimentally lolidk about all these numbers too

The biggest numbers here (such as 738, 811 etc etc) are probably font atlas coordinates and sizes. So that's probably our way to edit font width if needed.
 

Attachments

Last edited by Cherryoin,
  • Like
Reactions: xhai
Cherryoin said:
how did you manage to get it decoded? i tried hex editor with shif-jis support but can't see any normal text.

View attachment 582398
Post automatically merged:

UPD: I checked those .e files in 3ds version of the game. Its dialogs are accessible via hex editor.

View attachment 582446

I changed a couple of letters and opened the game. Dialog that I edited didn't start and just stuck on black screen.
So I suppose that we also need a way to encode these .e files properly.
Click to expand...
Now that i wonder, which is the archive with the first dialogues of the Game ? (The cutscene were Ban comes late to the shop). I tried for a while but i don't found where is supposed to be, Even using the 3DS Version to try to find it but i wasn't able XD
Post automatically merged:

Cherryoin said:
Replace it in game's files using UMDgen. Font file is stored in PSP_GAME/USRDIR/09_Texture folder of game's ROM.
Post automatically merged:


I'll add some tools here too. This is tool I found on this github repo. It lets you convert .ttf fonts into .fnt fonts. Though it has different from Danball Senki format.
So, as workaround, I made custom script called senki.py (included in zip file that I attached). It doesn't encode font into .fnt and just leaves it as text file. So we can just copy and paste those glyphs into our font for the game.

We can fully automatize this process when we figure out how Danball Senki font works. I figured out only a couple of numbers yet.
For example, letter A in Danball Senki has this header:
[TABLE=full]
[TR]
[th width="9.8782%"]0041 A[/th][th width="5.4156%"]0[/th][th width="11.2881%"]27[/th][th width="7.141%"]12[/th][th width="7.4891%"]0 0 0[/th][th width="7.8547%"]13[/th][th width="5.4112%"]0[/th][th width="7.4521%"]12[/th][th width="35.2372%"]738 811 28 763 0 0 763 796 0 0 0[/th]
[/TR]
[TR]
[td width="9.8782%"]A unicode number and letter itself (for visual reference probable[/td][td width="5.4156%"]idk, probably a font atlas page[/td][td width="11.2881%"]Glyph index[/td][td width="7.141%"]Glyph actual width in pixels[/td][td width="7.4891%"]idk[/td][td width="7.8547%"]Glyph actual height in pixels[/td][td width="5.4112%"]idk[/td][td width="7.4521%"]Y-offset of the letter. I figured that out experimentally lol[/td][td width="35.2372%"]idk about all these numbers too[/td]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

The biggest numbers here (such as 738, 811 etc etc) are probably font atlas coordinates and sizes. So that's probably our way to edit font width if needed.
Click to expand...
That's great!...
Honestly, i found funny how I'm the only one that isn't doing anything yet 😅. When I try to do something I pass more time trying to figure out what i'm doing in first place.
I think that i'm gonna try do something like a Excel file to store the dialogues that we found with his respective archive (how the leaked script of Sonic 2006 does) using the 3DS Version as base to see if i Even able to do something right
 
MilsamFroste said:
Now that i wonder, which is the archive with the first dialogues of the Game ? (The cutscene were Ban comes late to the shop). I tried for a while but i don't found where is supposed to be, Even using the 3DS Version to try to find it but i wasn't able XD
Post automatically merged:


That's great!...
Honestly, i found funny how I'm the only one that isn't doing anything yet 😅. When I try to do something I pass more time trying to figure out what i'm doing in first place.
I think that i'm gonna try do something like a Excel file to store the dialogues that we found with his respective archive (how the leaked script of Sonic 2006 does) using the 3DS Version as base to see if i Even able to do something right
Click to expand...
yes you need to make a spread sheet for the dialogue and entire script for easy editing and translation..
Post automatically merged:

both of you did a lot of research and work on tools. maybe the translation should start from the scratch, cause if there are some errors its easy to debug.
 
Last edited by xhai,

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