ROM Hack Could I get some help with poking around in Dawn of Sorrow?

[Exam]

Sorry, wasn't sure how to title this.

Dawn of Sorrow is generally assumed to have Japanese-only voice work. This isn't strictly true. Many of the voice clips were removed in non-Japanese versions; basically, any line that is clear Japanese was gutted. The end result is that some characters seem to only say one thing ever, which is especially noticeable during things like the Dario fights.

Clearly, there is a need for a voice restoration, but I don't know the best way to go about it, or even what tools to use. Does anyone have more experience with undub-type projects and/or with Dawn of Sorrow specifically? At the moment I'm playing the Japanese version and going by a script dump. It's... not ideal.

Somewhat off-topic, but I also wanted to know if this game has any regional differences, if anyone happens to know. Portrait of Ruin had various bugfixes in different versions of the game, to the point that the European version is recommended over the American version. I know the Japanese Dawn of Sorrow has an update, but no other versions do.

 

[FAST6191]

Your basic undub of a DS game is

Pull apart region you want the audio from (usually Japanese) and find the audio. The overwhelming majority of DS games use SDAT (so much so I have a list of exceptions https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-various-audio-formats-of-the-ds.305167/ )

Pull apart the region you want to overwrite. Find its audio (typically in the same format/layout as the one you found the original in). Overwrite it, rebuild if you need to. Don't even need to know how the audio formats work, just how to replace a file (for which there are loads of tools to pull ROMs apart, replacing in place or without disturbing other files can be a bit more tricky, especially if the replacement file is larger)

Now a while back I made a cheat for portrait of ruin ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/castlevania-portrait-of-ruin-us-undub-cheat.367014/ ) as it has Japanese as a hidden option if using a menu combo. Here it still had all the Japanese audio in the game (thousands of lines/samples in the end) but checks every time it calls the audio and plays the relevant sample. This meant I could just trip a flag in the game with a cheat. Said thousands of lines/samples that would all need to be identified (they are not nicely named) and remapped is why I went for the flag option, a partial undub would require you fiddling with nameless files though.
What happened for this game I don't know. Hopefully they just ran the Japanese audio through a fuzzy filter to have it sound Japanese but not be too intelligible because that is what the kids like (or possibly dodge out of region fees and censorship issues). This would mean the simple undub fixes it.
However there are some games that lose things, I first met it with megaman zx, which also used some non SDAT stuff as well.

As far as regional differences for bugfixes, difficulty or whatever then no idea. https://tcrf.net/Castlevania:_Dawn_of_Sorrow#Regional_Differences reckons some audio was dropped (whether silenced or calls removed entirely is unknown at this point, if replaced with silence then an undub of the simple replacement variety should hopefully bring it back) and the option to skip cutscenes during first play through.

If however it turns out you are fiddling with samples then... actually it is not the worst thing. If it is SDAT then chances are any voice samples will be in SWAV (SDAT's format for simple short sound clips, 5-10 seconds tending to be the upper limit) which are either in plain SWAV format or in one or more massive SWAR (SWAV Archives) archives.
In any case you should be spared the fun and games with volume, looping, associated sample/instrument banks and whatever else those playing with SSEQ (the sequenced, think midi, format most music on the DS comes as). It is unlikely you will be dealing with STRM audio here which is what it uses for long form wave audio, however if you are then it should still be a simple file level stuff without worries about accessory files and settings all over the header and file itself.

If it is going to be a nightmare to undub as things got dropped and trying to pry open the code to add new calls back in is going to be no fun then some do opt to backport the script to the Japanese version. This could be a matter of file replacement as well but text encoding differences, font differences and maybe dropped lines from the script or different ordering can make this easier said than done, though still within the realm of standard text hack rather than fiddling with game code to get it to play audio clips it would not otherwise have.

 

[lookaround]

Sorry for replying to an old topic but this is literally the only mention I could find on the internet regarding this. I cannot find a single Dawn of Sorrow hack that addresses this. Did you end up finding out any more info on the topic?

 

[FAST6191]

I only have what I wrote there. The principles however are still going to be the same.