ROM Hack Disgaea Undub

[Johnboy]

Can't you disable the voices by turning MSG Volume to Zero?

 

[MoonCHildus]

Danger: informational wall of text *WILL* crit you for 18570 hit points.

As was noted above the files that must be replaced from the japanese version are:

voice.dat
voice.dat.tbl
msgvo.dat
msgvo.dat.tbl

I initially tried to do it using dslazy. I can now confirm that this solution may work on some cards and not on some others. I own an R4 with 1.18. What I have done is use dslazy, find the japanese rom and press unpack. When unpacking finished I renamed my NDS_UNPACK directory to japanese_NDS_UNPACK. Then I deleted the file "current.nds" from the dslazy folder. I then opened up the american rom, and clicked unpack. After this happened I navigated inside the japanese_NDS_UNPACK folder and into the "data" subdirectory I picked up the files above and copied them in the respective data directory inside NDS_UNPACK.
Afterwards I pressed pack and saved the new .nds file.
The result was a no$gba compatible rom but somehow did not work on some cards (firmware perhaps? can't tell really).

Then I fired up dsbuff. Google it, you ll find it. You ll come up with one complete .exe file you can use. This utility behaves *EXACTLY* like dslazy with one exception. It saves everything in the C:\dsbuff directory. If you follow the exact same procedure (1. open up jap rom, unpack it, rename the unpack directory, 2. delete current.nds, 3. open up american rom and unpack it, 4. copy files from jap to american unpack directory 5. pack rom) you should come up with something useful.

It works perfect on my R4, I will probably check if it works on my Supercard (nds lite slot) and report more. But the procedure must be the same for everyone, and I dont believe it will have any difference depending on the program you use.

Can anyone who has been succesful be kind enough to post their card combo? If you failed, can you give more details where did you encounter the problem? because the solution is like piss-easy to perform and I believe these instructions are more or less very simple...

Thanx in advance to all the posters above.

P.S. I believe dsbuff may require the .NET runtime to run, I can't tell for sure since I have all .NETs in my machine, but, meh, who knows.

P.S. (2) so far I have played enough to reach the point where the gatekeeper opens up your portal to Vyers castle. Everything looks cool.

P.S. (3) The reasoning behind undubing this is that the japanese voice actors in general are FAR MORE PROFESSIONAL than their american counterparts, people there actually study voice acting :-) And after all, this is an anime-like game, you expect to listen to japanese voice acting, right? ;-) Plus the voice actors for disgaea are quite legendary in the field, the main character being voiced by the girl (!!!) who does Ogioue in Genshigen anime series, among other credits.

P.S (4) soz for da long post, but...

 

[Chrono_Tata]

How much voice acting is there in the DS version? I've been playing Chapter 1 for a bit and the only voice acting outside battles is from the Intro scene. It's been a while since I played the PSP version but I'm pretty sure there were more voice acting.

Or is my memory playing tricks?

 

[Zarcon]

How much voice acting is there in the DS version? I've been playing Chapter 1 for a bit and the only voice acting outside battles is from the Intro scene. It's been a while since I played the PSP version but I'm pretty sure there were more voice acting.

Or is my memory playing tricks?

I'm fairly positive that you're correct, there's more VA work in the PSP version.
Which kind of bugs me since the game is only 64MB, they really had no reason not to put in all the voice acting other than 64MB carts probably being cheaper to manufacture.

 

[MoonCHildus]

How much voice acting is there in the DS version? I've been playing Chapter 1 for a bit and the only voice acting outside battles is from the Intro scene. It's been a while since I played the PSP version but I'm pretty sure there were more voice acting.

Or is my memory playing tricks?

No it doesnt play tricks. They have removed the speech from all the intermediate places. No talking during e.g. the point where Etna talks to you about the prinny squad.

Yeah I know, 35 mbytes of data, its like a darn cheat they play on the gamers, they could have included the double amount of talk if they wanted imho, the voice acting is only around 11 mbytes, damn shame. Really unfair treatment to this epic game - especially since the psp version had full speech for almost *every* cutscene, and it included both dubs in the first place. Mind you this is not a translator's problem, the initial japanese rom has only that speech covered in the first place.
Makes you wonder at how professional a company like e.g. Marvelous is, since Luminous Arc has A LOT of speech, and at least it compensates for the 128 mbytes it takes, trimmed version being around 112 mbytes, which makes it at least a *full* rom and not just a bloated one. Aaaaaanyways... gives more incentives to wait for Luminous Arc 2

P.S. I ve finished the PSP version like 3 weeks ago so I have it kinda fresh on my head... makes the comparison unfair...

 

[Zagger]

MoonCHildus i used dslazy and i'm using an r4 1.18, works perfect.
Yeah japanese VA for this game is pretty good

it has Wakamoto for the narrator :> how can an american dub top that?

 

[AXYPB]

Had they kept the original voices for the Prinnies I wouldn't go through the trouble of doing this myself.

Yeah japanese VA for this game is pretty good

it has Wakamoto for the narrator :> how can an american dub top that?

I would have preferred characters narrating the next chapter previews myself. Small price to pay.

 

[Trygle12]

Unfortunately, I am unable to run the undubbed version on my AceKard 2 with AKAIO firmware.

I did everything exactly as stated, but it loads and just stays on the black screens.... forever. @_@

 

[jophilo]

Unfortunately, I am unable to run the undubbed version on my AceKard 2 with AKAIO firmware.

I did everything exactly as stated, but it loads and just stays on the black screens.... forever. @_@

Welcome my friend, welcome

!! The same for me and my acekard 2. Except i'm not using the akaio but the official (4.08...or something like that).

 

[seedvt]

MoonCHildus's method works perfectly. Thanks!

Working on R4DS 1.18, SuperCard DS One v3.0 SP4.

 

[jophilo]

I tried MoonCHildus's method whit my acekard2 and it still don't work.....

!

 

[MoonCHildus]

Hm. An interesting theory would be to check out the button right next to the Filename input box in the DSBUFF's interface. It says "opt." on it and from what I ve come to understand it patches with DLDI the rom (????). Can someone toy a bit with it and give back some info?
Thanx in advance.

 

[Trygle12]

Nope, DLDI tends to not work on commercial NDS roms.

 

[RevolutionE]

MoonCHildus' method works great on M3REAL so far...

 

[Ruri]

One other note: While I haven't gotten up to it in the DS version yet, I recall that the PS2 version had a voiced song at one point. If they kept that in the DS version it is almost certainly represented by the following two files:

- song.dat
- song.dat.tbl

So I recommend replacing those, too (there's no harm in it, since if they refer to something else then they'll just be the same in both versions anyway.) After all, dubbed lyrics tend to be worse than other dubbed voices, since they have to dub it to match music that was written with the other language's lyrics in mind...

Of course, if someone who didn't change those files has gotten up to that part, they can tell me whether I'm wrong or not (it's pretty far in, though.)

 

[DarthNemesis]

One other note: While I haven't gotten up to it in the DS version yet, I recall that the PSX version had a voiced song at one point.

Akai Tsuki?

 

[Tenkaichi]

Hooray MoonCHildus! It seems to have worked with your method and DSbuff, it loads and the game runs with Japanese voices.

Using an M3Simply, latest firmware v1.14.

 

[Fairytale]

One other note: While I haven't gotten up to it in the DS version yet, I recall that the PSX version had a voiced song at one point.

Akai Tsuki?

I think she meant Within Invasion, the song it plays when fighting Baal. I have the song as mp3 as well ( unoffical disgaea ost )

 

[Kerian]

One other note: While I haven't gotten up to it in the DS version yet, I recall that the PS2 version had a voiced song at one point. If they kept that in the DS version it is almost certainly represented by the following two files:

- song.dat
- song.dat.tbl

So I recommend replacing those, too (there's no harm in it, since if they refer to something else then they'll just be the same in both versions anyway.) After all, dubbed lyrics tend to be worse than other dubbed voices, since they have to dub it to match music that was written with the other language's lyrics in mind...

Of course, if someone who didn't change those files has gotten up to that part, they can tell me whether I'm wrong or not (it's pretty far in, though.)

Filesize is exactly the same for both song dat and dat.tbl in the US and Jap version. I think they are the same

Edit: Undubbed intro skips the text too fast causing the Japanese Voice Acting to be cut in the middle of the sentence. No big deal though.

 

[War]

This doesn't change the game ID, does it? Someone in narin's cheat thread said that the Disgaea DS codes weren't working, and that it was cause he used this method to undub it.