ROM Hack Game Center CX : Arino no Chosenjo 2 (New Start?)

[Dann Woolf]

I found a typo in Ace Detective 1 (though I can't remember exactly where, I think during the first or second mystery), "elegant" is mispelled as "elegent".

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

I can edit the font but I don't think I can easily extend the width for that one. I'll see what I can do. If you have a suggestion for how it should look, feel free to throw an image my way.

Dann> thanks. I have a list of adventure game and RPG fixes to make tonight so I'll try to fix that too.

Oh, and for everyone writing me about the adventure game text lines off a character or two left or right in several spots, I know. It's a slow process fixing them all and could take weeks.

 

[Dann Woolf]

Also, this is an extremely minor thing, but there's a sentence without a period in the second mystery in Ace Detective.

Spoiler

When you confront Sasano about his crying.

And an inconsistency: when Evil Game Master Arino gives you the last Ace Detective challenge, he refers to the fourth mystery as "which one", which seems to be an accidental mixup of the "which ROM" and "only one"/"one missing".

And holy shit another typo: When you give Kan your card at the station, a sentence is cut off: "You might have heard from my boss already but I have new business car"

And when you ask Abe about the mysteries there's a sentence missing a ? at the end.

And when you search Arino's desk in the office Arino says "It's mine" without a period.

And there's a couple of typos when you first go to the public bath.

And when you examine the picture of Mt. Fuji Arino says "If you are in the bath this images really fits the mood!".

Spoiler

When you're chasing Nakauichi his name gets mispelled as Nakauchu.

 

[bdr9]

what cart are you using?.

Thanks, I'm using an Acekard 2i on a DS Lite. It always happens in the same places, though, so it seems like an actual anomaly in the rom itself, as opposed to a glitch that would be specific to my specific setup.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Dann> if you want, could you list these all up and send them to me as a message? It will be easier for me to keep track of them all. I am sure you'll find quite a bit. There is an overwhelming amount of text in the game. I'll patch up anything you can catch.

bdr9> oh, I agree there is something going on there. I just don't see it on every setup so I needed to ask. I actually don't have an Acekard myself so ill see if I can replicate it on one of my 4 carts (DSTwo, r4, ace 3ds, m3i zero)

I'm thinking it is somewhere along the lines where that Unicode string (the choices) gets converted back to sjis for display at runtime. In any case I'll see.

Ok, it's Saturday before 9am and my kids are going wild so I probably can't work on this until later tonight anyway. I hope you are all enjoying the game.

 

[MarkDarkness]

I've concluded that Aaron is a robot. Proof: 5 days, 5 updates. I rest my case.

 

[Sora de Eclaune]

I've concluded that Aaron is a robot. Proof: 5 days, 5 updates. I rest my case.

Nah. Aaron's no robot. I am. Chell tries to get me to dress up and act like GLaDOS (a robot) and the place I work at has called me in on the past 3 days I've requested off - including today. Flaky coworkers, apparently. I really need a break, you know? But nope. This year, I am a robot.

 

[MarkDarkness]

Nah. Aaron's no robot. I am. Chell tries to get me to dress up and act like GLaDOS (a robot) and the place I work at has called me in on the past 3 days I've requested off - including today. Flaky coworkers, apparently. I really need a break, you know? But nope. This year, I am a robot.

Then perhaps you are indeed the robot and Aaron is just really, really Japanese. Bushido!

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Okay, I *think* I see what is happening with the garbage at the end of some of the strings. The multiple choice options have to be re-encoded in Unicode and written in reverse (?) back into the lbs files. If it is an odd number of half width characters, it can't convert the last (first) character and it misses the termination character and so it keeps going until the next which is the...length/pointer for the next phrase.

I'll try to get this patched tonight if I can.

I don't see the big deal with strings that don't have termination characters.M¥@". Z3

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

I'm aware that is the font used in the first game, but I am the only one that dislikes the fact the m looks like a n, and my brain always gets a headache? Even the M and W don't look that great.

Surely we could make those letters look better? Simply extend the the width of m by 1 pixel.

"Simply", you say? With NDS hacking on this level there is no such thing as "simple". Okay, I'll blindly make the character 5 characters wide instead of 4 and see what happens...

Nope, system doesn't recognize it. We have exactly 4 pixes across to make a satisfactory "M", "W" and "m", "n".
Any ideas?

In the meantime I was able to replicate that odd "G" case, but the only way to fix it was (oddly) by adding an odd number of spaces and then the file had the corrent end-of-string marker. I may have to hunt each one of these stragglers down by hand and it isn't easy.

I couldn't replicate that same error in the save dialogue at first when continuing my game, so I started from the very beginning and tried to save at the first opportunity and then I got it to show that "G". When I added the spaces the file looked okay in a hex editor and on-screen. It's kind of a dirty hack at the moment but it works. I've asked the original author of that (Nagato) for help but I do have the source I may need to modify in the end.

/me goes back to fixing other reported text misspellings/errors in the Adventure and RPG games.

 

[RadioShadow]

I can edit the font but I don't think I can easily extend the width for that one. I'll see what I can do. If you have a suggestion for how it should look, feel free to throw an image my way.

I see, the font is a fixed width (5 pixels). I thought it was a variable width font. Explains why the font is so squashed. Shame we can't have the font width as 6 pixels.



Should be: Cherry... Cherry tomato?

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

RadioShadow> That's already fixed for the next patch (1.0.6)

And yes, there are different fonts and rules for text depending on where it is used in the game. It is extremely annoying and difficult to manage in-game. Some scenes use two different fonts in the same conversation (whenever something is unlocked, that is a different font than the rest of the conversation), and for dialogue choices given to the user, the question is SJIS but the selectable answers are Unicode. Nightmare much? No wonder past groups took one look at this game and ran away.

Dann> I've fixed about half of the ones you listed but I need more specific dialogue for some of them. I know where in the game you are talking about but the files are not in any order; the text is all over the place and I can't eyeball 1.7MB of text. My only choices are to ask for more specific details on the exact phrase said or I have to play the game from the beginning to see for myself. I know there is a lot to adjust/change in that game anyway, though. I do have 2 other mails worth of corrections to make so maybe some of yours will also be in there.


Oh, about the random garbage characters at the end of some strings, I have found...13 files where "..." is used as part of the selectable answers. For my reference later, they are:

room_00_01
room_01_02b
room_01_05
room_01_06b
room_03_06
room_04_05
room_05_05
room_08_04_b
room_08_06_b
room_09_05
room_09_07
room_10_95
save

I'm going to add an odd number of spaces after the choices with "..." and see what happens. Who knows, but anyway the spaces are blank characters; if there are still garbage characters they might be out of the displayable range, so that might also (temporarily) solve the problem. Again, I may have to break open Nagato's old script if he is too busy to look at it anymore.

If I can get all this done tonight and test to make sure the first few dialogue choices don't have garbage characters in them, I'll release 1.0.6 tonight and keep with my patch-a-day average.

Mark> My username elsewhere is "seishinbyou" which means "mental illness". I substitute sleep with work/hobbies. This is bound to backfire some day since I also have a full time job, wife, 2 kids, grandmother and great grandmother I'm looking after in addition to trying to take care of this and my other music-game related stuffs as well. Oh right, I also have a 3rd book in the works (Unbelievable People : Tales from the Salaryman Side <- Collection of tales of insane people and environments I have directly worked with over the past 16 years in the industry with at most 1 level of separation. Not uncommon experiences, either. The whole "Black Company" stigma looms heavy these days so this may actually be somewhat timely)

 

[MarkDarkness]

RadioShadow> That's already fixed for the next patch (1.0.6)
Mark> My username elsewhere is "seishinbyou" which means "mental illness". I substitute sleep with work/hobbies. This is bound to backfire some day since I also have a full time job, wife, 2 kids, grandmother and great grandmother I'm looking after in addition to trying to take care of this and my other music-game related stuffs as well. Oh right, I also have a 3rd book in the works (Unbelievable People : Tales from the Salaryman Side <- Collection of tales of insane people and environments I have directly worked with over the past 16 years in the industry with at most 1 level of separation. Not uncommon experiences, either. The whole "Black Company" stigma looms heavy these days so this may actually be somewhat timely)

Sounds incredibly healthy, man. Meh, we'll all rest when we're dead, right... and your effort is sure as hell causing an impact, what with 10.000+ accesses to the site in a single week.

But wait, freaking hell, you're the guy on Arcade Mania! I always knew I remembered you from somewhere, but I usually thought "well, must be from some message board".

 

[DickMarlowe]

In theory (nothing is ever 100% sure in science), sleeping is the most suitable time for the body to restore its functions. Chronic lack of sleep may drastically increases the odds of cancer and such, as DNA damages in the cells are not properly looked after. Also, back and other muscular pains may appears more frequently as, again, the organism restores itself mostly during sleep.

Of course, there are other factors which contribute to the cells' health, such as nutrition, genetic and stress level, but experts tend to agree sleep should still be a priority to anybody.

Anyway, great work again Aaron.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Mark> You mean this?

Bwahaha, that was years ago now. Then a few years later I got to look pasty faced on film. Oh well.

Anyway, I made up a version 1.0.6 patch but I'm *not sure* if it fixes the garbage at the end of the multiple choices with "..." in the options. I'll try it out. If you want to try out this *top secret experimental* (not really) version, give it a whirl. It adds a bunch of other fixes, anyway:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/5qbwiaptmmm4724/rgc2eng_v106.rar

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Okay, and I verified the first two spots with garbage characters now...do not show them (I replicated the steps I did to make them appear in the first place, which was to start the game from scratch, save at the first opportunity. Then for the next one I finished the first challenge).

Edit> Confirmed also working on a DSTwo for those same parts, anyway.

There are still 10 other spots to test in the main dialogue, however. 2 more in Wiz-Man, 1 in Demon Returns, 1 in the first Adventure, 1 in GunDuel, 2 in Guadia Quest, 2 in Super Demon Returns, and 1 in the "Further Challenges".

EDIT> Oops, spoke too soon...It looks like it still happens. I may have to hexedit pointers manually...not looking forward to trying that. At least the garbage characters are a bit further away from the main text :/

EDIT> And another part worked :/ I guess if I were to rate this "fix" for the garbage characters in Japanese it would get a big triangle. (Meaning so-so). At least it is better than the previous release, and that has got to count for something, right?

EDIT> The next one "He eats bugs! / He east souls..." is bugged :/ The bugged character is a bit further away from the text again, though. I have a save game right before that point so I'll use that is a base while I try a few things...(/me looks at clock and sees 2:32am)...tomorrow.

Of course, one possible fix (might not work) is just to rewrite all of the dialogue not to use "..." but then again other sentences use a single "." in it anyway so I'm not sure on that.

 

[MarkDarkness]

Mark> You mean this?

Bwahaha, that was years ago now. Then a few years later I got to look pasty faced on film. Oh well.

Anyway, I made up a version 1.0.6 patch but I'm *not sure* if it fixes the garbage at the end of the multiple choices with "..." in the options. I'll try it out. If you want to try out this *top secret experimental* (not really) version, give it a whirl. It adds a bunch of other fixes, anyway:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/5qbwiaptmmm4724/rgc2eng_v106.rar

You must admit that photo is quite hard to forget.

 

[Aaron Chmielowiec]

Okay, I *might* have the garbage character problem beat... "Might" being the operative word. It seems that the single byte "." character, when converted from Unicode to SJIS in-game (as opposed to the rest of the text already in SJIS), the game interprets it as a single byte character, but the "length" indicator in the game thinks it takes up 2 half-width character (1 full byte). For every "." I use, the game tries to fetch one character more at the end, and that is where the problem starts.

So I took the original font and made the double byte "…" character look like 3 full stops.

How does this look?

I think I can finally solve this problem if that works.

 

[MarkDarkness]

Okay, I *might* have the garbage character problem beat... "Might" being the operative word. It seems that the single byte "." character, when converted from Unicode to SJIS in-game (as opposed to the rest of the text already in SJIS), the game interprets it as a single byte character, but the "length" indicator in the game thinks it takes up 2 half-width character (1 full byte). For every "." I use, the game tries to fetch one character more at the end, and that is where the problem starts.

So I took the original font and made the double byte "…" character look like 3 full stops.

How does this look?

I think I can finally solve this problem if that works.

That's it.

 

[Drignor]

Hey folks. First time posting, but I've been following this thread for forever, and I must give a huge thank you to all involved with this project. It's staggering how professional and great this translation works. One small question. Has anyone else had trouble getting the epilogue to run after patching with 1.0.3 or higher? I beat the game using the 1.0.1 patch and now after trying to run the epilogue again after patching with anything 1.0.3 or higher, the screen goes black and nothing happens.

Edit: I'm running it using an AceKard 2i on a DS Lite.