ROM Hack Negima!? Chou Mahora Taisen Chuu (fantranslation)

[dnniwa485]

Doing some little project this summer so, im going to translate One of the Negima games in DS (as seen on the title of this topic)

:: Negima!? Chou Mahora Taisen Chuu: Checkiin Zenin Shuugou! Yappari Onsen Kichaimashitaa ::

I hope DarthNemesis or someone who has knowledge for ROM hacking to notice this topic and make us a tool to do the job. If one of them did notice this, then i'll start it as soon as they provide the tool.

Edit:

Currently who working on the scene:

azerty1-- hacker
jjjewel -- hacker

dnniwa485 -- translator

suruz -- font contribution

Status:

-- Translating Storyline Script: Finished Phase 1

I need a cheat, for this game. If you know one, please Query here.

 

[suruz]

Doing some little project this summer so, im going to translate One of the Negima games in DS (as seen on the title of this topic)

:: Negima!? Chou Mahora Taisen Chuu: Checkiin Zenin Shuugou! Yappari Onsen Kichaimashitaa ::

I hope DarthNemesis or someone who has knowledge for ROM hacking to notice this topic and make us a tool to do the job. If one of them did notice this, then i'll start it as soon as they provide the tool.

Omg!! I've really wanted to play this game for a long time

Wish I could do more to help, but best of luck with the translation!

EDIT: Just to clarify for anyone reading, this is an actual strategy/fighting game as far as I know, not just a typical text-based anime game. So its well worth translating

 

[azerty1]

i'll take a look at the rom and see if i can make a tool over the weekend.

 

[Kyoton]

When the heck did this come out? This TOTALLY slipped under my radar!

 

[azerty1]

actually, the rom's a tad more...weird...than i had anticipated.
everything is in the .pak file, which has a bunch of lz77 compressed stuff in there. decompress that and you get fpak files and then...yeah...i can't make head nor tail of those...
have you found anything yet?

 

[jjjewel]

actually, the rom's a tad more...weird...than i had anticipated.
everything is in the .pak file, which has a bunch of lz77 compressed stuff in there. decompress that and you get fpak files and then...yeah...i can't make head nor tail of those...
have you found anything yet?

Did you find the text yet? It's compressed within the FPAK. I guess just regular LZ compression because Crystaltile2 can decompress it. (Oh, I love this program.

) It's not difficult to locate the compressed text manually but I'm not sure how you're going to write an extractor/inserter. Anyway, here's the info I got. Maybe it'll help.

In packfile.pak, if you take a look at FPAK stamp at Hex address EDCC. After the magic stamp FPAK you'll see 01 00 which I think indicate that the text is compressed, then 47 00 which is an offset to something, then 98 00 which is an offset where you'll see a bunch of FF FF FF FF, then A8 00 which is an offset to your compressed text. So at EDCC+00A8 + 1= EE75 (Actually A8 will locate the end of the previous set of codes so you gotta add 1 to it) you'll see your compressed text started with 10 (which indicates LZ compression, I guess.) There you can use Crystaltile2 to decompress the text. (Just leave your cursor on the byte with number 10 and go Tools-->LZ77 Extract.)

The text for the beginning dialog is at FPAK at 0131FF48 and the actual compressed text is at 01320100. Anyway, there's a problem with font set. I think they don't use Ascii English alphabet in the game. Here's the screencap where I tried to change the first line of text to ?abcd?????.

My code

Output

The Shift-Jis English alphabets showed up correctly but the ascii English didn't show up at all. So you'll probably have to locate the font and do something with it too.

 

[dnniwa485]

sorry guys.. if i cant help you in hacking... i only have the very basic skill about rom hacking.

Anyway, keep up the good work guys... keep up the hacking so we can begin the translation.

and anyway... how about translating the images ... we need some guys who knowledge on photo editing for translating the images.

 

[suruz]

I think english ASCII characters need to be added to the font before any hacking can be done.

If the font is NFTR then I'll gladly try to insert the characters, but otherwise I have no experience with fonts >_<

Cool that you found the first bit of text though, thats a start ;D

 

[azerty1]

actually, the rom's a tad more...weird...than i had anticipated.
everything is in the .pak file, which has a bunch of lz77 compressed stuff in there. decompress that and you get fpak files and then...yeah...i can't make head nor tail of those...
have you found anything yet?

Did you find the text yet? It's compressed within the FPAK. I guess just regular LZ compression because Crystaltile2 can decompress it. (Oh, I love this program.

) It's not difficult to locate the compressed text manually but I'm not sure how you're going to write an extractor/inserter. Anyway, here's the info I got. Maybe it'll help.

In packfile.pak, if you take a look at FPAK stamp at Hex address EDCC. After the magic stamp FPAK you'll see 01 00 which I think indicate that the text is compressed, then 47 00 which is an offset to something, then 98 00 which is an offset where you'll see a bunch of FF FF FF FF, then A8 00 which is an offset to your compressed text. So at EDCC+00A8 + 1= EE75 (Actually A8 will locate the end of the previous set of codes so you gotta add 1 to it) you'll see your compressed text started with 10 (which indicates LZ compression, I guess.) There you can use Crystaltile2 to decompress the text. (Just leave your cursor on the byte with number 10 and go Tools-->LZ77 Extract.)

The text for the beginning dialog is at FPAK at 0131FF48 and the actual compressed text is at 01320100. Anyway, there's a problem with font set. I think they don't use Ascii English alphabet in the game. Here's the screencap where I tried to change the first line of text to ?abcd?????.

seems like i need to really figure out hwo to work CT2...i tried to use the lz77 compression search function and thought that all the fpak files were decompressed pieces of the big file, but oh well. thanks for figuring out so much stuff so quickly.
there shouldn't be any problem with the tools, since i can just search for the FPAK header and just follow the pointers to the compressed text.

more importantly, suruz is rigth, something with the font needs to be done before we can get anywhere.
I'll start searching around the pakfile.pak for some compressed graphics or anything. Everything has got to be in there, i'm guessing, seeing as there's nothing else in the rom to look at...



ok, there seem to be two types of FPAKs, the ones with 0100 in the header and the ones with 0000 in the header.
those are all the offsets of the FPAKs with 0000. I'm not all that sure what that means, but it could be graphics, i dunno. there's 131 of them compared to 10558 with the 0100.
Could the 0100 just mean that there is compressed information in there rather than specifically text? If so, then we're going to have to find something else that distinguishes graphics from text. I'm hoping that the 0000 might mean something in that respect...
here's a few of them (i've got a list of the offsets of each FPAK if anyone needs it, btw.)

Spoiler

0: 0
19C: 0
15E60: 0
6D2C0: 0
950E4: 0
CD328: 0
FA414: 0
1894F4: 0
2056C8: 0
277F30: 0
2E39FC: 0
351200: 0
3AED65: 0
3B6040: 0
429EB4: 0
48E878: 0
4ED521: 0
4F626C: 0
568E90: 0
5E5BB4: 0
647B04: 0
6AEB50: 0
71C8D4: 0
79FDC4: 0
889830: 0
920A09: 0
9C1CF8: 0
9CC391: 0
9E3A11: 0
9E8E35: 0
A27EEC: 0
A4D625: 0
B4956C: 0
B61174: 0
B612A0: 0
B77E0C: 0
B8E5B0: 0
BA4E04: 0
BCEAB0: 0
BE5514: 0
BFC0D8: 0
C129DC: 0
C3DC88: 0
C5458C: 0
C7DF20: 0
C947CC: 0
CBEEC8: 0
CE8EE4: 0
D00080: 0
D2A3B4: 0
D54D18: 0
D6B514: 0
D95E78: 0
DC159C: 0
DEC5E0: 0
E02E8C: 0
E2D690: 0
E44044: 0
E5AA50: 0
E84AC4: 0
EAF7F0: 0
EDBA14: 0
EF25D8: 0
F1D724: 0
F340D8: 0
F4B00C: 0
FB8FA0: 0
1052614: 0
10817AC: 0
1089F51: 0
108FEC9: 0
1096485: 0
10A0505: 0
10AA7E1: 0
10AF43D: 0
10B4085: 0
10BB9D9: 0
10C0621: 0
10C7F75: 0
10CCBBD: 0
10D4511: 0
10D9159: 0
10E0AAD: 0
10E78F1: 0
10EDC49: 0
10F45A9: 0
10FB725: 0
1102E01: 0
110F708: 0
1191AD4: 0
11A4F40: 0
11D1FD0: 0
11D1FF0: 0
11E4164: 0
1266014: 0
1272C25: 0
127A689: 0
12822AD: 0
1295ED8: 0
1295F30: 0
1297899: 0
12AAA25: 0
12B2FD5: 0
12B6670: 0
131C6E5: 0
131FF48: 0
133DF8C: 0
134FF6C: 0
1378368: 0
13A6C08: 0
13BE504: 0
13D49A0: 0
13F59F8: 0
1415B78: 0
1436044: 0
144CC7C: 0
1475648: 0
148C1B8: 0
14A6CAC: 0
14C26E4: 0
14ECDB4: 0
151F6D8: 0
1538790: 0
154B840: 0
155EDD5: 0
15691F8: 0
161AEB8: 0
162446D: 0
162C024: 0
167C790: 0
16A811D: 0
131

 

[dnniwa485]

guys,... how did you manage to decompress the pak file ... im really bored... and somehow.. my scripts are ready to insert to the game.. atleast..

 

[suruz]

guys,... how did you manage to decompress the pak file ... im really bored... and somehow.. my scripts are ready to insert to the game.. atleast..

Eh!? How many scripts have u done?

Sorry, just curious..

And i also tried to decompress the pak but .. it didnt seem to work. So hope jjjewel can help out?

 

[dnniwa485]

at the point where Evangeline and chachamaru is rescued... (dialogue) status is unknown.. unless the text are fully extracted

from my instinct:

-- Item List (atleast from what i see on item store .. maybe its around 60%)
-- Battle Menu (100%)
-- Character/Student List/Names (100%)
-- Save Dialogue
-- (Error Message?)
-- Casino (maybe? 10%?)
-- Battle Arena (unknown)

 

[suruz]

Cool! It's great that you've already done quite a bit!

I played through about an hour in japanese.. There is a bit of english text in the battle, and small captions, so I could understand most of it.

It's a really fun game

 

[dnniwa485]

btw: do we have to intact the pre-names for this like :

for negi... there are sometimes (mostly i guess) negi-bozu (or we can call him negi brat or something)

and as for setsuna (she always address konoka as ojou-sama -- in english means milady or princess..)

and as of other characters.. are the same (degozuru, ne , dana) or something.. xD.. famous slang word from each characters... (somethings missing if we translate those words to full english)

---------------------

do we need to preserve some words still intact in japanese word (just transliterated). Cause im thinking thats the better way to do it. (preserving the personality for each charaters.)


sorry kinda new on translation scene.. xD

 

[KingVamp]

I know I'm not helping ,but a really wanted to comment on this,

all these japan games I seen either be all girls or all girls and one boy but, this is like 10 times girls then usually

Got to fell sorry for the boy

Good luck !!!

 

[azerty1]

guys,... how did you manage to decompress the pak file ... im really bored... and somehow.. my scripts are ready to insert to the game.. atleast..

Eh!? How many scripts have u done?

Sorry, just curious..

And i also tried to decompress the pak but .. it didnt seem to work. So hope jjjewel can help out?

I'll write something to decompress and divvy up the packfile.pak. just give me a day or two.

 

[suruz]

guys,... how did you manage to decompress the pak file ... im really bored... and somehow.. my scripts are ready to insert to the game.. atleast..

Eh!? How many scripts have u done?

Sorry, just curious..

And i also tried to decompress the pak but .. it didnt seem to work. So hope jjjewel can help out?

I'll write something to decompress and divvy up the packfile.pak. just give me a day or two.

Awesome, thanks!

QUOTE

do we need to preserve some words still intact in japanese word (just transliterated). Cause im thinking thats the better way to do it. (preserving the personality for each charaters.)


sorry kinda new on translation scene.. xD

Hm.. well I actually watched the dubbed version of the anime xD So they didn't keep any of the honourifics or extra things (san, sama, bozu)

But its your choice if you want to keep them.

"Miss Konoka" would be fine for Setsuna to say.. she says it in the dub. And err.. "Negi-bozu" would be fine for Kaede, since there isnt really an english version of it?

Again, your choice!

Oh and I'll be glad to test and proofread anything when its in the game. But need to find the font first...

 

[dnniwa485]

the font needs to be fixed huh..

oh well ill take my choice to keep those preference of mine (manga pride) .. in fact i didnt watch the animations yet(but planned to).

 

[suruz]

the font needs to be fixed huh..

oh well ill take my choice to keep those preference of mine (manga pride) .. in fact i didnt watch the animations yet(but planned to).

Yeah this game is based on the second anime remake called Negima!? (with the !? at the end)

That's why the game has the Black Rose Baron and the frog and cat characters xD

Its actually a good series if you watch till the end.

Sorry to get off-topic but it may help if you have to translate the Baron's dialogue or something

 

[azerty1]

just realized that CT2 has a bulk decompression function that works fine. i don't need to do anything for that...
the only question is...there are more than ten thousand files in the packfile.pak. What are we supposed to do with them?