ROM Hack Neon Genesis Evangelion: Ayanami Raising Project DS

[xPearse]

Im trying to find the file with the fonts so I can try and build a table for a translation I want to do eventually, I tried using CrystalTile 2 to open the files and try to spot the font but have had no luck. It comes up all weird looking, the file types overall are bin, SCD and a few others. Can you guys help me out here, feeling like bashing my head off the nearest wall at this rate.

Tried using windhex to relative search and find an offset and build a table off that but all the results I edited never changed a thing. Im sort of unfamilar with DS hacking and only recently looked into it so help would be great, thanks.

 

[Normmatt]

The font is a standard nftr font and its located at 0x87e80 (size 0x73c18) in the decompressed arm9 binary. Its uses a standard ascii+sjis font encoding so if you can't find any text it could be compressed.

EDIT: Yes there's lots of sjis text in the decompressed arm9 binary.

 

[xPearse]

What do you mean by the arm9 binary, could you possibly help me find where the font is. If it is compressed how would I decompress the files, I thought you'd just open them up regularly.

 

[jjjewel]

The game used standard Shift-JIS so you shouldn't need the font file to create table.

If you extract arm9.bin (with CrystalTile2 or DSLazy or Tinke, etc.) The location of the font is as Normmatt said.

There are some text in arm9.bin and in .scd files. Text when game starts is in aya.scd. The game seems to take normal (ASCII) English text.

Spoiler

Text when game starts. (You must extract aya.scd first to get the address the same as shown.)

Test with English text. I did the xxxxxxxxx on purpose just to see roughly how many characters a line can hold. The game seems to automatically start a new line for you. (You can try with some longer text to see how much text a text box can hold and what will happen if your text is longer than a text box, etc.)

 

[GHANMI]

Get Tinke and Crystaltile2 (they include a hex editor "to see the text" and tile editors, besides Tinke can open some common fonts -the ones that he can't can be usually opened with Crystaltile2)
Google how to decompress the arm files.

As you can see, the English is showing up correctly, so no need to edit the font, unless you want to add accentuated letters for French/German/etc..
You just need to edit the text, and the other graphical text (ie everything not in the font used by the picture, example the title screen)

 

[Kelebek]

I can see that strings lengths are there though (the word right before the text), so those will need to be edited as well if you change the length of the string. Looks like 0a00 is text, followed by the length and then the string itself.

 

[xPearse]

Wow, so you just add the letters in with the hex editor. When translating a Game Boy and Game Gear game I had to input the hex's instead, this new way should be easier. Thanks for helping me out guys. The people on Romhacking didn't even help when I asked about hacking and translating DS games, they're always like that. Tell you to go neck deep into the documents section even though they could easily post and help like what you guys did.

I am confused on how to re-insert the edited file back onto the rom though, im flicking around these DS programs and aren't seeing any way to.
http://gbatemp.net/threads/the-ultimate-nintendo-ds-rom-hacking-guide.291274/

 

[Kelebek]

DSBuff can do it. Use the Pack option, which is right next to Unpack. Just give it the folder of all the game files (with the ones you edited included).

 

[xPearse]

Thanks and it worked, yay. Now soon I can get to work, thanks guys.

 

[GHANMI]

Don't mention it.
Anyhow, if you're interested in other DS translations for practice, you could also check the unfinished projects for Code Geass DS and Cross Treasures, both really easy projects (saying this because I tried both of them: the first is like this one in that editing the hex gives you directly in-game properly formatted half-width English letters, the second uses txt files making it the easiest DS translation by far -I also know of another one for the GameCube that also uses txt files but I'm saving that one for myself )

 

[xPearse]

That might be worth a look in the future, I really liked Code Geass. I would jump to translate more games at the moment but my translator is busy at the moment, sadly I can't read Japanese.

 

[xPearse]

Hey jjjewel, did the text appear normally for you or was it inserted choppy like mine in this video. Im just curious that's all, it may have to stay like that but im not really bothered by it.

 

[Kelebek]

What do you mean by "choppy"?

 

[GHANMI]

It seemed alright for a translation.

 

[xPearse]

It's the way the text appears in the box, for English it shoots in but for Japanese it calmly appears. Im not really bothered by it as im just happy there can be a translation.

 

[Kelebek]

Yeah, does the same for me. It's just not supported for ASCII, they only support that nice fade-in for SJIS it seems. Full-wdith ASCII doesn't look very nice though.

 

[xPearse]

If I do space them out then I would be left with less spaces, hmm. I think it'll leave it as it is for now. I do wish I know how to edit the exe and implement what you said, also what do you mean by a padding character anyhow.

 

[Kelebek]

You have full control over the string size. You can have anything up to 65535 characters for a single string, and even then if you wanted more you can just add another page. In changing that though, you just have to fix all the positions at the start of the file.

And by padding I mean, making the string like "C.o.m.e." where each one of those fullstops is a 01 (or whatever) byte. In-game the time between between the actual characters is smooth and not blocky, but in-game it ends up looking like "C o m e " and that's what I mean by, maybe try to find something which doesn't create an empty space. But I highly doubt there will be one.

Probably just have to deal with it.

 

[xPearse]

Im fine with that, thanks for your help.

 

[Lycan911]

Wow, I've been waiting for years for this translation, hopefully you'll finish it