ROM Hack Nostalgeo no Kaze

[BluWacky]

DISCLAIMER: I know next to nothing about anything useful for translating or ROM hacking. I'm just fiddling around out of my own interest. DO NOT EXPECT ANYTHING TO COME OUT OF THIS.

Okay, so I'm taking a look at Nostalgeo no Kaze on a whim. My Japanese ain't great, but I have dictionaries, grammar books and a LOT of paper, so this would be something I could theoretically work through in several months/years/millennia if I were to take it seriously (which I'm not, as I say I'm just experimenting). Plus who knows, it might get an English language release anyway!

I know Noitora and several others worked on a translation patch and from my own fiddling around I suspect I've done pretty much a similar sort of thing given how fast Noitora got started - edited the fonts so they're variable width (NFTREdit is incredible!) and made an easy start on the battle commands (which are all in hiragana and katakana) as the text is just there in the battle message file (BL_msg_battle.msd)

Before I go any further, though, I can already see that there's not going to be as much space as I'd like in the battle message file to be able to properly translate names (I haven't looked at Noitora's file so I don't know how it's done there.). The ROM is in Unicode and so the fonts are all 2 byte whatevers contained in four different NTFR files for different sizes (apologies if the technical terms are wrong). Will the game automatically work wonders if you just replace the NTFR files with, say, a 1 byte font tile thingymajig which only includes the Roman alphabet? Or does it really depend on a game-by-game basis for that sort of thing? Or, instead, would that screw up other parts of the game? For instance, character names are pulled through to battle messages using the format %SCC00% (with the number changing depending on which character name it's using) - would that not work if it was written in 1 byte format?

Sorry if I'm being a bit vague. I really don't know anything about any of this, I'm just interested to see how far I can get before I lose interest. But if anyone can offer any helpful advice on this sort of thing I'd be very grateful.

(If it turns out I need to do ASM hacking then I think I'll just have to be creative with the naming schemes or something!)

 

[War]

You should definitely PM Noitora since he can probably give you specific tips for this game. Also, who knows... maybe he'll give you what's translated so far.

 

[FAST6191]

3 things.

1) DS roms have nothing like the size restrictions of yesteryear. msd files that I have worked with in the past have a fairly simple pointer table allowing you to expand all you want (although you may still have problems with screen real estate (see 2)). I do not know if there is a file length at the start of the pointer section but it is a good bet so remember to edit that too.

2) I will tell you about the psuedo variable width font and/or dual tile encoding which revolve around the same principle. Here you merge two characters into one and a call to a single character displays 2 characters.
You can use it to merge things like ii together rather than have two widely spaced characters and it also helps on menus where screen space is limited or you have a hard limit/fixed limit for number of bytes. Good news is this can then make some use of the 16bit.

3) You probably could also hack the game to use 8 instead of 16 bit but frankly for a basic hack it is not worth it. It could also mess up parsing of variables (like the names).

 

[shineek]

as war said you should ask noitora he was translating this until the rumor came that it will be released in US (obviously want happen tecmo released only one game on ds in US , and nostalgio wasent that good game , it wasent selling too good in japan)

 

[psycoblaster]

2) I will tell you about the psuedo variable width font and/or dual tile encoding which revolve around the same principle. Here you merge two characters into one and a call to a single character displays 2 characters.
You can use it to merge things like ii together rather than have two widely spaced characters and it also helps on menus where screen space is limited or you have a hard limit/fixed limit for number of bytes. Good news is this can then make some use of the 16bit.

About this that FAST mentioned,

it's one I made for crimson room which used an 11x11 font.
However, you'll need to code your own program to support table files with multiple characters like 0000=AA
but it won't be that hard because the file type is .mes and has a really simple pointer based file structure

 

[BluWacky]

Thanks for the tips all. I suspect that coding anything to support the pseudo font is beyond me at the moment but it seems like a very sensible idea.

It MAY not be too much of a problem if I can just make the relevant files bigger - there's a lot of spare space in the ROM anyway.

I've yet to experiment particularly in depth, but the actual story text is stored with a lot of wasted space. Rather than just storing the character names once in each event file and pointing back to them as necessary, EVERY TIME they speak their name is stored separately, so the text sections go:

DIALOGUE (with control code to split line if necessary)
A couple of blank addresses - the system only appears to need one so some space can be saved that way
NAME OF CHARACTER WHO SAID THE ABOVE DIALOGUE

etc.

So by re-arranging the dialogue - say, to have the character names just appear once and point to them each time - then I can probably save some space.

I'm not really sure if I totally understand how to deal with compression, though. The event text is stored in compressed format, whereas most of the rest of it is uncompressed. I can extract the compressed files containing each cutscene's text, but what do you do to put them back in again when you've translated and re-pointed?

 

[Norek]

Well, I've played and finished this game in Japanese and I must say it isn't very hard to translate, I mean it's easy to understand most of the text (I'd say 3rd kyuu would do it, plus lots of work with dictionaries).
And in my opinion, it's worth translating, cause the plot is nice and game's system is also very good.
I'd like to translate it into Polish but we don't have ppl who could do this (I mean all the technical things).
Maybe I'll contact someone after finishing my other translation projects, to help with this game.
Oh, and while it's my first message here - Hello everyone

 

[psycoblaster]

Well, I've played and finished this game in Japanese and I must say it isn't very hard to translate, I mean it's easy to understand most of the text (I'd say 3rd kyuu would do it, plus lots of work with dictionaries).
And in my opinion, it's worth translating, cause the plot is nice and game's system is also very good.
I'd like to translate it into Polish but we don't have ppl who could do this (I mean all the technical things).
Maybe I'll contact someone after finishing my other translation projects, to help with this game.
Oh, and while it's my first message here - Hello everyone

Technically, it's a very easy rom.