Possibility of Tales of Destiny DC English Patch

Anyone made in progress with this? Attempting it myself, I've gotten some of the files unpacked trying to figure out what to do with the files. Non-programmer btw.

 

I've managed to extract the files from TOC_DC.iso using the tools from that Russian site. The DAT.BIN and DAT.TBL unpacked into a DAT folder. Inside of the DAT folder there is also a MGLK folder that has 1074 files. The other BAT file from the Russian tool unpacked another 1074 files with a lot of .xgm files inside. The .xgm files are binary and when opened with Notepad, it's mostly gibberish.

Honestly, the translation is probably the easiest part since we have Google Translate. Finding the right place to replace the Japanese text with English and saving the fole in the correct format so that the files can be packed again is the hard part. I created a video on the unpacking process on YouTube and created a GitHub repository with a tree directory of all the extracted files.

My next plan is to organize the file names in Google Sheets so I know which file corresponds to which part of the game, especially the dialog, menu, item descriptions, etc. If anyone else know how to view these files or how they are encoded, please share.

 

After checking some files under TOD_DC\DAT\MGLK in Notepad++ and converting from Binary to ASCII/HEX nothing really worked. However, using Python (IDLE) I was able to open the .xgm and .tm2 files as binary text and it looks like I can replace some of the code for other code. Here's the code to open binary text files in Python:

I used "f" for file and since I'm using Windows, I used path with backslashes (another backslash to escape the "\" character). The important part here is the "rb" for read binary.

Code:

>>> f=open("C:\\Users\\pnvnd\\Desktop\\TOD_DC\\DAT\\MGLK\\13705\\13705_55_01.tm2", "rb")

I opened the file and stored in varible "f" and used the read() method to get back some useful text.

Code:

>>> f.read()

Don't forget to close the file when you are done.

Code:

>>> f.close()

From the looks of it, this might involve a lot of really low-level programming to swap out characters and letters, might be tedious. The files shows text like

Code:

x00\x01\x01\x03\x04\x05

so I need to figure out what to do with this next. On another note, isn't it strange how everyone who works on Tales of Destiny Director's Cut patch suddenly disappears?

 

Some nice people contacted me on this site and gave me lots of useful information. It appears the SLPS_258.42 file can be edited in a Hex Editor. I'm using Visual Studio Code with the official Hex Editor extension from Microsoft. So a menu match is definitly possible. I have this project up on my Github account, please feel free to each out to me to get a proper patch out.

 

So after editing SLPS_258.42 with a Hex Editor and replacing all entries of スタン with Stahn (in their Hex form), I used ImgBurn to create an ISO file and tried it. And it looks very promising! There were about 9 instances of "Stahn" so I'm not sure where they all appear yet.


Menu and Status shows the name as well.


If no one else wants to publicly lead this project, I can do it. I have a rough idea what needs to be done for a menu patch at least. Let's hope no one makes me "disappear" for doing this.

 

I can't believe somebody is actually doing this. You're a hero. I thought i was gonna die before ever playing this game. I'm waiting for this since i was a child.

 

I think a lot of people made a menu patch for this game but have not posted publicly...I need to check out if what I'm doing is not going to make Bamco send their lawyers. I waited 10+ years without attempting since there are more repuable groups out there.

Anyway, since I have a character map of most of the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana,I just have to do a Find and Replace (CTRL+H) and swap out characters with English ones. For now, it may have to be a 1:1 character swap until I figure out the data structure for these files.

Here's some screenshots of me messing around. Note: My changes doesn't seem to affect Leon's side.

 

<Deleted> Sent pm

 

To me? I didn't get anything...

 

Update! I have a working demo patch, but it's HUGE (3 GB). I used xdelta to create the patch, so I think the patch filesize is large due to the way I repacked the ISO. I'm looking at the Tales of Destiny 2 menu patch and its only 424 KB. Anyone know or have a link on how to re-pack PS2 games back into ISO properly or how to make this patch smaller?


Edit: I packaged the original PS2 files in an ISO with ImgBurn and a copy of this with the modded files. The patch file was much smaller but could not be applied to my other ISO backup. I think I'm re-packaging the ISO wrong.

 

I asked around the internet and it doesn't look like anyone is releasing any patches (publicly). I'll be working on a patch and have already released a sample patch on my Github account. If anyone wants to form a team, or donate resrouces, please let me know!



If you'd like to help, here's what we'll need:
1. Memory card / save file with as many items, weapons, armor, accessories, etc. as possible.
2. Need some scripts (preferrably Python) to read binaries files to Hex and replace groups of Hex values from a list (like a VLOOKUP)
3. Patchers, to pack ISO files and create patches (with xdelta for example) and test
4. Translator (grunt work) to map out in-game characters/symbols to Hex (lots of manual labor)
5. Random people to recruit, moderate Discord, etc.

Since no other tools are available to make life easier, my current plan is brute force hex replacements

 

I'll be updating my project here: https://github.com/pnvnd/Tales-of-Destiny-DC

 

would you guys like to join absolute zero's discord server?

— Posts automatically merged - Please don't double post! —

currently they are working on tales of rebirth

 

I've updated the character mapping (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TZJpTIxXZckXoy5GH0FOsn5KSkakDqRzaTpIkEcGB10) and have completed the hiragana and katakana sections. Also, noted the hex characters are an offset of Shift JIS encoding, so I may be able to decode some sections of the SLPS_258.42 (ELF) file for an easier time doing menu translations (maybe bitwise addition?)

For example: hiragana > Shift JIS hex > ELF hex
ぁ > 82 9F > 99 A8
あ > 82 A0 > 99 A9
ぃ > 82 A1 > 99 AA
い > 82 A2 > 99 AB

If you do the hex difference you get 1709, so I will try to subtract 1709 from every hex in the file, then convert file to Shift-JIS encoding. This should show me all the hiragana, katakana, and hopefully kanji. I might need help programming this part.

Here's a screenshot of me messing with characters, dialog boxes, and making new lines

 

Hey kazendama could you please answer pnvnd's messages? He's working hard on this and maybe you guys could join efforts!

 

heres hoping....

 

I'm a software engineer. If you tell me your requirements the most detailed way possible maybe I can help you guys.

 

Gemini might be worth contacting as he did all the hacking for absolute zero translations