ROM Hack Professor Layton and the Unwound/Lost Future UNDUB Patch (kind of...)

rodryguezzz

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I started playing the first Professor Layton game a couple of days ago and it has been quite funny. I'm playing the undub version so I decided to download all the NDS undub roms. I found the first and the second games but not the third one. I've searched everywhere but it's impossible to find an undub patch or already patched rom of this game. The only couple of links I found were already dead but, after seeing many posts of people saying how easy it is to undub roms, I tried myself. I've never modified a rom before (except applying patches) so this is all new for me.

Creating this patch is a puzzle
I grabbed an american (U) rom and then replaced the files in data\lt3\str\ by those in the japanese rom at \lt3\str\.
At first it seemed like everything worked perfectly but then I noticed some random english spoken phrases in the middle of the conversations. I opened the patched rom and the japanese rom and played both at the same time side by side using desmume and noticed that the english phrases in the patched rom exist because they simply aren't present in the japanese version. For example, while one character says one complete phrase in the japanese version, the same dialogue is split into two phrases in the english version (you see the first phrase and then have to click A to advance the dialogue and see the second one). My extremely limited japanese knowledge tells me that this happens because they didn't literally translate the dialogues and actually added some phrases in the western version.

After that, I decided to actually look at the files I was replacing and found out that there are different files with different names in both versions. The japanese version has more files in one folder but the english version has more files in another folder. I thought that adding the extra japanese files to the english version wouldn't do any difference since i'm sure the game wasn't codded to use files that weren't supposed to be there in the first place. On the other hand, the extra files in the english version are obviously related to the extra dialogue, so I decided to delete all of them and replace the others with the japanese ones like I did the first time. Now, there are no random english phrases in the middle of the dialogue but we end up with phrases where the character who is supposed to be speaking, isn't speaking.

The only way to prevent this is probably by editing the dialogues and removing the extra phrases of the western version.

BTW, the extra files I found and deleted were in data\lt3\str\evt\en. I think they were only related to dialogue but i'm not sure.
I don't want to play the whole game before finishing the other 2 so I can't test if there's any problem through the game. If someone has a better patch that works better than mine, please send it to me.


I made two patches, one with random english dialogue in the middle and the other one with the extra files deleted but, unfortunately, I can't post the links here because it contains copyrighted material.
 
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FAST6191

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You can't post the patches here anyway -- if the patch you have contains copyrighted data (which the entire audio contents of a game most definitely is) then it defeats half the point of using a patch.

You can post something like a batch file to unpack the relevant roms/fetch files, rename, slice and modify individual files as necessary and rebuild into a final ROM though. Indeed such a thing is in many ways better as it would allow people to customise things.

As for extra contents or contents removed then if it is going to be a bother we tend to go the other way and backport a script to the original game, in this case you would presumably take the English script and stick it in the Japanese game.
 
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rodryguezzz

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You can't post the patches here anyway -- if the patch you have contains copyrighted data (which the entire audio contents of a game most definitely is) then it defeats half the point of using a patch.

You can post something like a batch file to unpack the relevant roms/fetch files, rename, slice and modify individual files as necessary and rebuild into a final ROM though. Indeed such a thing is in many ways better as it would allow people to customise things.

As for extra contents or contents removed then if it is going to be a bother we tend to go the other way and backport a script to the original game, in this case you would presumably take the English script and stick it in the Japanese game.

Thanks for the answer. I edited my post about posting the patches.
Since everyone usually makes undubs by replacing the .sdat file, I went through that route only to find out that there is no sdat file in this game. I looked at my undubs of previous games and that's how they were undub (alongside with replacing the data\data\stream folder). I have no idea on how to make a batch file but with my instructions, maybe someone can make an undub rom for himself. There's no undub avaliable anywhere so I guess it's better than nothing.
And I think that moving the english script to the japanese rom could be hard because the text is not exactly the same in both versions, like I said.
 

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By all means share methods and things you discovered. That is very much encouraged.

Opening a game, copying files across and repacking it all is what most people use on most systems/formats, or at least ones where you have a file system. It tends to work as localising a game is mostly either the whole game or some things removed from the original language.

Script wise I doubt it would be trivial, however it is easier to slightly rework some text in a translation than it is to get together a voice dubbing team or replicate human voices.

Batch files for things like this are not that hard

https://gbatemp.net/download/nintendo-ds-rom-tool-ndstool.29352/
That has a basic command for extracting a game and rebuilding it.
From there copying a file/directory tree is nothing major, and you can do things individually if you want.
Renaming is much the same.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/a-beginners-guide-to-the-windows-command-line/ is a reasonable start to it all.

If you are chopping and changing files that gets trickier, especially as windows does not have a file cutting command (I usually use a tool called filecutter) but still nothing major. If it is changes to individual files you can always make a simple patch to go between the original and the altered version -- any alterations there are your own work and thus we find them fine to share.

Put each command you want it all in a normal text file, save it with the extension .bat and you have your batch file.
If you want to start messing with powershell scripting or all the fun variables and programming features it gets harder but a basic batch file is nothing more than a list of commands to be executed one after the other. As most patches like this will be taking a few known files (it is not like DS games are getting updates after all) and go to a very specific state with no variability then most such things can be rendered as a simple batch file. Might not work for Linux, OSX, android or something but the thing about the batch files we normally see is it is fairly easy to read and see what is being done.
 
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rodryguezzz

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Ok, i'm only moving files from one folder to another so it shouldn't be that hard to make.

I downloaded Tinke to listen the sound files and understand what they actually are, and this is what I found out:
I also got the european rom and the str folder (which contains the sound) is the same as the american version, except that en folders are called uk.

There are 4 folders inside the str folder.
The bgm folder contains 3 files, which are the music. They have a slightly different size in the japanese version. I didn't bother listening all of them because they don't have vocals, so there's no point in replacing them.

The evt folder has another subfolder inside it called en or uk in western versions, where the files are stored, but the japanese version has no subfolder and the files are just inside evt.
This folder has the dialogue between characters outside of cutscenes. Western versions have more files than the japanese version. Those extra files should be the extra dialogue added with the western localization that I mentioned in my post.

The mov folder works the same way as evt. en or uk in the western versions and no subfolder in the japanese version.
Those files are the cutscene audio. Both music, sound effects and voices are mixed in the same files and each file corresponds to each cutscene. The japanese version has 2 extra files (038 and 039). I went to the other mov folder (lt3/mov) where the video cutscenes are stored, and found that western versions don't have the m0039 cutscene, so those files probably belong to that.

The nm folder is a little bit different in both versions. In the western version there are files right inside the main folder and then there's a subfolder with other files while in the japanese all files are toghether in the same place, in the main folder. The files 110 through 148 are voice audio of the characters and are related to puzzle solving. Those are inside the uk/en subfolder in the western versions and need to be replaced. The other files (050 through 065, 100 and 401 through 419) are sound effects so there's no need to replace them. My problem is with the files 500 through 505 in the japanese versions. Those are voice audio but there are no similar files in the western versions. I don't know where they belong. Maybe they are related to some extra dialogue in the japanese version.
 

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