ROM Hack Rockman ZX Advent (Mega Man ZX Advent) - Full Undub

[geo-kun]

Hello again!

Following my undub of the first ZX game, I'm happy to present you the more-or-less same modification of ZX Advent.

Rockman ZX Advent was actually dubbed into English (which wasn't the case with the previous game, where they just removed all the voices). But many people see ZXA's dub as a low-quality one, and there have been some attempts to undub the game in the past, but they were unsuccessful. There's even a patch on the internet, that calls itself "undub", but in fact just removes all the English dub voices and makes all the dialogues silent.

The main problem with undubbing ZXA was that all the voice files are numbered very differently in the English and Japanese versions, so a simple file swap wouldn't have worked at all. A lot of work had to be done to figure out what piece of dialogue corresponds to which sound file and repoint every block of an English text script to the correct audio. This is exactly what I did.

Rockman ZX Advent: Full Undub



- Every piece of original Japanese voice acting is present;
- Did you know that even the English dub of this game left out the voicing of some dialogues that are voiced in the Japanese version? Mainly it's briefings characters recieve upon entering a new area. These are restored too;
- Same as in my ZX undub patch, all in-game terminology is restored to original;
- The undub was tested and confirmed fully working on DeSmuME and Acekard 2i flashcart.

A copy-paste from a thread about ZX's undub, which is true for this one as well:
Due to English game script being much longer than the Japanese one, not all dialogue boxes ended up having an associated voice clip. It doesn't mean some clips are lost. It just means that some blocks of text which fit into one box in Japanese, now have to be split in two due to a longer text (Japanese text is much more compact than English). The voice for such two split blocks plays during the first of them, so if you wanna hear everything, don't scroll the dialogues too fast. Technically, this is fixable by completely rewriting all the game's text to fit the original number of blocks, but no volunteers so far.

Tools used:
Solid One's Mega Man ZXA text dumper/inserter tool for dealing with game text scripts
DiegoHH's tool for unpacking and repacking subtitle files from ZX/ZXA
Tile Molester for editing graphics
DSLazy for ROM packing/unpacking
jEdit for convenient text editing
Crystal Tile 2 for uncompressing and recompressing the arm9.bin
HxD and Translhextion for some hex editing

Credits and thanks:
Solid One for his great help and support, and also tools he wrote for modifying this game
DiegoHH for useful tools he developed
denim for helping bypass the arm9.bin compression
Geo a.k.a. illuminor (me) for putting this together, which took much more time and effort than it may seem, even though I had a lot of help

A .zip file containing the patch is attached to the post. It includes a README, which you can also read here:

Spoiler: How to apply the patch

To apply the patch on Windows:

- Copy a Japanese ROM file of Rockman ZX Advent (CRC32: 89C919BC) in the patch folder;
- Rename your ROM "zxa.nds";
- Run "Patch ZX Advent.bat";
- Done! You will now see a file named "zxa_undub.nds" next to your original file. This is the undubbed ROM, you can now play it.

Please don't ask for ROMs or links to download them.

Enjoy playing!

Also check out the undub of the first Rockman ZX game.

 

[zeropain]

Thank you for this!

So this sentence count here as well, or?
''Technically not an undub: instead of transferring Japanese audio into American ROM, we transferred English text, graphics and some more features to the Japanese ROM.''

Was answered some posts below.

 

[Meteor7]

Lovely. ZXA is a fantastic game, and while the English dub is wonderful and hilarious to me, I'll be sure to try out this new patch. Thanks for your hard work.

 

[Solid One]

Yay, now the real thing is out there! Congratulations!

It was a very tiresome task, but surely it gave results. I'd like to thank you for your efforts, Geo. With this, now I'll be able to make a PT-BR translation with our undub in a near (or far) future. And you can count on me if you need help on your russian translations for ZX and ZXA \o/

 

[geo-kun]

So this sentence count here as well, or?
''Technically not an undub: instead of transferring Japanese audio into American ROM, we transferred English text, graphics and some more features to the Japanese ROM.''

Edit: Nevermind, this counts here as well.

Nope, doesn't actually count here as well. It's a different case. Even though we are applying the patch to the Japanese ROM, this is only for purpose of not distributing the Japanese audio via the patch file, which is not allowed. The patch transforms the ROM into USA region, but leaves Japanese audio intact. So the result is an American ROM with Japanese audio.

 

[zeropain]

Thanks for the explanation.

 

[NANASHI89]

Hello again!

Following my undub of the first ZX game, I'm happy to present you the more-or-less same modification of ZX Advent.

Rockman ZX Advent was actually dubbed into English (which wasn't the case with the previous game, where they just removed all the voices). But many people see ZXA's dub as a low-quality one, and there have been some attempts to undub the game in the past, but they were unsuccessful. There's even a patch on the internet, that calls itself "undub", but in fact just removes all the English dub voices and makes all the dialogues silent.

The main problem with undubbing ZXA was that all the voice files are numbered very differently in the English and Japanese versions, so a simple file swap wouldn't have worked at all. A lot of work had to be done to figure out what piece of dialogue corresponds to which sound file and repoint every block of an English text script to the correct audio. This is exactly what I did.

Rockman ZX Advent: Full Undub



- Every piece of original Japanese voice acting is present;
- Did you know that even the English dub of this game left out the voicing of some dialogues that are voiced in the Japanese version? Mainly it's briefings characters recieve upon entering a new area. These are restored too;
- Same as in my ZX undub patch, all in-game terminology is restored to original;
- The undub was tested and confirmed fully working on DeSmuME and Acekard 2i flashcart.

A copy-paste from a thread about ZX's undub, which is true for this one as well:
Due to English game script being much longer than the Japanese one, not all dialogue boxes ended up having an associated voice clip. It doesn't mean some clips are lost. It just means that some blocks of text which fit into one box in Japanese, now have to be split in two due to a longer text (Japanese text is much more compact than English). The voice for such two split blocks plays during the first of them, so if you wanna hear everything, don't scroll the dialogues too fast. Technically, this is fixable by completely rewriting all the game's text to fit the original number of blocks, but no volunteers so far.

Tools used:
Solid One's Mega Man ZXA text dumper/inserter tool for dealing with game text scripts
DiegoHH's tool for unpacking and repacking subtitle files from ZX/ZXA
Tile Molester for editing graphics
DSLazy for ROM packing/unpacking
jEdit for convenient text editing
Crystal Tile 2 for uncompressing and recompressing the arm9.bin
HxD and Translhextion for some hex editing

Credits and thanks:
Solid One for his great help and support, and also tools he wrote for modifying this game
DiegoHH for useful tools he developed
denim for helping bypass the arm9.bin compression
Geo a.k.a. illuminor (me) for putting this together, which took much more time and effort than it may seem, even though I had a lot of help

A .zip file containing the patch is attached to the post. It includes a README, which you can also read here:

Spoiler: How to apply the patch

To apply the patch on Windows:

- Copy a Japanese ROM file of Rockman ZX Advent (CRC32: 89C919BC) in the patch folder;
- Rename your ROM "zxa.nds";
- Run "Patch ZX Advent.bat";
- Done! You will now see a file named "zxa_undub.nds" next to your original file. This is the undubbed ROM, you can now play it.

Please don't ask for ROMs or links to download them.

Enjoy playing!

Also check out the undub of the first Rockman ZX game.

Can you use cheats on this one? I have one like this that doesn't use cheats.

 

[Pealvepo]

Amazing job! Thank you <3

 

[omega1612]

Awsome job!
So im kinda new here and i can't find how to download the file attached to the post, can you please tell me how to?

 

[geo-kun]

Awsome job!
So im kinda new here and i can't find how to download the file attached to the post, can you please tell me how to?

Sorry for the late reply, I'm not sure if you figured it out by yourself by now, but you just, um, click the attached file's name?

 

[N3ls0n]

Excuse me, I had a patch problem because I applied the '1211 Rockman ZX Advent (JP) Japanese rom and was playing normally until arriving at Scrapyard1, the personage error does not go through the trash to continue. would you have any solution? thankful
I'm using the rom on Acekard 2i on DSLite and also on the Nosgba the error occurs.

 

[Thirteen1355]

Hey hey,
Which tools would I need to edit the undubs, so that they include western terms (Mega Man instead of Rockman, Reploid instead of Repliroid) in the text?

 

[geo-kun]

Excuse me, I had a patch problem because I applied the '1211 Rockman ZX Advent (JP) Japanese rom and was playing normally until arriving at Scrapyard1, the personage error does not go through the trash to continue. would you have any solution? thankful
I'm using the rom on Acekard 2i on DSLite and also on the Nosgba the error occurs.

If you can, please provide a save file just before the problem occurs, so I can look into it.
(Yeah, another VERY late reply, I'm sorry.)

 

[def_nomad]

Hey, I don't know if you still pay attention to this thread, but as you probably know the legacy collection for Zero, ZX and ZX advent.
Modding the music has been really easy (to insert the remastered tracks), and a lot of the internal files of ZXA are the same as the ones present in the DS rom (probably the same applies to ZX though I haven't checked yet).
I've been trying to undub it so it can be played with english text and japanese voices, and the best I could do so far was to use the script files from your undub and replace the JP scripts with them, then play the JP release. (dialogue works, but stuff like the text in the map is really garbled)
I know pretty much nothing about hacking this kind of stuff so I'm just trying random stuff and maybe I'm overlooking some obvious files, but I was wondering if you are interested in taking a look at it and maybe help a bit.

 

[geo-kun]

Hey, I don't know if you still pay attention to this thread, but as you probably know the legacy collection for Zero, ZX and ZX advent.
Modding the music has been really easy (to insert the remastered tracks), and a lot of the internal files of ZXA are the same as the ones present in the DS rom (probably the same applies to ZX though I haven't checked yet).
I've been trying to undub it so it can be played with english text and japanese voices, and the best I could do so far was to use the script files from your undub and replace the JP scripts with them, then play the JP release. (dialogue works, but stuff like the text in the map is really garbled)
I know pretty much nothing about hacking this kind of stuff so I'm just trying random stuff and maybe I'm overlooking some obvious files, but I was wondering if you are interested in taking a look at it and maybe help a bit.

I would have looked into it (without promising anything though, I'm not a pro hacker myself) but unfortunately I don't own a copy on Steam and have no spare money to buy one.

 

[Kaed]

First, thank you very much for this rom hack, geo-kun! For anyone that love the japanese dubbing on Rockman games this is a dream coming true.

As def_nomad user pointed out, the "Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection" is out, and it seems that the file structure is the same as the Nintendo DS games (ZX and ZXA), and every .bin file is already in the folder. Just a simple name change from "title_usa.bin" to "title.bin", "cmm_mega_s.bin" to "cmm_rock_s.bin" or "m_back_en.bin" to "m_back_jp.bin" etc. will change almost all japanese texts to english texts in Rockman ZXA game (not tested on ZX yet), and it's running just fine in the game. The "New Game" text (which they used a new font), the character names above textbox and the region names on the mini map are still in japanese for me, so I think this will require to extract some files to change it, and this is the point where I have no knowledge too. xD So if you can also work on this PC mod, I and many others would be very grateful.

 

[def_nomad]

Oh, I understand. I've managed to insert a lot of the files, but I ran into a problem with both ZX and ZX advent, do you know in which files the names of the dialogue boxes were stored? That's the main problem I have right now that maybe you can help with.
The other problem is the "New Game" text Kaed mentioned, but I'll probably figure that out scouring through the collection files instead of the game-specific ones. (And doubt you can help with that for now)
In either case, thanks a lot for your help since your work has allowed us to make a lot of progress already.

 

[geo-kun]

Oh, I understand. I've managed to insert a lot of the files, but I ran into a problem with both ZX and ZX advent, do you know in which files the names of the dialogue boxes were stored? That's the main problem I have right now that maybe you can help with.
The other problem is the "New Game" text Kaed mentioned, but I'll probably figure that out scouring through the collection files instead of the game-specific ones. (And doubt you can help with that for now)
In either case, thanks a lot for your help since your work has allowed us to make a lot of progress already.

The names for the dialogue boxes are stored in the arm9.bin in the DS version. So, even knowing nothing about the PC port, I'd assume they're in the game's executable. But I may be wrong.
But if I'm right, it may be problematic to edit them due to copy protection, if there is any present, because you'll have to alter the .exe

 

[def_nomad]

Well, I've gone through a lot of files and I guess I have to resign myself to believe it's in the exe, though I haven't been able to find any strings in it suggesting it's there either. I was able to find names for a bunch of files and stuff though so I don't think it's copy protected.
I tried looking through arm9.bin to see if I could find how the names were stored there, but I had no luck either though I did find the font used so uhh...I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but how were the names stored there? Like...any specific string of characters?
I'm really close to simply giving up on a complete mod though, it's playable enough without the names there.
And thanks again for helping!

 

[geo-kun]

I tried looking through arm9.bin to see if I could find how the names were stored there, but I had no luck either though I did find the font used so uhh...I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but how were the names stored there? Like...any specific string of characters?
I'm really close to simply giving up on a complete mod though, it's playable enough without the names there.
And thanks again for helping!

arm9.bin's contents were compressed in the original game. We had to bypass the compression and leave it uncompressed for the NDS undub. But this content in the port's executable is probably compressed as it was in the original, so you won't be able to simply find the names there, you will have to find a way to uncompress it first.

When arm9.bin is uncompressed, the names section looks like this: (This is without the correct character table.)
With the table it looks like this:

---

Also, as for the "New Game" and other main menu stuff, in the NDS version it's not stored in text format, it's graphics. But I think this stuff doesn't work the same way in Legacy Collection, judging from X Collections, where the menus are reworked slightly.