ROM Hack Table Making...

[imperiumk]

Well I am a newbie to posting on the board, but a long time reader. I'd like to give a shoutout to all the people who have put their time and effort into creating these wonderful translations. You're amazing. Thank you all.

Since I have been taking and not returning the favor, I decided to begin learning about binary, hex and translating. I have a moderate knowledge of the Japanese language as well. With a bit of practice, I believe I could be a big help to some of the ongoing and future projects.


My first question was in Table Making, do all of you who do this use a certain program or do you actually type out a table using excel. It would be awesome if I could get a link to a program that would help me take some of these extracted hex, get them into japanese and begin translating them.

Aside from this, if i could get some tables in hand, i would be more than happy to translate.


Thanks for taking the time to read this, and glad to be on the board. (Excuse the Newbie nature of my post)


-Kyle

 

[DarthNemesis]

The vast majority of DS games use Shift-JIS or Unicode.

 

[psycoblaster]

crystaltile2 has inbuilt code pages, and when you create your own program using any languages, you can use any official code pages..

 

[imperiumk]

Thank you for the quick response.

Well i've been looking at it, and Its still a bit difficult to wrap my head around, I could definately help with Translation though. If anyone needs some help, just send me a message!

 

[Noitora]

Thank you for the quick response.

Well i've been looking at it, and Its still a bit difficult to wrap my head around, I could definately help with Translation though. If anyone needs some help, just send me a message!

Good! We need more romhacking power!
If you want, you can go to the translation requests topic and start trying to hack some games, it's a good exercise

Or you can go to http://www.advanscene.com/ and browse the Japanese releases

 

[imperiumk]

Well I've been reading. I understand hex, shift-jis and some unicode. I get the binary calculation to get a certain hex and reverse. I think the only problems i'm having are user induced. Where to start, what to start with...and some file types are giving me a bit of trouble as well (mostly .pac). Finding the text in certain files is giving me a bit of trouble, i believe I found some in the script.pac included in Shining Force Feather, but not sure because I can't extract it.

I'm a newbie in the game, only have a bit of HTML background so my coding is pretty minimal. I guess a bit of guidance would be appreciated. Would love to keep practicing once I understand a bit more, and eventually help some of the teams here translate these great Japanese games that never make it outside of the country.


Thanks for your fast responses!

 

[psycoblaster]

.pac files are mostly pack files. Think of it as a folder holding more files. It's simple to code an unpacker once you understand the file structure.
if you can upload script.pac online and give a link to me I can quickly program something for it...
and you should understand that the game doesn't support single byte ASCII (I think) so you'll be seeing
Ｈｅｌｌｏ！
instead of
Hello!

 

[imperiumk]

Well that is a great explanation, i was assuming it could be something like that, first from it being called "PAC".


Here is the file:
Script.pac File

I would love to see what is inside a .pac file.


Thank you for taking the time, and no rush on it.


-K

 

[psycoblaster]

not completely sure how this works, but crystaltile2 supports it
it looks like it's 4 byte aligned, with the pointer and a size.
It also seems that the pointer/ size has an extra 0 at the end, like the second entry is
90020000 03000000
which is
00000290 00000003
when flipped, and
2900 (pointer), 30 (size)

and there are many times when the pointer is repeated several times.
The first entry has a similar style as the other entries, but I'm not sure what it is.

I don't know the rule behind the pointer repeating itself, but you should try a test to remove the extras and run it like normal.

 

[imperiumk]

I will keep dabbling into the technical side, I would only like to be able to dump the text. Possibly learn more as I go.


I guess i'll just start putting my services out as a translator if anyone needs it. I have a Japanese 3 (college) level vocabulary/understanding of the language.


Thanks for all your time.

 

[DarthNemesis]

I guess i'll just start putting my services out as a translator if anyone needs it.

http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=114090
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=119735

 

[psycoblaster]

I will keep dabbling into the technical side, I would only like to be able to dump the text. Possibly learn more as I go.


I guess i'll just start putting my services out as a translator if anyone needs it. I have a Japanese 3 (college) level vocabulary/understanding of the language.


Thanks for all your time.

I can help if you are only planning to dump text. Creating a program to dump text is easy to create once you figure out the file system.