ROM Hack Text hacking with Luminous Arc 2(U)

[mastersord]

Before you ask, I have the game decompressed through DSLazy and can view the files in Crystal Tile and Tinke. The problem is that if i do a search through all the files in there in a straight text editor (in this case UltraEdit), nothing comes up that resembles Romanized text from in the game.

Doing some googling has lead me to someone who did a script dump years ago, and the dump has been lost to time. However I found this thread archived somewhere and this quote struck me:

..Dumps of the MsgPack.bin file (one for JP version, one for EN version), which is LA2's main dialogue library (but not its actual script file). The majority of dialogue, save for a few lines, can be found here.

The one that took me a little effort is the EN one, which is encrypted. The JP one is in plain text..

I have no idea where to begin to decrypt this file in a way i could re-encrypt it. After that I would need to figure out how scripting works in this game, and overcome those hurdles.

This is more of a learning exercise than anything else and probably won't yield anything other than some examples and then a lack of interest, but it maybe useful as a reference to future hackers.

 

[rastsan]

Doesn't that same page (from your link) say that they are both just text files?
"The one that took me a little effort is the EN one, which is encrypted. The JP one is in plain text.

They are just two TXT files. Open them with any software that supports multiple code pages - an advanced text editor, or your internet browser. Turn text wrap off, if it's a text editor."

My bet is try emeditor.

As to encryption...
well there already is an answer to that. Find a line of script that you know is in that file and look for it in a memory dump file (dump the memory using haste or emuhaste) The un-encrypted (if it really is encrypted) version will be found in there. just may not be the same thing. Either way try emeditor first with a re load - detect all. Which unless it is compressed in some way or reverse encoding should open easily. anyways from what they said if you don't want to go to the trouble of emedior, use ct2 and code page 932 or sjis should do (that and going through codepages one by one until you see text).
If you still have a problem could you post a link to that file so I could take a look?

 

[mastersord]

Doesn't that same page (from your link) say that they are both just text files?
"The one that took me a little effort is the EN one, which is encrypted. The JP one is in plain text.

They are just two TXT files. Open them with any software that supports multiple code pages - an advanced text editor, or your internet browser. Turn text wrap off, if it's a text editor."

My bet is try emeditor.

As to encryption...
well there already is an answer to that. Find a line of script that you know is in that file and look for it in a memory dump file (dump the memory using haste or emuhaste) The un-encrypted (if it really is encrypted) version will be found in there. just may not be the same thing. Either way try emeditor first with a re load - detect all. Which unless it is compressed in some way or reverse encoding should open easily. anyways from what they said if you don't want to go to the trouble of emedior, use ct2 and code page 932 or sjis should do (that and going through codepages one by one until you see text).
If you still have a problem could you post a link to that file so I could take a look?

The first part was referring to his/her/its text dump, and not the native file which I would need to re-compile back into it's original form.

You're right that i could run it through an emulator and look at a memory dump, but again, that gives me just the unencrypted form. I would need to learn the assembly used to unencrypt the file to figure out the algorhythm I think.

going through code-pages, some of the files look like they're shift-JIS.

I can't link to the file because I don't think it's a good idea to distribute part of a decompiled ROM. I can say that if you got the game, dumped it, and decompiled it, the specific file where he claims the text is located in, is at
..\data\msgData\msgPak.bin.

I'm looking at the structure and I'm wondering if there's a file in there with a word-list that maps to that file..