Hacking Unable to find text in main.dol

[Krailon]

I didn't see a translation subforum like there is for NDS games, so I guess I'll put this here. Sorry if it doesn't belong here. Although so far it basically is hacking more than anything

.

I recently started playing Bleach Versus Crusade. I told my friend about it, but he couldn't read the menus, so I threw together a little menu translation (no, I didn't even think to suggest one of the menu translations already floating around

). That got me wondering if I could do a translation patch, even if I just did the menu. I guess it's more of an experimentation/learning thing than anything else. However, so far I've been completely unable to find any hint of japanese characters anywhere inside main.dol. I've tried UTF8 and shift-JIS without any luck.It seems like I'm either doing something REALLY wrong, or they used some weird encoding that I don't know about. Has anybody gotten curious and taken a look at the main.dol for this game? If so, have you managed to find any of the japanese text? I don't think that it's in any of the other files because most of the other files are .mrg/.mrgc (model) files and .lyt (layout) files, and besides, there should be at least SOME in-game text in the main.dol.

At this point I would be happy just being able to FIND some of the text, let alone replace it. although I'd still like to give the translation patch a try.

 

[giantpune]

idk about NDS games, but in wii games, there can be text stored anywhere in the game image. for example, they can have a file called "menu_text_es.balls" and "menu_text_jap.balls". then the game can load different text strings for different languages by loading a different file from the disc.

 

[Krailon]

Yeah, but while that's true, there's usually at least a little bit of in-game text stored in the main.dol. And I'm not seeing any at all. So that makes me thing that something is weird. Also, I've searched a few of the more random files in the ISO such as "event_script_data_adv_jpn.dat" and "event_script_data_sys_jpn.dat" and I still don't see any japanese text in any of them either. That's what makes me wonder what's going on...

 

[WiiCrazy]

Also it's possible that the actual resource be compressed/archived in the main.dol... search for common compression/archiving headers...

 

[Krailon]

Now that is something I didn't think of. I'll give it a try, although I'm not super familiar with Wii disc internal formats. Hopefully it's a common compression, not a Wii disc file specific one

. Thanks

 

[WiiCrazy]

Btw, are you sure you are looking at it correctly?

I see lots of japanese text at offset 0044E660 encoded in Shift JIS

like

アップタイマ (up time)
ラウンドタイマ (round time)

 

[Krailon]

See, I knew I was doing something wrong. But I've got like 15 hex editors, including something I wrote myself specifically for this, and I'm still seeing nothing

 

[WiiCrazy]

Download JWPce (http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/jwpce.html)

In JWPce
go to Utilities -> Options -> File/Clipboard-> Clipboard Options
Set Import to Shift-JIS there..

then copy text from the address I gaved above... paste into the JWPce window... you'll see the japanese text...

Beware though, modifying an executable is not like modifying an ordinary file.. You should leave the string sizes and the overall file intact and just change the actual individual strings and pray that the game doesn't make any check on them...

ps: A hint for you, noticing a Shift JIS japanese text in a normal ascii view is possible through ƒ character... it just happens to be occuring a lot due to the nature of the encoding I guess...

 

[Krailon]

Holy crap it works. You just made my day. Thanks!

The question now is why won't any of my hex editors display shift-JIS, even the ones that say they will? :S

 

[WiiCrazy]

Holy crap it works. You just made my day. Thanks!

The question now is why won't any of my hex editors display shift-JIS, even the ones that say they will? :S

Hex editors are byte oriented tools, In shift jis 2 bytes makes a single japanese kanji/kana... And possibly those editors are not detecting the text as SJIS there because the text is preceded with random bytes...

To overcome that you should work through a lot of cut & paste I guess...(if indeed there are hex editors out there that supports SJIS though, I never used one)

 

[Krailon]

Yeah, I guess that's workable. I'll probably just code something up to make things a little easier

. Now I'm curious though, how were you able to find the text when I couldn't?

 

[WiiCrazy]

Yeah, I guess that's workable. I'll probably just code something up to make things a little easier

. Now I'm curious though, how were you able to find the text when I couldn't?

It was partly luck, I first searched for common compression stuff,
Uª8-
Yaz0
LZ77

Then I found a reference to LZ77 in the dol but that was just part of a function name, not a header... Then followed down quickly to see if there are repeated ƒ characters seeking with my eyes... found it...

If you get familiar with how a certain chunk of bytes look as a whole like a picture then you just need to take a glimpse of it seeking it through the pages... In the past I've done this for c64 code, music data, note tables, graphics, font data and so on... Now I can differentiate between code & data in a ppc executable... Though it's now a bit of hard since sizes are 100 times big compared to old times...