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[Koji]

This isn't exactly about super card, but I couldn't think of where else to post this, but if it wasn't for the supercard I wouldn't have been able to do it.

I'm not a super 1337 rom hacker or anything... but I couldn't sleep last night so I decided I'd play around with a DS rom and see what all I could accomplish with it.



It's not much, and for those that have never played Bokujou Monogatari you may not even know what the big deal is (and since it was taken with my webcam, it's very blurry).

The big deal is, very top line reads "Load this save?" where it used to have a bunch of japanese text. It took me 4 hours just to get that one line right... but don't let that fool you, this was mainly because I was messing around with lots of things and I made quite a few interesting (to me anyways) discoveries.

For starters, this game uses the GBA format for graphics, so existing GBA graphics editing programs (tilED for example) work well with them. I was actually surprised to see tons and tons of graphics completely uncompressed and so easy to alter. The only thing that was compressed was (annoyingly enough) the font. I feared that would have been the end of my joy ride since I don't know how to handle graphic compression, but to my joy I made a second discovery.

Bokujou Monogatari has all of it's text encoded in standard ASCII. Merely had to load it up into a hex editor that had multibyte text support and I could edit to my hearts content.

This information is probably already known to anyone who does any fair amount of toying around with DS already, and for those that are interested but aren't probably don't have the knowledge to use this. Still, this gives me a fun little side project to do. So

if anyone is interested, I might release a patch for the game that translates some of the menu options so that some people that love harvest moon, but don't know enough japanese can at least partially enjoy the game.

[derrace]

cool find!

Any chance of doing a english patch for Jump Jump Superstars?

:razz:

[cory1492]

That would be a wicked patch indeed, wanted to try that game but... Im barely good at english never mind Japanese  :lol:

[davhuit]

Nice

(was doing romhacking few years ago and know it's not that easy to understand at the beginning)

[Koji]

cool find!

Any chance of doing a english patch for Jump Jump Superstars?

:razz:

I haven't even taken a look at jump superstars. It could fairly easy like Bokujou Monogatari, or it could be a royal pain in the ass (I'm going to guess the later on jump super stars just by looking at the game, but I can't be sure)

If anyone knows how to use a program like tiled they can check the game themselves and see if the text is easy enough to find. Just set it to GBA 4bpp mode and scan the rom.

Cory: It'll probably be awhile since I'll do it a few lines at a time and there is no way I'll do anything close to a full translation (natsume will have the english version released probably in march-may of next year) but I'm currently planning on translating the opening parts where it asks to put in your name, birthday, dog name, etc etc as well as the phone menu.

If I have the time, I may also translate the girls reactions to gifts... but I don't think that's too necessary since you can pretty much tell just by looking at their pictures whether they like something or not.

And here's a couple more screen shots:

[davhuit]

What hex editor did you use ?

I was looking at an us rom, not really hard to find some text (yugioh is an easy one see below)



But never did for a Japanese game so, and JSS don't seem to have some US word to find a first table of character (except some ON/OFF/KO, and 2/3 words letters are not really enough to make one).

The dialogues wouldn't be too hard to translate as I barely understand most of them in the screen (so in a .txt file and with the ability to check some kanjis with a dictionnary, it would be even easier).

Edit : Finally, it seems to be what romhackers fear the most, a rom with compression, cuz I finally find a "long word" in US in the game (JUMP SUPER STARS) in the wifi menu but no result for a character's table, so no need to search further I think.

Edit 2 : Find things like directory/xxx.cpp o_o (seems like compilation files), will check later, I think I read somewhere ndstool or devkitarm (or a thing like that) was able to dissasembly, it it's work maybe dissasembling it (try to find text and if there's some, translate them), then reassembly the rom would work (there's nothing to lose to try it anyway).

[Koji]

I just used hex workshop... and yes some games will definitely have compressed text. I didn't have any problems with harvest moon. The game will be released in a few months so I see no more reason for me to work on it.

I should have thought about breaking apart the rom. Probably would make looking for text a lot easier, ahh well.

It does seem that most DS games that don't use compression for the text follow ASCII standard. Did you try doing a relative search as well? Or just regular text?

[davhuit]

Even a compression would even be a big problem (if I manage to localize at least one word).

Did you manage to display Japanese in ASCII or did you change sentences with luck until you find one ?

(I don't think a Relative Searcher Support Japanese).

[vallich]

I also played a little bit with my rom Mario and luigi and found out that the new text must be exact the same lenght as the original text.
For example:
Plupp --> privacy : The game will not work
Now i know how the Hexing work and now i try to hack JSS!!
Good luck to me ;-)

[davhuit]

I also played a little bit with my rom Mario and luigi and found out that the new text must be exact the same lenght as the original text.
For example:
Plupp --> privacy : The game will not work
Now i know how the Hexing work and now i try to hack JSS!!
Good luck to me ;-)

Not really, in most of games, you can modify the pointers to change the size of the text, or making a bank expanding (transfer the text elswhere, where some bytes are free).

Tried FMA too but same, I need to find a good appz for Japanese rom and maybe it'll be easier (My few years romhacking are a bit far away lol). I'll try to take the rom you tried Koji, and see if I can manage to find the text to see if the problem is me or not.

[Koji]

I also played a little bit with my rom Mario and luigi and found out that the new text must be exact the same lenght as the original text.
For example:
Plupp --> privacy : The game will not work
Now i know how the Hexing work and now i try to hack JSS!!
Good luck to me ;-)

Not really, in most of games, you can modify the pointers to change the size of the text, or making a bank expanding (transfer the text elswhere, where some bytes are free).

Tried FMA too but same, I need to find a good appz for Japanese rom and maybe it'll be easier (My few years romhacking are a bit far away lol). I'll try to take the rom you tried Koji, and see if I can manage to find the text to see if the problem is me or not.

Dav: It's not hard to do a relative search for japanese text as long as it's not multi-byte (which seems to be the standard for most new GBA and DS games). Since the DS uses the same 4bpp and 8bpp modes as the GBA you can just open the roms up in a tile editor that supports GBA modes and do a scan till you find the fonts (hopefully)

I did notice that the game didn't follow the standard exactly, US characters were stored a little differently, but it was quick enough to figure out (as I said above in the first post or two)

[davhuit]

I just got the rom, can you give me the adress of a sentence to spare me some times ?

thanks a lot.

[Normmatt]

Me and a friend have also hacked this game and translated a fair bit of it but stopped once we relised it was being released in the states.
but if you want anything related to this game i have just ask.

[N.Nescio]

I would go with Davhuit's suggestion.

Try to use Darkfader's NDSTOOL. With this program you can extract all the files from the ROM and then you can modify end/or replace those files. After modifying you can compile the ROM again.

There are ROMS out there which have all the sounds as separate files, so you can even modify the sounds. (eg. TAK3)

Mario and Luigi has some text in
- DATA\BAI\Bmes.dat
- DATA\BData\mfset_*.dat

Don't have any spare-time at the moment. Otherwise I would try it out myself.

[Koji]

Check the dates... thread necromancy is bad :p