umbreon112
Novice
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2019
- Messages
- 4
Hi everyone, I'm new here.
I recently came across this turn-based roguelike RPG (link) that was released in 2002 for Dreamcast and PC only in Japan. It's one of the best roguelikes I've played with 31 unique dungeons (ranging from low floor counts of 5~15F all the way up to 99F for the post game / brutal ones, and one massive 9999F dungeon that I'll likely never have time to play through).
The only issue is, it's so old and obscure that I haven't been able to find much discussion about the game, which is a shame... so I'd love to do a translation for the PC version so that it can potentially be played by others. I'm fluent in Japanese so the actual translation of text isn't an issue (easiest part), but everything else is new to me. I found RPG Codex by landing in this thread (link) while googling how to go about things.
I opened the .bin files of the game in a hex editor called wxMEdit (since it supports Shift-JIS encoding) and I found that one file contains NPC dialogue, and I can edit that to have it show up in-game (Thankfully the game already supports English characters, so I don't need to add that to the game). Here's an example of what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/4JCRMjb.png
But I couldn't find text for other things like items, player stats, option selections, etc. in any of the .bin files, so I'm guessing they might be compressed or something.
I also learned while googling that hex editing is probably not the best way to do a translation, because you're limited by character counts having to match the Japanese text, and it's a chore (though I personally don't mind hex editing, just happy to be able to translate at all, though I'd need to find where item text is for the game to really be playable).
I've tried to hunt down various tools for extracting the .bin files like UniExtract2 (failed) and quickbms (couldn't quite figure out how to use it) but haven't had any success with my attempts, so I feel like I've hit a wall on what to do next. Does anyone here have experience with this type of thing where they could offer insight / advice? I'd greatly appreciate any help.
Perhaps I should also mention, I tried searching for Japanese text for items in cheat engine (カタナ - Katana - E3 82 AB E3 82 BF E3 83 8A ) for example, but it didn't find any matches even in memory, though perhaps that's due to my settings / cheat engine not supporting Shift-JIS or something?
I recently came across this turn-based roguelike RPG (link) that was released in 2002 for Dreamcast and PC only in Japan. It's one of the best roguelikes I've played with 31 unique dungeons (ranging from low floor counts of 5~15F all the way up to 99F for the post game / brutal ones, and one massive 9999F dungeon that I'll likely never have time to play through).
The only issue is, it's so old and obscure that I haven't been able to find much discussion about the game, which is a shame... so I'd love to do a translation for the PC version so that it can potentially be played by others. I'm fluent in Japanese so the actual translation of text isn't an issue (easiest part), but everything else is new to me. I found RPG Codex by landing in this thread (link) while googling how to go about things.
I opened the .bin files of the game in a hex editor called wxMEdit (since it supports Shift-JIS encoding) and I found that one file contains NPC dialogue, and I can edit that to have it show up in-game (Thankfully the game already supports English characters, so I don't need to add that to the game). Here's an example of what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/4JCRMjb.png
But I couldn't find text for other things like items, player stats, option selections, etc. in any of the .bin files, so I'm guessing they might be compressed or something.
I also learned while googling that hex editing is probably not the best way to do a translation, because you're limited by character counts having to match the Japanese text, and it's a chore (though I personally don't mind hex editing, just happy to be able to translate at all, though I'd need to find where item text is for the game to really be playable).
I've tried to hunt down various tools for extracting the .bin files like UniExtract2 (failed) and quickbms (couldn't quite figure out how to use it) but haven't had any success with my attempts, so I feel like I've hit a wall on what to do next. Does anyone here have experience with this type of thing where they could offer insight / advice? I'd greatly appreciate any help.
Perhaps I should also mention, I tried searching for Japanese text for items in cheat engine (カタナ - Katana - E3 82 AB E3 82 BF E3 83 8A ) for example, but it didn't find any matches even in memory, though perhaps that's due to my settings / cheat engine not supporting Shift-JIS or something?
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