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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Ryusui |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba                  Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| "Don't know why, but somebody gained EXP."
Hi. I'm new here. I'm sort of a high-level dabbler in translation hacking...I've done some work on several different projects, only one of which is actually close to completion, though nobody will probably care about it when it's done. 
Anyways. I'm good enough that I've tweaked Klarth's Atlas to my needs, implemented 1-and-a-half VWFs (the second one is still a WIP; you can see it in action in my avatar...sorta) and cracked a compression scheme. I'm no newbie, I just prefer going things alone and I have an evil goblin in command of my attention span who turns off the juice just when things are getting good. Did I mention I'm my own translator? My conversation skills would probably get me laughed at...but then again, the Japanese seem to appreciate gaijin attempts to speak their language. Still, while it still needs some more tweaks, the script I've written for my project is pretty good...maybe a little over-the-top for the source material at times, but it's close enough to the original meaning, if not the spirit (of which there is sadly little  ).
If you want to know more, check out my DevBlog; the main page has nothing in the way of actual content, but I've been updating the DevBlog...well, "sorta-weekly" for the past four months. Amazing how much I was able to do in just the first few weeks...almost disappointing that I haven't finished the damn thing yet. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| "Ryusui said 'Hello', and stayed. Don't know why, but somebody gained EXP."
Hi. I'm new here. I'm sort of a high-level dabbler in translation hacking...I've done some work on several different projects, only one of which is actually close to completion, though nobody will probably care about it when it's done.
Anyways. I'm good enough that I've tweaked Klarth's Atlas to my needs, implemented 1-and-a-half VWFs (the second one is still a WIP; you can see it in action in my avatar...sorta) and cracked a compression scheme. I'm no newbie, I just prefer going things alone and I have an evil goblin in command of my attention span who turns off the juice just when things are getting good. Did I mention I'm my own translator? My conversation skills would probably get me laughed at...but then again, the Japanese seem to appreciate gaijin attempts to speak their language. Still, while it still needs some more tweaks, the script I've written for my project is pretty good...maybe a little over-the-top for the source material at times, but it's close enough to the original meaning, if not the spirit (of which there is sadly little ).
If you want to know more, check out my DevBlog; the main page has nothing in the way of actual content, but I've been updating the DevBlog...well, "sorta-weekly" for the past four months. Amazing how much I was able to do in just the first few weeks...almost disappointing that I haven't finished the damn thing yet. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| This, in case you haven't noticed, appears in the sample post at the bottom of your profile.
Am I the only one here who knows what fhqwhgads is? Let alone how to pronounce it? (I mean, besides the guy who set it up as part of the sample posts to begin with.) (edited by Ryusui on 06-16-06 02:25 AM) |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Sorry. I just hail from a corner of the digital cosmos where Homestar Runner is either ignored or frowned upon.
Another reason why GameFAQs is starting to bore the hell out of me. You'll find me on the anime boards and a few game boards as "Yusuke Urameshi". Pardon my lack of originality; YYH was just starting in the U.S. when I joined. I'm also known by a couple of other aliases, but nowadays I use "Ryusui" whenever possible. And I will never, ever, ever write a song about the Sibbie. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Um...you know, a person who can actually make use of your "romanization patch" is probably going to be able to read the original Japanese text anyway. | |||
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba  Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Why settle for number 1? If lower means better, why not vote him in as...number 0? Or number -1? That'd sure show the world how good he is! XD | |||
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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I'm not sure if this belongs here, but whatever. Humor the newcomer. I'm not going to assume everybody here is a translation hacker, but have you ever stumbled upon a piece of script that you really, really wanted to hone to perfection, due to it being 1. in the opening, 2. a recurring dialogue/monologue that appears in multiple games in the series ("Now I will step forward to realize this wish...") or 3. just really memorable? Well, for reasons better explained in my DevBlog (sorry about the pop-ups), I've been working on a translation of Sylvanian Families for GBC. You may laugh now. The Sylvanian Families games-every single freakin' one of them-feature a monologue that, incidentally, also appears on the official Japanese page for the toys and is therefore a very important piece of material to translate. Whatever I use, it will appear in all the Sylvanian Families translations I do, and so I want to get it right the first time. The thing is, part of the reason I'm doing this is as atonement for a horrendous act of hypocrisy. Let me start this brief mini-rant against myself by saying that I hate Tokyopop's work on the .hack manga and novels. There are errors, inconsistencies and general acts of wanton dumbassity cover-to-cover in all of them I've read, and every single one could have been rectified if the translator had bothered to play the damn video game for five minutes. Five minutes on .hack//INFECTION would teach these people that Orca is a hulking Blademaster and not a skimpily-clad Werewolf (that's Ouka), that Balmung got his wings from an event called The One Sin and that the keyword to the infamous "Navel of Lake" area is "Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground". And there's more stupidity that I've yet to mention here. In any case, these kinds of stupid inconsistencies drive me insane wherever I encounter them, and I do encounter them a lot. If you're not going to do the research, people, then do us all a favor and give the project to somebody who will. Somewhere in the middle of the events I describe in the post I linked to, I decided to try translating Sylvanian Families 1 just for the hell of it. This was about a year ago. I decided I would just be lazy and do a straight translation from start to finish. What I now consider karma bit me in the ass before I could do any serious damage, thankfully: the script, as noted, is a compiled mess of jumps, branches and case routines that Klarth's Atlas couldn't handle as-is (as-was?). So the project landed on the back burner, where it belonged until I had a gruesome epiphany about a month before my first post there: I was a damn hypocrite. All that screaming and crying over inconsistent translations and I had done exactly what my hated foes did. If I hadn't been hamstrung by Atlas' weakness and Epoch's twisted genius, I may very well have put out something I would only have been embarrassed by. So I did my research. In the original Japanese version, for starters, there are no names. I'm serious. All the furry figurines and their digital counterparts have is their family and position therein: the protagonist, for instance, is "Aiborii Usagi no Onna no Ko", or "Ivory Rabbit Girl". Thankfully, the Western releases of the toys (in the U.S., you might know them as "Calico Critters"...ugh) do have names, and those are the ones I'm using in my game. "Aster Dandelion" is the protagonist in my translation, and all the other characters have also been re(properly?)named to match their Western counterparts. A frustrating decision in any other case (why the hell is Persona 2 still using the crappified names from the first game?), but very much appropriate here. The same thing goes for the opening monologue. I've heard that there is indeed an official English equivalent for the quote, and I'm trying desperately to find it. I have to say, part of the reason is because the opening monologue to Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne is permanently lodged in my brain, both in English and in Japanese (I had to hunt the Japanese version down ), and I want something just as good to use in my translation. It's cute, it's furry and it's got only marginally more actual gameplay than Animal Crossing, but dammit, I can still try to do a good job on it.
This post, the first in my DevBlog, contains a rough translation of the opening monologue; unfortunately, the link to the original version on the Japanese site is dead due to the site having updated in the past few months, but here is a link to the new page. If you know anything about Sylvanian Families or know anybody who does, I need to dig up the official English version for this, if it exists. And if it doesn't, I welcome any and all contributions from aspiring or accomplished writers. A voice in the darkness beguiles me, "Truth is a mystery, unraveled by the candles' flames." (edited by Xkeeper on 06-17-06 09:26 PM) (edited by Ryusui on 06-17-06 10:14 PM) (edited by Ryusui on 06-17-06 10:14 PM) |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| You've probably got the memory (RAM) offset, not the ROM offset. | |||
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Ah, I forgot to mention. If you'll read my DevBlog beyond the two posts I provided, you'd know that I've implemented a VWF and that my translation is about 80% complete and 95% playable. The nasty 20% is mostly comprised of a pair of script chunks devoted entirely to the "Hanauranai Jiten"; literally "Flower Reading Encyclopedia" ("Flower Dictionary" in my translation). It's a little gimmick you get for completing a sidequest: enter your birthdate and it tells you your "birth flower", what that flower represents and what kind of person you're therefore supposed to be. Note that this means I have 366 (yes, the game counts leap years) triplets of "flower", "meaning" and "fortune" to translate. I'll probably just release a "version 0.95" or whatever patch once I've got everything else done; the game is perfectly playable without it (and winnable without ever even finding the damn thing, though it is pretty easy). | |||
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba  Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Because it's not pointing to a place in the ROM.
As far as the hardware is concerned, RAM and ROM are the same thing: a great big sequential collection of numbers. The difference is that the RAM is 1. both readable and writable and 2. the system's internal workspace for all its number-crunching, while the ROM is 1. Read-Only Memory and 2. the numbers that comprise the game itself. If the offset is pointing to a place in RAM, then find the place in RAM and use breakpoints to figure out when it's written with the proper value and where in the ROM it's coming from. This will require the willingness to understand a bit of how ASM works (although not any actual hacking). |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Think of memory as being one great big collection of address numbers on a particular street. Say we know Rom Street has houses on it numbered from, say, 8000 to 9000 (yes, it's a very long street). If there's a number between 8000 and 9000 in memory, then we know that it has to be an address on this Rom Street. Otherwise, we know it's not on Rom Street and we don't bother looking there.
I know jack about NES programming, so I don't know what values the hardware treats the ROM as, but apply what you know to my example and you'll get it. In brief: you're not getting the "go to this place in the ROM" menu option because it's not a valid ROM address. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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Originally posted by insectduel No it's not. It's a pointless middleman that can actually impair translation instead of aid it. (And furthermore, the word is "romaji".) If you're some kind of freakin' madman whose idea of translation is to play through the game and take screenshots of every single dialog box, then I have one word for you: Romjuice. Once you have a proper table (that uses real Japanese symbols and not often-confusing romaji), you can use WindHex to find the script in the ROM and use Romjuice to extract it. If your "translator" says they can translate from Japanese but that it has to be romanized first, then get another translator. I'm by no means perfect, but I can read and I can translate from Japanese, and I don't need some idiot "romanization patch" to do so. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| ...You know, maybe I'm dumb, but while I appreciate the gesture, I think this would probably work best somewhere more...non-specific, like the General Chat board I originally put it on. I mean, I can't help but feel like I'm the only romhacker on Earth who's heard of this stuff. Probably not the case, but this is more of a general question about the franchise rather than a specific question about actual romhacking (which I'm doing just fine with, for the most part).
But while it's here, I'd like to know if there are any decent GBA THUMB disassemblers out there...I'm back to work on SF1, but SF4's VWF is very much a WIP (as noted on my DevBlog), and I've decided the best way to get it to do exactly what I want is to just rip out the print routine's guts and start from scratch. I've already mapped out how the entire thing runs (almost, anyway...VBA-SDL-H is my best friend ), but it'd be nice if I had a tool that could just rip code directly from the ROM in the places I specify and export it to a format I can just run back through Goldroad (my trusty assembler) with minimal modification. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Listen to Labmaster. His VBA-SDL-H is a romhacker's tactical nuke for GBA programming.
On a side note, Labmaster...while you're here, do you know of any good GBA disassemblers? Something that would allow me to selectively dismantle a piece of ROM into code I could just run back through Goldroad (which still appears to have a couple of bugs, but hey) and get something I could insert back into the original file? I've come to a fateful decision with my SF4 VWF...I'm going to rip the guts out of the entire print routine and refashion the whole damn thing in my own image. Of course, this entails that I have its slippery intestines in hand to remake into my cat's cradle... If you look at my avatar, you'll see what I've got done in action...sorta. 1, the text is just barely legible in that squashed screencap, and 2, it's displaying a quote from SMT3: Nocturne's opening...but it's functioning nonetheless. Problem is, the print routine used in the actual game uses most of the same functions but works slightly differently, so if I'm going to get it to look right everywhere, my one and only option is to do some massive code surgery. Bah, here's what it looks like unsquashed. Click to view. (edited by Ryusui on 06-18-06 02:36 AM) |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| It might take a little digging, but see if there's a pointer somewhere in the ROM that points to the location of the debug menu text...maybe I've been working on my Sylvanian Families project too long, but if you know some ASM and do enough backtracking, you might be able to find the routine that calls the debug menu and bring it to life.
Or maybe it got #IFDEF DEBUG'd out of the final version. Only one way to find out. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Sounds like you didn't find an "Infinite Health" code for monsters as much as a "Zero ATK" code.
If a higher number means a weaker monster, then the obvious conclusion is that it's not how much HP the monster has, but how much damage is being done to it. If a monster has 3 HP, then 2 ATK will kill it in two hits. 8 ATK is enough to kill it nearly three times over, and 1 ATK makes it take three hits. And 0 ATK means your attacks do nothing and never will. Check the value again after a level-up (make sure you increase Attack power!) and see if it increases. Anyways, about your first question. Once the value's been written to, backtrack in the code as directed until you come upon the LDA instruction that loads the value from the ROM. I know little about the details of NES ASM, though I've worked with SNES and GBA and much of the concepts are similar. The offset that's being loaded from might be given as part of the instruction; if not, set a code breakpoint there and when it breaks, note the values of the registers. Check them for a ROM address; if there's one in there, that's what you're looking for. |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| By any chance, when you tweak memory values like that in FCEUXD, does the memory value merely change to what you specify, or is it permanently set to that value?
If it sets it permanently to that value, that might have the side effects you're talking about if other parts of the game code use that value for different purposes. If it only changes it temporarily, then we may very well have a larger problem on our hands: the value isn't merely an ATK value; it handles other stuff that the game can't run properly without. Do what you did the first time and see if it has a consistent effect in a fight: higher values mean monsters die quicker, lower values mean monsters die slower. And double-check to see if our "ATK value" hypothesis is right to begin with by seeing if it changes on its own when you increase ATK on level-up. Heck, make sure you didn't change the wrong value by mistake by double-checking to see if the castle errors crop up again. Romhacking is mostly experimentation: try something, see if it works, and if it doesn't, try something else. Even experts have to take the rinse, lather, repeat approach more often than not. The scientific method applies readily to this line of work: if you think you've found your miracle, the first thing you do is not trumpet it to the world, but see if you can get it to happen again, and consistently. Same thing goes for glitches. Nothing bugs (no pun intended) a programmer of any description more than a glitch that only happens sometimes. As for your question, I looked on Romhacking.net, but no dice. Google is your friend...learn how to shake him down for every cent he's worth. (edited by Ryusui on 06-18-06 03:57 AM) |
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Sorry, misread the post. | |||
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| Right now, I'm assembling source code by copy-and-pasting each line from a trace file or typing them in manually using vanilla VBA's disassembler. Anything would be a time improvement, not to mention an accuracy one: I realized to my horror at one point that if I had made any kind of mistake, I'd have to compare hundreds of lines of code to find it. My shortcut was to dump the original binary code and use WindHex's file compare to check for any differences (apart from the fact that Goldroad 1.6 and 1.7 compile ldrh instructions as ldsb ones at inappropriate times; I had to work around that to make my code behave properly); it worked well, but I'd prefer to be sure the first time. | |||
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Ryusui Red Paragoomba Since: 06-15-06 Last post: 6413 days Last view: 6308 days |
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| I hope you're ready for some serious hacking...that cellphone in the name entry screen gives me both ideas and sheer terror.
See, as you've probably already worked out, each button corresponds to a different kana group: a, k-, s-, t-, n-, h-, m-, y-, r-, dakuten, the wa/wo/n group and symbols. But American phones don't work that way. One of the most interesting things this translation is probably gonna have to do is rewrite the cellphone so that it works like an American one; ABC2, DEF3, GHI4, JKL5, MNO6, PQRS7, TUV8, WXYZ9, etc...and instead of a dakuten key, you'd have Caps Shift. Side note: It's Ryusui. |
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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Ryusui |
