Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby rodrigo » Sat Feb 25, 2012 12:27 pm

what can I say
this is fantastic
thank you
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Missagh » Sun Feb 26, 2012 4:38 pm

I made a status update at the Phantasy Star Cave Facebook fan page that seem to have given some good attention to the video. It looks great so far! I would actually prefer that you continue with the voice over in the upcoming videos as it is interesting to follow the production beyond the visuals.
-- Missagh Alami, webmaster of Phantasy Star Cave.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Daren » Mon Feb 27, 2012 1:23 am

I agree with Missagh, I thought the video was pretty interesting and the descriptions were pretty well done and helpful
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Yeah, that's right
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby mikepjr » Fri Mar 02, 2012 6:57 am

I just wanted to say, you're doing great, keep up the good work.
I can't wait for it's completion.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Kyence » Thu Mar 22, 2012 4:18 am

A quick update. I finished the decompression of the Japanese event text and inserted the data into the game. This will allow me to translate the text into English as I play through the game (it will be easier for me to check for any errors this way). Inserting the decompressed data has been the most boring part of this translation process :lol:


Quite frankly, the idea of doing this for PSG2 and its 100+ events is scaring me away from even THINKING of taking on that behemoth without an extended break (I really think a team is necessary for the tasks required to translate G2; I know TheAlien is already working on the fonts).

Anyway, enough digressing. As I play through the game and encode the English text without any fancy algorithms or compression blah-blahs, it should progress nicely in the next few months. I'll make a couple of more videos and such.

The latest possible completion date is December 22, 2012 :twisted:

Thanks again for all of the positive feedback, everyone; it really got me through this part of the project!
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Rulakir » Sun Mar 25, 2012 7:15 am

And now we know what causes the world to end haha

Seriously nice work though!
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby carlsojos » Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:44 pm

I've no skills that really coincide with translation, but if you have something monotonous, I can help pick at that if you decide to hit PSG2.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby theAlien » Tue Apr 10, 2012 5:18 am

Kyence wrote:I know TheAlien is already working on the fonts).


I was. I had to stop coding a paint program to make sense of drawing new fonts because of work/life/etc. I'll get back to it eventually or someone can go ahead and build the fonts the painfully slow way if they want to.

They are stored in the game in this way:
20 bytes for the first horizontal row of the character.
Skip ahead 492 bytes -> for next 20 bytes of that character.
And so on until you have a full character.

There seem to be 512 byte blocks of characters with 12 empty bytes at the end of the block.
So basically the characters are scattered across a large chunk of data. I don't know why it is this way, but that's what's going on.

They are drawn in an odd way as well. Depending on the bit combination, you get four pixels, skip a row, four more pixels. Then when you draw in the next line, it brightens the first line or adds a shadow at the end, etc. I was going to investigate every combination further and add these things to the paint program but yeah, life. If someone gets a full English character set going before I get back to the program, then I guess I'll just ditch it.

I don't know where the pointers to these things are either, I never got around to that. I would also guess that the fonts are stored in PSG:1 in the same manner. Cheers...hope that info helps someone.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Tryphon » Tue Apr 10, 2012 9:30 pm

I'd gladly give an eye but don't understand well.

What file are you talking about (containing data among them characters) ? Where do characters start ? Could you describe a little more these "bits combination" ? How many bits per pixel ?

Ideally, could you give an exemple (if it doesn't require too much time) ?
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Kyence » Mon Apr 23, 2012 11:07 pm

Life can get in the way of hobbies sometimes :) I'm sure someone can make use of the data you found out, TheAlien!

I uploaded another video onto YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voGSZz6e3LU
This shows Myau and Odin joining, plus some of the fighting animations.

In the coding itself,I am up to Gothic with all four characters. As I was coding, something occurred to me: the whole Noah/Lutz debacle. Honestly, I prefer "Lutz" - blame that on Naflign! It's also more consistent with the other PS titles he is in. However, that does make me a bit hypocritical, since I keep Alis and Odin as is. So, I found a simple solution:
once I am done translating the game, I will make a separate version with "Noah" instead of "Lutz". Since I am dealing with raw coding here, and they are the same number of letters, it will be as simple as "Find/Replace."
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby theAlien » Wed Apr 25, 2012 12:28 am

Tryphon wrote:I'd gladly give an eye but don't understand well.

What file are you talking about (containing data among them characters) ? Where do characters start ? Could you describe a little more these "bits combination" ? How many bits per pixel ?

Ideally, could you give an exemple (if it doesn't require too much time) ?


Sorry, been busy but hopefully you can take a look at the data. The characters are in the mapdata.dat file and I had written two places, either 1E000h, or 51800h....I can't remember which right now. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which is which.......just delete half of it or something and watch the characters vanish. Then you know that's the one! ha. That's actually how I found them.

Obviously they're compressed, so you won't be able to edit anything until you decompress them. Ideally you should also compress all the data you modify, and I was working on doing that but obviously it's stalled right now. Some of the data I recall had nested compression, and for the life of me I can't recall if the font was one of them. If it is, it's not as scary as it sounds. First run of decompression results in a batch of new compressed blocks, and you simply treat them like new files to decompress. So you run the decompression again on these new blocks individually. Keep track of any blocks like this because you'll probably want to compress them again into those same nested chunks. The reason for doing this is probably hard to see at this point, (because the game is currently working...) but you may encounter crashes or problems down the road if you ignore it.

Hopefully all of that makes sense and will get you started. Cheers! I will update again if I get a chance to get any more work done.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Tryphon » Wed Apr 25, 2012 8:15 pm

Thanks for the answer.

First, some stupid questions, but I've never tried hacking PS2 games (or whatever). How do you play quickly modified game ? To be precise, I have an ISO of PSG1. I mount it, get the files, modify them, remake an iso and launch it or is there a way to launch a game in PCSX2 from a directory containing files from the ISO (so I can modify them and see the result immediately) ? (I'll be inestigating in that way, but if someone can spare me some time on this subject, I'd be grateful)

You say files are compressed. How to decompress them ? Have I to write a decompressor (if so, what is the algorithm used ? I was told it was a LZ-Renau. I know what is a LZ algorithm, but details vary from implementation to implementation, and I haven't found many documentation on the "Renau" variant) or is there some secret tool somewhere ?

Thanks in advance for any help.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Kyence » Thu Apr 26, 2012 1:54 pm

There is a decompression program specifically made for the PSG games; Orakio Rob's team made it and it the main tool I have used. He has it on his site http://gazetadealgol.com.br . Go to the Diversos tab, and then Downloads. The program will be in .c format as "descompressor." You will then need to download a free c compiler. The instructions are in Portugeuse. I translated that into English for my own purposes, but Orakio Rob has not given me the okay to distribute it yet, so you
may have to ask him. However, the Portugeuse program is easy enough to use : type descompressor <FILE.DAT> [offset of the part of the file you want to decompress that starts with CM, i.e., 14000] [SAVEDECOMPRESSIONFILENAME.DAT]>[SAVE
PRINTOUTNAME.TXT]

You can do alot with the printout, though placing it back into the file so it can be in the game without breaking it is a little more complex. You cannot place the the decompressed section completely: you have to splice it in,change flags in the CM
header, and then at the beginning of the file. When I am done with the PSG1 translation, I plan on making a small tutorial about how to do it.

In the meantime, I hope this helps you get acquainted with the tools,so you can play around with it

What I have had to do was use UltraISO. Do a Google search for it. If you have a PS2 ISO already, simply open it in UltraISO.It will show the files that are within the ISO.Simply extract these files. The ones you would be editing text-wise would be the SLPM file and the EVENT.DAT file. I edit these in the MadEdit hex editor - it is also free and allows you to see the hexcode as SHIFT-JIS, which is what the Japanese is written in. There is a limited amount of English letters already encoded in the game; Using MadEdit,open the SLPM file and scroll around until you see a long list of letters;
it is usually in the first 50% of the file. When you edit the file, save it, and place it back into the ISO using UltraIso. Before
you save, you MUST go into the options and make sure "change checksum" is OFF. Thus, the original game's checksum is preserved. Then, simply load the ISO as you normally would into the PCSX2 emulator and play
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Tryphon » Thu Apr 26, 2012 9:25 pm

Thanks for this helpful answer. I'll try to make it work, I'll post if there's something I can't achieve and see if I can help.
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Re: Phantasy Star Generation:1 English translation project

Postby Tryphon » Fri Apr 27, 2012 6:28 pm

Kyence wrote: You cannot place the the decompressed section completely: you have to splice it in,change flags in the CM header,


If I understood correctly, you mean set all flags to 0 (since nothin will be compressed any more), or is there a need to recompress modified data (I believe the portuguese document found on gazetadealgol says it isn't necessary, but I don't speak portuguese, so I may be mistaken) ?

and then at the beginning of the file.


That I don't understand. What is there at the beginning of the file ?


Otherwise, thanks for the help and the precious tools (and thanks to the brazilian hackers).

I see you're translating the text. Do you know what do the codes between pieces of text mean (I see lots of 40, 633x, 25xx which doesn't seem to represent characters) ?

Are you forced to replace text by texts of the same size to respect pointers somewhere or can you specify pointers ?

Do you keep SHIFT-JIS encoding ?


EDIT : I managed to draw characters. They are in MAPDATA.DAT @ 1E000 (for PSG2) (at least, one of the sheet, I don't see katakanas and hiraganas inside, nor latin characters). Something bothers me tough : they look like each character is brightly drawn onto a darker one. Here's the sheet (garbage at the beginning must be some auxiliary data, I'll investigate). Did those among you who actually played PSG2 (it's not my case) see those "surimpressed characters" ?

res-MAPDATA-1E000.png
res-MAPDATA-1E000.png (187.67 KiB) Viewed 24786 times


At 51800, I get that (I've yet to figure how to get colors) which is funny since the file is from PSG2...

res-MAPDATA-51800.png
res-MAPDATA-51800.png (79.76 KiB) Viewed 24786 times
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