If DS Lazy works... why should there be any need for another tool?

(I haven't heard of the other tool, if there is good reason to use it I'm interested in hearing it myself)

Btw, any game in particular you have an eye on?

My sig should be a clue. Not the banner, but the text around it. ^_^

EDIT: Anywhere else besides Turbo Upload I can get NDSTools? Stupid site chock full of ads...I can't seem to get the damn thing to understand I want a file, not some video sharing service or some other crap.

Is this better? ^_^

Well, this project has gotten off to a rocky start. ^_^; The game's font file is easy to find, but it looks like it's compressed...hopefully it's something documented and not a hand-rolled Konami algorithm.

That, and when I try to run either Kira Game or L wo Tsugu Mono in NO$GBA, the game boots but gives me the message (in Japanese) "Data could not be read. Please turn off the power and reinsert the game card."

Resetting the system is no help. I can't help but feel like I'm missing something obvious...

EDIT: There's the problem. I forgot to select DS save media under options. ^_^;

As long as I'm making progress/the project holds my interest. ^_^;

An ALT-TAB crashed the game during the intro, so I haven't really started yet, but it's kinda funny: after giving the backstory, the game opens with L and Light trading accusations over who is Kira while everyone else takes sides. The vote is against Light: finally, he admits to being Kira.

...Turns out it's all a thought exercise L has conjured up to help them profile Kira: "The Kira Game". (And yes, that's what I'll use as my English translation's subtitle.) I had heard before that this was something of a Mafia-type game, but I wasn't sure until now how it fit into the story. XD

That said, still no luck with the graphics files, but I have made some important headway: all the text is stored in Shift-JIS format. There's an extra "02" between characters for no reason I can discern, but it should be simple enough to customize either a table or a script extractor to handle it.

EDIT: Oh. My God.

I just now tried fiddling with the game's script...found a string that appears in the game's tutorial and replaced the kana "Kira" with the letters "Kir" (yeah, I wanted to fit "Kira" in, but Jing's little buddy will have to suffice for now), padding the bytes with 02s as with the rest of the script.

This was the end result.



This...is the first time I've encountered a built-in proportional font in a game. Ever. *cries epic tears of joy*

Now, if I could only make some headway with the game's graphics, this project might actually be doable...

Sorta. I've seen enough of the script to tell that it follows the plot of the manga, but the actual gameplay segments are something of a take on Mafia. Check it out on Wikipedia.

Basically, "The Kira Game" involves a group of people - "Investigators" - among whom are two special players whose identities are secret. Those two are L and Kira. The game involves a back-and-forth between all the players - that is, the player and the AI-controlled characters - trying to figure out who Kira is while simultaneously trying to allay suspicions that they themselves might be L or Kira. At the end of each turn, a vote is cast, and if a majority wins, the chosen player is "arrested" and removed from the game. The object of the game is for either L or Kira to be removed: if Kira is arrested, then L and the Investigators win. If L is removed, then Kira wins. Kira also has the unique ability to pass "Judgement" on other players: he can unilaterally remove other players from the game (though remember that at this point in the manga, the method was unknown to all but Light: only near the end of the first half was the existence of the Death Note revealed to L and the investigators).

I'm still going through the tutorial, though, so there might be more that I haven't read yet. ^_^

Oh, as for the intro, that's part of Death Note. The rules for the Death Note are written in English: between chapters in the graphic novels and on the eyecatches in the anime, they're actually bilingual.

I've been forgetting to mention something important.

The graphics files are all in .nsbmd format, apart from the font, which is an .nftr; from what I understand, these are both documented formats, but all my Googling has failed to find me an app that can view them. Any help?