Anyway, I've played and beaten two chapters thus far, and so I've got a little gameplay update.

Each cycle starts with a number of remaining turns equal to the number of players times 3; that is, play rotates through all the current players 3 times per cycle. You've got six options apart from "Pass":

Raise Trust/Lower Suspicion
Raise Suspicion/Lower Trust
Greatly Raise Trust/Greatly Lower Suspicion
Greatly Raise Suspicion/Greatly Lower Trust
Raise Suspicion
Greatly Raise Suspicion

Each command consumes a different amount of Talk Points; these are arranged in increasing order. Every player has a different amount of Suspicion towards and Trust in the other players: if a player suspects someone else more than you, that's good, because that means they'll be more likely to vote for that person to be arrested. Trust is also good: the more the other players Trust you, the more Talk Points you recover when it's your turn. (It might also affect other things, like how much your accusations affect other players' opinions, but I'm not entirely certain.)

Commands are targeted at a single player: ones that affect Trust alter how much the targeted player trusts you, and ones that affect Suspicion alter how much everyone else suspects that player (I think). Your player might speak on behalf of another, stating how unlikely they believe it is that he or she is Kira and thus earning their trust, or accuse that player of being Kira, typically incurring a trust penalty in the process. Naturally, it's quite a trick to insinuate that someone is Kira without negatively affecting their opinion of you, which is why those last two commands are so expensive. There are also Special Commands that have more drastic effects and appropriately more expensive price tags attached.

A big part of gameplay is arguments. When anybody says something, another player has the chance to either Agree with the statement (increasing its effect) or Oppose it (reversing its effect), at a Talk Point cost. You can then Counter the opposition if you have Talk Points remaining: it's possible for such arguments to build into long strings of chains, with increasing Talk Point costs at each iteration, and when someone chooses not to Counter any further - or, more likely, simply runs out of Talk Points - the opponent wins the argument.

After all the turns have been used up, the game goes on to the vote. Everybody votes on who to arrest under suspicion of being Kira: a majority vote, that is, half or more players voting for a particular player, results in that player being arrested and thus removed from the game. If Kira is arrested as a result, then the game is over and L wins. If L is arrested, the game is over and Kira wins. If an innocent Investigator is arrested, then play will continue, but L will suffer a penalty: his max Talk Points are reduced by 20. There's also supposed to be a Worshipper among the players who is on Kira's side, but I have no idea what results from arresting them.

Before the next cycle begins, however, L and Kira will get to use their special powers. L may investigate any one player and determine how likely it is that he or she is Kira: an X indicates no likelihood whatsoever that a player is Kira, a circle indicates a possibility, and a double circle indicates a certainty. Kira may "pass judgement" on any one player, killing them with his Death Note and removing them from play unilaterally. Unlike L, who will always be asked to choose someone to investigate, Kira can choose whether or not to use his power, and with good reason: if Kira kills someone other than L, his max Talk Points will be reduced by half.

Play continues until either L or Kira is killed. (Theoretically, the game can also end by process of elimination: if only L and Kira are left, Kira will win, because L cannot arrest anyone without a majority vote while Kira can kill unilaterally. I haven't seen any game reach this point, however.)

Now, anyone know how I can view/edit .nsbmd and .nftr-format files?

Thank you and thank you. I'd found that link before, but the much-ballyhooed nsbmd viewer the topic supposedly linked to was missing in action. Thanks for providing it.

Anyway, I found the .xap files, and nsbmd confirmed what I thought: there's graphics in those .nsbmd files, graphics with text that needs to be translated. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem I can extract or edit the graphics...the "dump" options don't seem to do anything as far as I can tell.

EXACTLY AS PLANNED!

Oh, yes, thank you thank you thank you. Found the palette at the end of the file; the NSBMD doc wasn't much help in this case, but thankfully I've learned how to recognize palette data. Turns out that Tile Molestor still has its quibbles: the Import Palette menu only accepts values in decimal, and freaks out if you specify any offset over 65,535 (hex FFFF; i.e. nothing that won't fit in a two-byte value), so I had to use a little trick I picked up editing the title screen for Sylvanian Families 4. Just dump the palette and insert it somewhere else. You can even do this in Tile Molestor itself: copying and pasting the palette data as graphics works just fine, since all you're really doing is relocating some bytes.

Now I'm working on those .xap files...they're in GBA format, just like you said, and the "*_g.xap" files have the graphics. However, there are also "*_a.xap" files with the same names apart from that single character: i.e., I'm looking at a "fukidasi_g.xap" which has editable graphics, but I also have a "fukidasi_a.xap" that's gibberish as far as I can tell. What exactly is in the "a" files? Palette data?

EDIT: Also, any idea how to edit that .nftr font file? I know kenghot brewed up one to edit the font in Final Fantasy III, so it's a known format, but I can't make heads or tails of the one I've got on my hands...it'd be handy if I had the extant font on hand, just to keep things consistent...

EDIT #2: I am a flaming moron. Tile Molestor's not buggy, it's just cranky. "Size" is the number of palette entries...I put down 512 bytes, and it was refusing to load the palette from the location I specified because it ran past the end of the file. Just so everybody knows.

Opened up a *_a.xap in WindHex and took a look at it. Still can't make any sense of it, though a surprising amount of it appears to be plaintext. Hmm.

That said, I did find the palette in the fukidasi_g.xap file, prefixed with an $18-byte header starting with "TTLP", just like the title screen. This is maybe the most fun I've ever had with the prospect of graphics hacking...all my graphics and palettes are in the same place. ^_^

EDIT: I'd like to lodge a complaint about this doc here on RHDN:

http://www.romhacking.net/docs/286/

The reason? False advertising. It does not include anything in the way of ARM or THUMB opcode listings...in fact, checking the index, it seems this is only pages 5, 6 and 7 of whatever document it purports itself to be.

EDIT #2: Well, I finally figured out how the font is stored.

It's 1BPP but with a thoroughly oddball formatting scheme: every character is actually 13 pixels wide. Looks like a job for my old friend FEIDIAN.

EDIT #3: Stupid me can't count when converting hex to decimal. They're 11 pixels wide, and FEIDIAN dumped them nicely.

Excellent. Thanks.

I was running into some instructions I couldn't quite puzzle out trying to trace the code that drew the font, but as it turned out it wasn't compressed or anything...just inconveniently stored in a space-saving nonstandard format. The last time I encountered something like that was back when I was playing with the idea of fan translating Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam for SNES...didn't get far, of course, but while I didn't have FEIDIAN (this was several years ago, back when I was making caveman ASM hacks by hand), I had this DOS-based app I can't remember the name of that supported oddball tile sizes.

This may very well be the first translation hack I've ever attempted where I don't need to change a single line of code. Creepy, huh?

Tilemod. Just found it. ^_^

On a side note, one of the directories actually contains a "rename.bat" file. Seems the programmers forgot to clean up after themselves. XD

I'm also trying a stab at DS romhacking to see how easy/difficult it is to do translation hacking on it.

I'm using Tahaxan to find and open graphics files.. how many types of graphic files are there?
I'm looking at Daisenryaku and all I find are .txp, .cid, .bgp, .txd, and .ad2 which are files that I think
that are supposed to be the sprites, font, etc (they are listed as fonts, battle animation, unit, etc).
none of them seem to work in any tile viewing program I use that has the ability to see 8bpp.

thanks!  I was able to find some things (like the wi fi status bar image), but sadly after searching around.. that is about it.. I guess most of the more important graphics are compressed