I'm interested in attempting to at least hack some basic text into this game. I was easily able to make a table file for the PSX version of the first game, yet this one proves more difficult.

I've already tried loading the entire ISO (only ~330 MB, so no big deal) into WindHex and using an SJIS table, no results. I opened it in Monkey-Moore, no working results (both with normal searching, and with wildcards in case the kana are 2 bytes each). I asked KitsuneSniper for help, who searched for the byte combinations of some SJIS values, and he could find random kanji (which to me, seems like random data rather than actual kanji), but nothing else.

Can anyone offer some insight as to some other methods to try to get table values?

~DS

Well, truth be told I took a .cso that I had of the game and turned it into an .iso using a program I found, but I had the compression setting up as high as it goes, so it actually came out smaller than it was when it was a .cso. Interesting, huh?

Yeah, I noticed those files, too. I also noticed some .src files, which KitsuneSniper tells me are a dyslexic way of writing SCRipt, one for each game. Could be in there, too. I just need to find table values and then I can start tearing through files to find the text.

Edit: Well, I managed to make a table using the old-fashioned RPG method (naming the main character something, moving the save file somewhere, naming the opposite thing on the next file, and comparing the two, rinse and repeat). The table has the same values used over for various characters, or so I thought at first. Apparently, 81-83 and BC are used as control codes to determine which set of characters to use (81 is hiragana alone, 82 is the end of hiragana and katakana, 83 is katakana, and BC is English upper-case only). However, it seems as if the script is compressed. I checked both the ISO in it's entirety, as well as the various suspected script files. I wasn't even able to find any small words, let alone the script. >_<"";

~DS

Really? I can just try and open the .bin files with Winrar? Interesting. I'll give it a shot!

Edit: I tried doing so, and Winrar just said they were damaged files or files of an unknown type. Should I try renaming the files or something?

~DS

KaioShin said the right thing. Format of this archive is plain and easy.
It's just an archive with many gzipped files in there.

Well here's what you can do (this probably isn't the best way, but it works):

Open gsd1.bin in WindHex.

Search for the hex value: 1F8B08  (gzip files always start with this header)
Write down the offset (it's 14000)
Search for hex value 1F8B08 again.
Write down the offset (it's 10E800)

Now, Edit -> Dump Binary Data
Enter file name: va1.gz
Start Offset: 14000
Ending Offset: 10E7FF (you should subtract 1 from the offset you wrote down.)

and that will extract the first compressed file. Then you can use 7-Zip or WinRAR to extract the gz file.





Then to extract the second file you do pretty much the same thing:

Write down the offset (it's 10E800)
Search for hex value 1F8B08 again.
Write down the offset (it's 1C8800)

Now, Edit -> Dump Binary Data
Enter file name: va2.gz
Start Offset: 10E800
Ending Offset: 1C87FF (you should subtract 1 from the offset you wrote down.)

Now just keep doing that for all the files. I think there's 226 files in that 1 archive... Errrr hope you don't go insane extracting them all. If you were a programmer you wouldn't have to do it this way.

Write one. Seriously, extracting achieves is a basic romhacking skill required for almost all disc-based systems. And it's really not that hard. It's the perfect exercise for one's first "serious" program. All you need to finish such a program is basic program flow control and basic file I/O functions (the later can be looked up in the documentation of your given language quickly).

Don't say you couldn't do it until you tried, it's seriously easy.

Grab a copy of Turbo Pascal and read through (most of) the help file - shouldn't take more than a couple of hours tops. Then look up the syntax for variable declarations, control structures and functions/procedures (which is really easy), and that's it. You're ready to start experimenting with files.

lol pascal