[damarsman]

hey whats up dragon quest fans? i havent been on this board in a long time but i decided to tell you guys that im working on a translation for dragon quest 5 for ps2 for those of you who are capable of playing backups. well anyways... here is some old screenshots and other stuff. progress has come quite a ways since i took that and hers a list of about whats done.

monster names 95%
spells 40%
items(including weapons and armor) 50%
menus 90%

here are some things that are not close to completion yet.

hacking font to make variable witdh
hacking into the compressed battle script
hacking the compressed dialougue


all the compression in this game appears to be lzss and come in a million different formats. if any of you guys know anyone or can help me crack this junk let me know.

ohh yeah i already have tools written for extracting the items and spells and all the small font stuff.

heres my site that i havent updated in a while....
http://www.angelfire.../ultra/games31/

[rpgking]

Cool, that translation's looking good. I never expected anyone to be hacking a PS2 RPG so soon. ;)

[damarsman]

thanks...i really need the support. i dont know why hardly anyone hacks anything on the ps2. some of it is actually easier than rom hacking. the compression they use in dq5 was probably made just to stop fan translations because the game only takes 2.5 out of 5 GB of dvd. and thats with the 1 gb null file and the 500 mb of random windows nt files archive.

[rpgking]

A 1gb null file? What would the point of that be?

[Pendy]

Wow that's great. I'll have to put a post up about it at the DQDWNN. Plus add to the help wanted section. Wish I could help out more than that.

[Plattym3]

What do you need to be able to play backups? How would this work once Greg gets the game translated?

[Woodus]

Yeah, I wish I knew more about the compression algorithm you are talking about to help out as well.

Thanks for the info.

As far as playing a backup you will need a modded PS2

[Erdrick]

I wish you well in your endeavours.

[Azazel]

mattym3, on Aug 26 2004, 03:59.38 AM, said:

What do you need to be able to play backups? How would this work once Greg gets the game translated?

I'll kind of help you answer the later question. most likely either he'll released the whole translated game over an FTP server or something like that or release some kind of a PPF. The later will be kind of like most rom translations. If you want check out a few of the Japanese PC or PSX translation in case your kind of wondering how a CD translation works.

Alamone already attempted LA Pucelle or whatever it's called before it was announced for a US release. He got fairly far in the project but don't remember when exactly he dropped the project. Personally unlike the 8 and 16 bit games there not that many RPGs that don't get english releases.

Till there's a good PS2 emulator with a trace debugger he's probably not going to get very far on the actual in game dialogue. I remember someone posting about DQ5R translation project at a few other sites already. With all the LZ variants that there are it's going to be hard to crack for a while. Plus he mentioned the battle script is compressed and generally most RPGs even if the in game dialogue is compressed the non dialogue 8X8 stuff generally isn't compressed.

[superaielman]

Woah.. kickass. I wish the DW4R translation project was showing this much progress.

[Nikkolus]

Great to hear! Dragon Quest 5 is my favorite, good luck.

[damarsman]

thanks a lot for being supportive guys....even if i never get the dialougue done and the battle i can still release like a 40% or whatever. i have actually been reading into information about LZSS variants lately. i already had someone who is familiar with them look at a file and he said he would actually need the uncompressed file also to figure out how it was working. maybe enix didnt write there own LZSS routine and i can try different common japanese versions. i have a gut feeling that they wrote this junk specifically for the PS2 hardware so it would be as optimized as possible. One thing thats really strange is that in the main file (which is a directory in itself) that is a file that contains the whole script with pointers and all. i have tried changing the text and there is no output. this is when i searched and found the compressed data. its weird how every thing is there uncompressed but they used the compressed stuff for the game. maybe there would be some kind of way to make it read from that file for the script instead of using the compressed one. anyways...these are just ideas and for now im just working on the semi-easy stuff until some experienced with data compression hacking can come along. i used to hack roms and i know for a fact that in order to crack some compression you can do one of two things. that is, write a completely new routine or look at the assembly of the old one and reverse work your way through. either way this require some previous knowledge on the ps2 assembly language and its relationship to the hardware.


once again... thanks everyone for your inspiration. i just want to let everyone know that im serious about this so please try to find some people who can help..


ohh yeah...you'll get you name in the translation credits.... :whoa:

[Pendy]

I've always heard DQ games were notorious for there compression schemes when it came to hacking and it seems this latest one is no different

[Woodus]

I made a post in the announcements so it will show up on the main site too, hopefully we can find you some help ;)

[damarsman]

thankyou...

[Azazel]

Pendy, on Aug 27 2004, 02:30.47 AM, said:

I've always heard DQ games were notorious for there compression schemes when it came to hacking and it seems this latest one is no different.

Well all the Snes Dragon Quest games use Hoffman compression. I don't think the NES, MSX, and GBC ones have compression but I've never looked at them myself. I know there are scripts and table files released for the NES and GBC. Someone also was translating the MSX Dragon Quest 2 and was just using the NES english scripts and didn't look like that one had compression either.

For the person working on the project. Do you even know for sure right now that the game is using some kind of LZ? Have you look at if the game might use Hoffman compression like the Snes ones did?

[damarsman]

ok first of all...i uploaded a file that you can download at my website below. in this zip is a bunch of work which byuu did to try and crack the LZSS compression and a bunch of ways i helped screw up like giving him the wrong file and stuff. when you open the zip read the READMEFIRST.txt before doing anything and it will give you a explanation of al the files.

contained in this zip are the decompressed files. and byuus work including a decompressor. check it out if your interested or know anything about this.

ohhh yeah...in reply to above, byuu (who even translated the sfc version) seems to be pretty sure that this file is LZSS.



DQ5 Remix translation

[casmaster]

rpgking, on Aug 25 2004, 09:41.06 PM, said:

A 1gb null file? What would the point of that be?

I believe it is supposed to push the actual game data to the outer portion of the disk for better access rates and speed.

Quote

Hoffman compression

Isnt it Huffman? /nit picking



Enix is crazy with the way they save data. I found basic stat date (strength, agility intelligence, etc) saved in 2 locations. One set was even spaced with a 0 byte between them, yet they saved HP by having 1 byte for 0-255, and another byte SHARED between 4 characters, each getting 2 bits.
00 = 0
01 = 256
10 = 512
11 = 768
Then add to the first byte for total HP/MP (both current and max)

I'm not sure which game/port that was exactly but it was something i had fun figuring out.
lol



BTW, good luck with the DQV translation patch. I definately want to play that game one day.

[damarsman]

either they use the null file for that or just they just want to make the disc bigger than its actual 1gb size. that would probably float around the internet too easily. that was my thought but your idea actually makes more sense.

[casmaster]

Yeah. Piraters don't care much about size. I dont think anyone on cable went "hmm, i was going to download Dooom 3, but its 2gigs so i don't think i will."
But wouldnt a null file compress well? Assuming it is padded with 0's or 1's and not some random assortment of numbers?