[v1.2 RELEASED!] New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

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ateam
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#41 » Fri Mar 25, 2022 5:22 pm

fafadou wrote:incredible level of skill and patience ! Thank you for all.


Skill? Maybe. There are people far smarter than I in this scene.

Patience? Yes. I'll take that compliment all day long! The number of late nights and early mornings I spent on parsing through that gigantic tracelog were too high to count. However, I know that I'm doing something I love when I wake up at the crack of dawn, excited to put in a few hours towards this project before the workday starts!
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megavolt85
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#42 » Fri Mar 25, 2022 6:34 pm

ateam wrote:Skill? Maybe. There are people far smarter than I in this scene.


you are modest :D

over the past year, your reversing engineering skill has grown to the level of a god
there are talented people on the dreamcast scene and everyone is talented in their field, and if someone tells me that there is a person who is talented in everything, then I will laugh in his face
do not be modest, your talent is in reverse engineering and you perfectly understand how graphic libraries work and, as I said before, each talent has its own scope

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ateam
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#43 » Fri Mar 25, 2022 7:24 pm

megavolt85 wrote:
ateam wrote:Skill? Maybe. There are people far smarter than I in this scene.


you are modest :D

over the past year, your reversing engineering skill has grown to the level of a god
there are talented people on the dreamcast scene and everyone is talented in their field, and if someone tells me that there is a person who is talented in everything, then I will laugh in his face
do not be modest, your talent is in reverse engineering and you perfectly understand how graphic libraries work and, as I said before, each talent has its own scope


Wow… what a compliment coming from you! Your contributions to this scene are immeasurable, and we all appreciate the work you do.

Thank you =)
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Enma09
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#44 » Sat Mar 26, 2022 6:39 pm

¿All of this instructions/strings are in the 1st_read.bin or another files? OMG the lot of work had you do in this game :0

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ateam
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#45 » Sat Mar 26, 2022 9:09 pm

Enma09 wrote:¿All of this instructions/strings are in the 1st_read.bin or another files? OMG the lot of work had you do in this game :0


All instructions for the game executable are in 1ST_READ.BIN, but separate archive/container files are where the font, textures, sound clips, and story script reside.
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Enma09
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#46 » Mon Mar 28, 2022 12:23 am

ateam wrote:
Enma09 wrote:¿All of this instructions/strings are in the 1st_read.bin or another files? OMG the lot of work had you do in this game :0


All instructions for the game executable are in 1ST_READ.BIN, but separate archive/container files are where the font, textures, sound clips, and story script reside.


What tools did you use to be able to extract/import those files from the containers? Say the .bin for example, what do you recommend to someone who wants to start translating games for the Sega Dreamcast? I would like to learn to be able to do translations into Spanish.

I've been talking to pitito (from segasaturno forum) and he has given me several tips from which I've learned a lot, BUT I WANT MORE HAHAHAHA!!!!
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ateam
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#47 » Mon Mar 28, 2022 9:14 pm

Enma09 wrote:What tools did you use to be able to extract/import those files from the containers? Say the .bin for example, what do you recommend to someone who wants to start translating games for the Sega Dreamcast? I would like to learn to be able to do translations into Spanish.


In some cases you’ll encounter standard formats on the Dreamcast, like .AFS containers. 90% of the time, I have to analyze the header data inside those containers and then write my own extract/rebuild tools.

When it comes to romhacking (especially the DC), there is very little “one size fits all”. Sometimes the work of others who came before you can help here and there, but in my experience every game is its own unique puzzle. Solving it requires tons of patience, determination, and I’d be lying if I omitted skill.

The great news is, we all started at zero! Just keep trying. Scowering forums like those at romhacking.net can also teach you how to start thinking when it comes to this type of work. It doesn’t matter if it’s PlayStation, Sega Saturn, or SNES; there are consistent underlying principles and concepts that are universal.

Think of it like sports… is a hockey professional automatically any good at basketball? No, but both types of athletes know what it means to work as a team, score points/goals, strategize to exploit their opponents’ weakness, etc. What I mean is that by absorbing as much information in the romhacking space as possible, you begin to pick up things that’ll aid and assist you in your own personal endeavors.
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ateam
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#48 » Thu Mar 31, 2022 4:17 pm

I was thinking about my post from last Friday and realized that I left out a key element that helped me achieve that hack.

If you check the post (viewtopic.php?f=52&t=14736&start=30#p163650), you'll read me talking about backtracking through the tracelog dump, as well as trying to narrow down a range of relevant code inside that giant 13,538,000 line file.

Well, in Ghidra I noticed that there were several functions that returned specific error message strings. After searching through some of the leaked source code from the various Katana SDKs (https://github.com/Kochise/dreamcast-do ... master/SDK as one example), I was able to correlate these with specific functions that dealt with audio streaming. More specifically, stopping an audio stream.

I eventually came up with two functions of interest:
    • adxf_stop
    • sdPstmStop

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As seen above, doing a string search/filter in Ghidra actually yielded some results! From there, I was able to further narrow down a range of code from the tracelogs related to the assembly functions I was searching for.

Anyway, that's it! I'm glad I remembered to include this information :D
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ateam
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#49 » Tue Apr 05, 2022 6:15 pm

I recorded some gameplay footage of a test build, along with narration by me!

In this video, I take a look at:

    • Pre-title screen intro.
    • Settings menu.
    • Unlockable bonus content.
    • Beginning of chapter 1.
    • Modified font and text-rendering routines.

Keep in mind that this is just the first few bits of the opening story. It's quite lighthearted and I feel doesn't accurately represent the type of game this develops into. This game's story is nuanced and has many shades, along with some serious and adult themes (not THAT kind of "adult"). That being said, it's all full of comedic moments and fun moments, too!




Enjoy!
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ateam
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Re: New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

Post#50 » Thu Jun 16, 2022 7:55 am

Hi everyone!

I know it's been a while since my last update, but that's only because the team and I have been working EXTREMELY HARD at further progressing this translation patch! While the translators and editors have been toiling away at the 13,000-or-so lines of dialog, I've been hacking away, writing several hundred lines of new SH4 assembly to finally pull off the font-width modification that this amazing game deserves! Since the time of my last post, I'd estimate I've spent no fewer than 200 hours working on this hack.

While I don't have much time to write out a detailed explanation of everything I've done (it would take days to write it, and hours to read it), I want to take a moment to thank VincentNL. He's spent time experimenting with combining Cheat Engine and Demul to perfect what he likes to call the "poke and peek" method, where RAM can be inspected and modified on-the-fly during gameplay. Combining this with other tools like lxdream-nitro's debugger and Ghidra, the Dreamcast romhacking scene has turned a corner in terms of what's possible.

In essence, the game had to be modified to draw each font tile at a horizontal distance of 11px from the previous tile, whereas by default the game utilized a tile width of 22px. Each dialog line had to be increased from 26 characters to 52, and each dialog box's maximum character count had to be increased from 78 to 156. This, of course, meant that a whole new font sheet had to be drawn up, too!

As simple as that may seem, there are several dozen functions in Nakoruru that affect on-screen text in some form or another (nearly 40). Several of them are redundant, and I've tried to refactor/optimize the code where I could. Furthermore, things like choice lists for in-game player responses, menu/system messages, and the history view, all approached text rendering in their own unique way (i.e., different from the regular dialog boxes). In fact, the history view is still an open item as of writing this post, and the v1.0 release of this patch may feature a partially broken implementation of it. However, rest assured that it's not a game-breaking bug, and in my opinion, doesn't take away from the incredible amount of polish and perfection seen everywhere else.

All of that being said, it was an incredible challenge to wrestle with all of the disparate parts of this game that were trying so hard to keep me from performing the desired modifications! :lol:

And so, without further ado, I proudly present to you the fruit of my labor... Nakoruru's brand new, beautiful, narrow font...

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