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Main - Misc. ROM hacking - Mario RPG Text Dumps Hide post layouts | New reply


Rew
Posted on 04-16-14 09:52 PM Link | #40291
Hey gang!

So I am a newcomer both to these boards and to the Mario RPGs. (Even though I've played the Mario main platforming series since I was a child.)

I discovered Super Mario RPG as well as the four Paper Mario titles after it fairly recently. After playing all of those thoroughly, I decided I wanted to further explore these games--see the wealth of enemy/boss names, item arrangement, menu text, and of course all the various dialogue and storylines that I may have missed while hurriedly playing through the games themselves. As a veteran of the Zelda series, I've become accustomed to checking text dumps to see all that info (see the examples here). I just figured I would do the same for the Paper Mario series.

But alas, when I went online to look for SMRPG and PM text dumps... I found nothing. No text dumps for the SNES or N64 originals, nor for the more recent games. I tried every Google search I could, and it just seemingly hadn't been done.

The solution? I myself will set about this task to make these text dumps! (If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself, right?)

The catch? I've never so much as hacked a game before. I am a complete, nearly blank slate newb at this. But I am also determined to see this done. So I request the community's aid as I attempt to do this.

So there are nine games out right now that fall under the category of a Mario RPG. The four M&L games I'll get to later as I haven't even played those yet. So my focus for now will be the other five. After some preliminary poking around, here are my prospects on those:

Super Mario RPG - I've already downloaded the Lazy Shell editor, and it looks like a real godsend. I've already located most of the text, so it should be a simple matter of copy/pasting. There are still parts of the text I haven't located yet.

Paper Mario - Ugh. I've already been warned about this one--the text is compressed and encrypted. It may be, for all intents and purposes, impossible to crack. And yet a Google search reveals that someone somewhere consulted a text dump for this game, so someone did it somehow. But yeah, my prospects are not very hopeful for this one.

The Thousand-Year Door and Super Paper Mario - From what I'm told, the text in both of these games (as they're built on the same or a similar engine) is readily accessible, in ASCII format and comes complete with HTML-style text tags, alerting me to things like text color, size, effects, etc. (These are things I want to capture in my text dumps, similar to this Ocarina of Time dump.) I just have to figure out how to open the ISO.

Sticker Star - I honestly have no idea. I know 3DS hacking is in its infancy stages, and I don't know if anyone's even been able to peer inside this particular game yet. Any thoughts or suggestions on this one will be most welcome.

So there we are. I acknowledge that I'm new to this and that merely looking up the text for a game is not necessarily a simple or easy task. I'm prepared to do all the hard work I need to do in order to make this happen. Hopefully you all will be along for the ride to help, guide, and support me along the way?

---

Anyway, I have run into my first little snag, and it involves PM:TTYD. I have the ROM downloaded, and I believe I've isolated the ISO file. How do I open that? (I know it's the disc image file, similar to popping a CD-ROM into one's laptop.) I've googled, but run into loads of different and contradictory answers. I suspect I'll need a third-party program to accomplish it. So if anyone can supply a reliable one for GameCube (and Wii) ISOs, that would be wonderful!

Anthe
Posted on 04-17-14 10:55 AM Link | #40317
There's various programs that can extract GC and Wii games. Dolphin emulator has an extractor in it and I think there's Wii Scrubber too. Good luck!

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NWPlayer123
Posted on 04-17-14 01:52 PM Link | #40326
Super Paper Mario's text is in a plain text file IIRC, so that should be rediculously easy, TTYD I think is a mess with really vague one letter filenames. I would use Dolphin to extract SPM, and GCTool for TTYD. I haven't found anything to extract files from N64 ROMs other then game-specific ones, so I wouldn't be any help. Sticker Star you're not getting into anytime soon.

____________________
"I hate playing musical chats" ~ Quote of the month

Rew
Posted on 04-17-14 11:58 PM (rev. 2 of 04-18-14 01:14 AM) Link | #40360
Thanks for the heads-up on Dolphin, you two--that's what I was able to use to access both ISOs.


Okay, so good news about SMRPG and TTYD: I have located all the text so a text dump should be possible on both of those!

Astonishingly, this is not the case with Super Paper Mario. Even though I'd heard nothing but how easy it would be to find the text, I can only find readable text in one folder, "global" (i.e. menu text and everything relating to Pixls, particularly Tippi's tattles).

There are 9 other folders in the text (or "msg") directory: "machi" and "stg1" through "stg8". But... they're all in Japanese!! Even though I confirmed I definitely have the US ROM (in fact, the only directory under "msg" is "US", which leads to these files, even though all but one are in Japanese). How do I find the English text for all those areas? I've searched everywhere else on the ISO, but there is no text anywhere else. Or am I just completely out of luck on this one? HALP!


UPDATE:

The news is getting worse. I'm now opening up every text file in the TTYD and SPM ISOs. What I thought earlier was Japanese text I think is something else--I think they're encrypted (way too many weird symbols, and nothing came up when I tried to copy/paste a line into an online translator). For one thing, not all of the files in SPM besides "global" are encrypted. Specifically, "stg4", "stg5", and "stg7" are in readable English, just like "global". All the other text files are encrypted/compressed/have weird symbols.

Moreover, I'm opening up all the TTYD text files, and... some of these are filled with weird characters too! For example, "aji_02" is one. So is "aji_08".

Does anyone have any ideas how to make files like those readable? :(

NWPlayer123
Posted on 04-18-14 01:46 AM Link | #40368
It's because you're using shitty Notepad, use Notepad++ or a proper text editor at the very least, they're entirely readable. It's because notepad is reading it as unicode and trying to read it wrong.

____________________
"I hate playing musical chats" ~ Quote of the month

Rew
Posted on 04-18-14 03:05 AM Link | #40371
Thank you so much! (Heh, told you I was a newb at this stuff.)

Yeah, I had been using Notepad. But after downloading Notepad++, everything seems to be showing up quite nicely. (I was sort of wondering why part of the game's text would be encrypted and the other parts not, since I'd never heard of that before. Glad to know it was just a simple problem on my end.)

So now I'm pleased to say that SMRPG, TTYD, and SPM should all three be capable of full text dumps. :D

Anthe
Posted on 04-18-14 10:35 AM Link | #40386
I'm not entirely sure why you are doing this but eh, good luck :p

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Rew
Posted on 04-18-14 12:31 PM Link | #40390
Because I'm a little weird/obsessive? :P

But no, there is practical value to having a game's text all together, readily available. You can catch all those lines of dialogue in the story that you were perhaps too rushed to bother with while playing the game. It's a little bit more sure-footed than a player-created game script--and in fact, a text dump could help make a script more accurate. It's also useful for locating in-game names, descriptions, and such if ever they are needed. You can also see unused stuff as well.

And especially in the case of TTYD (and I imagine PM64 too, if it ever becomes possible), you can see the lines of all of Mario's partners in every situation, whereas just playing the game (or watching a YouTube LP or even consulting a fan-created game script), you only see one partner's dialogue per situation.

Gmanextreme9
Posted on 04-19-14 02:39 PM Link | #40412
Very cool. I missed some lines in TTYD so this might help.

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Rew
Posted on 04-28-14 02:23 AM Link | #40689
Update:

So I have all the text isolated and collated into one place for SMRPG, TTYD, and SPM. At this point it's just a matter of going line by line to remove all the tags associated with the text for those games (no small task). I can do that later, though.

As for Paper Mario 64, I've located the text for that game with a hex editor I have. It's a bit wonky, but readable. Every letter in lowercase is represented with capital letters, and all capital letters are rendered with symbols. It's possible that I could go through and figure out what's supposed to be what using context clues (e.g. "-ARIO" is obviously "Mario", and thus I could change all instances of "-" to a capital M).

But I'm wondering, is there a faster/more efficient way to get the text properly formatted? Is there a certain program that can do this so I don't have to sift through a bunch of lines of code? Thanks.

Fiachra
Posted on 04-28-14 10:14 PM (rev. 2 of 04-28-14 10:31 PM) Link | #40715
The characters are stored as their ASCII value - 32:
'M' (77) stored as '-' (77 - 32 = 45)
'a' (97) stored as 'A' (97 - 32 = 65)

http://www.asciitable.com/

You should be able to write a short program to add 32 to each byte for the text data and convert it to a character.

It looks like this should work for ASCII characters 32 to 126 (basic Latin). Other characters such as 'รก' are probably different.

Rew
Posted on 05-02-14 12:58 AM Link | #40816
Thanks for your help, Fiachra!

I'm a complete newb, however, so my next question is... How do I write a program? What tools do I use?

I know that I need to get each byte of text to go up by 32. But how is that actually done? I downloaded WindHex (I had previously been using HxD), and while there is a table builder in there, I haven't a clue how to use it. I tried playing around with it, but I have no idea what to do.

I tried reading some of the starter docs at ROMhacking.net, but they went right over my head.

Any help?

shibboleet
Posted on 05-02-14 01:01 AM Link | #40818
Well the first thing to decide is what progamming language best suits what you want to make it from...(Java, C#, C, C++, etc.)

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Rew
Posted on 05-02-14 02:00 AM (rev. 3 of 05-02-14 02:44 AM) Link | #40825
Go figure, no sooner do I make the above post then I peek back into it and figure it out. :P (Thanks, though, MrRean!)

So I've got my table made and I've converted the text. There are a couple issues that remain, however. The first is byte reference 29. This one is annoying in that it seems to serve as *both* a tag and the capital letter I, at the same time. This leads to such awkwardness as the following, near the beginning of the text (all instances of "I" bolded by me for emphasis):

($FF)I($9F)Oh dear... What the...?($FD) ($FF)I($9F)Who stuck that weird thing($F0)into this story?($FD) ($FF)I($9F)Ha ha ha! Yeah! I did!($FD)


I can't change "I" to whatever else it's supposed to signify without eliminating the first-person singular (as well as every instance of a sentence beginning with I). :P

The second issue should make itself known in the quoted example above. There remain quite a few unconverted bytes, which I'm relatively certain are tags (for things like line breaks, end of dialogue boxes, etc.). Is there a quick or easy way to figure out what's what? My current plan is just to go on YouTube and look up a Paper Mario LP and see how things line up--I was wondering if you hacking experts have a better idea, though.

EDIT: Does anyone know how to assign a line break in a .tbl file?

Fiachra
Posted on 05-02-14 06:12 AM Link | #40829
The "I" tags at the start all have 0xFF an 0x9F around them. You could try replacing those instances first and then replace the remaining ones. What does it look like for other characters speaking? You may have a byte for each character and you could use that to add the character's name

It looks like 0xFD is used to mark the end of a string, I think 0xF0 is line break. The easiest way is probably to edit a string in the ROM and run it in an emulator. Put each of the ones you're unsure about in the first few dialogue boxes in the game. It may be quicker than looking through a video of the whole play through.

Rew
Posted on 05-06-14 01:19 AM Link | #41016
You're right, Fiachra--those appear to be part of control codes. I'll just leave them be.

Okay, so now I have a (sort of unrelated) new question. For some reason, WindHex isn't loading Wii ISOs for me. Every time I try to open one, all the bytes are 00s all the way down--in effect, blank data. It does this for all my Wii ISOs (yet GameCube, N64, etc. all open fine). What gives?

Fiachra
Posted on 05-06-14 11:02 AM Link | #41026
Posted by Rew
... Okay, so now I have a (sort of unrelated) new question. For some reason, WindHex isn't loading Wii ISOs for me. Every time I try to open one, all the bytes are 00s all the way down--in effect, blank data. It does this for all my Wii ISOs (yet GameCube, N64, etc. all open fine). What gives?

I'm not familiar with that program. It would probably be easier to use Dolphin Emulator to extract all the files on the ISO's filesystem and open each file individually in a hex editor.

Rew
Posted on 05-11-14 03:11 AM Link | #41137
Good news: I am effectively finished with text dumps for Super Mario RPG and the first three Paper Mario games! (You can find them at ROMhacking.net here, for those who have any interest in such things.) They're currently in their "raw" form, with all coding and such still intact. I am planning to clean them up in the near future, though.

I just wanted to thank everyone in this thread for all your help! I couldn't have accomplished my task without y'all.

At any rate, this does still leave Paper Mario: Sticker Star. I know NWP above said I shouldn't expect to get into it for a while. But is there anything I can do to try to access the text? Has anyone ever attempted this with a 3DS game before? There's no 3DS emulator out that I'm aware of, so I can't extract files that way. I attempted to load the PM:SS ROM into WindHex, but any attempt to search for text was futile. (This approach worked quite well for PM64 but alas not SS.) If I could just find out what values represented text characters and could build a table accordingly, that would be something.

Anyone have any ideas? I know it's a long shot, but I figured I'd at least try.

Posted by Fiachra
I'm not familiar with that program. It would probably be easier to use Dolphin Emulator to extract all the files on the ISO's filesystem and open each file individually in a hex editor.


Yeah, and eventually I did do something like that. It's just weird that I used to be able to open Wii ISOs with WindHex. Now, more recently, it won't let me open GameCube ISOs anymore either. Weird. Oh well.

NWPlayer123
Posted on 05-11-14 03:45 PM Link | #41146
All ROMs you could get at this point in time would be encrypted, and even if they're not, I still don't know of any way to extract the files except maybe a tool from here http://3dbrew.org/wiki/Main_Page - the formats are documented, but IDK how much of use that would be. Also, I use HxD, and it works fantastically, I've never had any problems with it.

____________________
"I hate playing musical chats" ~ Quote of the month


Main - Misc. ROM hacking - Mario RPG Text Dumps Hide post layouts | New reply

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