ToDr script dump

[pkt-zer0]

Hi!

I'm not terribly sure whether this would be the right section of the forum to post this in, or whether such a request is out-of-line, but it's worth a shot.
So, to the point: would anyone happen to have a dump of the PS2 Tales of Destiny remake, or a program that could create one? It would be immensely helpful for the (slowly) ongoing translation project here.

Considering that there is a ToD2 translation in progress, and ToDr was done by the same guys and using a similar engine, potentially the same tools, or slightly modified versions of them, could be used for ToDr as well. At any rate, this seemed like a good place to ask around.

Any and all help (including suggestions for places to continue my investigations, in case all else fails) would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Cless]

Indeed, the engines extremely similar, and most of the ToD2 tools will possibly just need minor adjustments to work on it, but I really haven't gotten intimate with it (mostly trying to focus on ToD2). For what it's worth, DAT.BIN (where the script is likely to be located) has over 50,000 files in it, and going through and identifying what I could of ToD2's 9,300 files was already an adventure in itself.

I did adjust my ToD2 menu text dumper to ToDr though, and got some menu text dumps sitting around, but I don't know if you want those.

[pkt-zer0]

For what it's worth, DAT.BIN (where the script is likely to be located) has over 50,000 files in it, and going through and identifying what I could of ToD2's 9,300 files was already an adventure in itself.

Sounds adventurous indeed. I know I'm probably just pointing out the obvious, but couldn't that be automated by gleaning whatever info is needed from the master records? I'd like to believe that they'd organize things a bit better than throwing a tetrillion files in an archive and indexing them individually.

I wouldn't mind screwing around with that myself, actually. Question is, how much knowledge specific to this sort of stuff would be needed, beyond generic coding/computing knowledge? (This is assuming you are willing to share the tools/source code/information, that is)

I did adjust my ToD2 menu text dumper to ToDr though, and got some menu text dumps sitting around, but I don't know if you want those.

Well, from the menu texts, the item/weapon/whatever lists have been compiled from various sources, but none have the item/title descriptions and suchlike. So the dumps could be interesting in case they contain the latter parts, though they aren't much of a priority.

[Cless]

Sounds adventurous indeed. I know I'm probably just pointing out the obvious, but couldn't that be automated by gleaning whatever info is needed from the master records?

There's... really no such thing. The game is compiled, so pretty much everything must be reverse-engineered.

I'll state one thing. I have NO IDEA why ToDr would need 50k files, assuming they use the same structure as all the previous Tales games. ToP only had 1350 in its virtual file system while Tales of Rebirth has around 14,000. Most of the files within are actually archives with a number of related subfiles... like a folder I guess. It's possible ToDr could have abandoned the archive system but that sounds inefficient..

I wouldn't mind screwing around with that myself, actually. Question is, how much knowledge specific to this sort of stuff would be needed, beyond generic coding/computing knowledge?

I'd say it's nearly impossible, especially without previous game hacking experience. You're likely not going to find anything in a generic format. if previous tales are anything to go by, the script itself is more than likely compressed in a custom LZSS+RLE variant, across hundreds of files.

(This is assuming you are willing to share the tools/source code/information, that is)

I'm not very keen on the idea of open sourcing the tools we have. As slim as the chances may be, the director's cut announcement has extended my position on playing "wait and see" as far as receiving the game on these shores. I'm only interested in spending time hacking so that I'll eventually be able to play in english, but the time will feel wasted if it's actually announced. PS2 isn't quite dead yet, so...

Anyway, here are the menu text dumps I did awhile back. A file or two may contain translated text that I did for a test...

[pkt-zer0]

I'll state one thing. I have NO IDEA why ToDr would need 50k files, assuming they use the same structure as all the previous Tales games. ToP only had 1350 in its virtual file system while Tales of Rebirth has around 14,000. Most of the files within are actually archives with a number of related subfiles... like a folder I guess. It's possible ToDr could have abandoned the archive system but that sounds inefficient..

Well, the character sprites are stored as lots of small "parts" - even just the heroes and the boss characters weigh 8,000 files this way. Haven't written a program that'd extract individual files from the DAT.BIN (seems simple enough, if DAT.TBL is just an indexer table for it), so I'm not sure whether they're actually file headers, but the string "TIM2" appears 36,311 times, unless I made a mistake somewhere.

I'd say it's nearly impossible, especially without previous game hacking experience. You're likely not going to find anything in a generic format. if previous tales are anything to go by, the script itself is more than likely compressed in a custom LZSS+RLE variant, across hundreds of files.

I actually found some of the fonts/icons. But yeah, compression algorithms I'm not too likely to reverse just intuitively. Screwing around with a disassembler would probably lead to equally few results.

As slim as the chances may be, the director's cut announcement has extended my position on playing "wait and see" as far as receiving the game on these shores. I'm only interested in spending time hacking so that I'll eventually be able to play in english, but the time will feel wasted if it's actually announced. PS2 isn't quite dead yet, so...

I'd say that ToDr will come out for the PSP sooner than a US version of the original is announced. But you do have a point there.

Anyway, here are the menu text dumps I did awhile back. A file or two may contain translated text that I did for a test...

Thanks.