Need some Assembly help, Tales of Symphonia related

[Julian]

Hi, I wasn't really sure exactly where to place this, but since this is Symphonia related, I figured I'd post it here.

I'm currently working on an undub of Tales of Symphonia. I know a lot of people here aren't really for undubs and stuff, but the part that I'm currently working on may be of interest to some people: I'm trying to recover the voices for the skits. I'm sure we can all agree that those soulless skits without any voices are incredibly annoying.

(For those who are interested, I've already undubbed everything else in the game, just trying to fix skits before I even consider releasing it)

Anyway, I've figured out that the control for the skit voices is in the DOL-file (gamecube executable), and from my many attempts, it seems that it will be more complicated than a little bit of hex editing.

My two options for tackling this are:

1) Use the Japanese DOL, the DOL file however, includes all the menu text, item/skill descriptions, etc, which would require a lot of work to translate (the synopsis is also here, ouch), and would require a lot of pointer modification and such, which I don't really know how to do, but I don't think it would be too bad, would take a little bit of research, but I believe it should be doable, although it would get complicated very fast and I'd really much rather avoid that.

2) Assembly, or some type of assembly hack, I guess. The problem: I have little to no assembly experience. The fact that gamecube uses PowerPC assembly hasn't really helped much either. I was able to convert it to an ELF file and disassemble it, but that didn't do me much good, lol.

I tried contacting the guy that did the Abyss undub, and his response was:

In Tales of the Abyss, playing skit voices was compiled out of the game. Identifying the specific change involved static analysis and execution tracing of both versions. Knowing where they diverged, patching the responsible function was trivial.

I've tried to contact him for more info, but it's been almost a month, so meh. (First response took about 2 weeks)

Anyway, I figured this would probably be a long shot, but I was wondering if anyone here would be able to land a little helping hand on this project, especially if it is as "trivial" as he makes it seem. Or if I could be pointed  to another forum where I could get some help, I would very much appreciate it!

I can upload both DOL and ELF versions if anyone is interested in taking a look at it.

Thank you very much!
-Julian

[Cless]

Sounds pretty hopeless without an emulator with an assembly instruction logger/tracer (what he means by by "execution tracing," I assume). I don't believe Dolphin does that.

[Julian]

Ugh, that's really lame..

Well, thanks for the info. It really irritates me leaving stuff half-done like this, but what can I do ~_~

[Penance]

I know how you feel.
I have a pretty much fully translated menu of my PS2 version but the text is read at full-width  l i k e   t h i s  and it's really annoying because it can't be fixed.
Though I havn't considered looking at the fact the game just might use floating point values... Maybe Cless could shed some light on that.

[Cless]

The only thing I can say about floating point values is that I hate their guts.

[Penance]

Are they really that difficult?
From what I've heard it's just changing a value... Didn't you use something similar to alter the size of the Arte's text in Destiny 2?

[Cless]

Floating point numbers are decimal numbers. What I did in ToD2 had much more to do with screwing around and luck.

[Penance]

Hmmm.
I guess it's just figuring out what value it uses.. 3f800000 (1) or 40000000 (2)...
And there's gonna be alot of the same values, changing some might even crash the game.
It's a 50/50 shot if it even uses float point values and it would take too long for me to find the right one.
Ahh.. I see what you mean by how annoying they are.

In ToD2, was it some kind of data table you edited or was it just one value in float point fashion?

[Cless]

It was neither.

[Penance]

So what was it? XD

[pedrocasilva]

BTW, how's it going, Julian?

[Julian]

?

Uh, except for skits, it's all done, just need to stop being lazy and actually thoroughly test it to make sure I didn't miss anything.

As for skits:

Option 1, translating the JP file is pretty much out of the question, as it also causes some crashing issues, which I may or may not know how to fix.

Option 2 I doubt will be happening any time soon unless I can get a volunteer who has powerpc experience to help out, and even then I don't know.

I'll probably release the partial later this month or something after I do more testing.

[pedrocasilva]

I see, with or without voiced skits it's still better than the US voice-overs for me, though.

I don't know how to play a gc backup on my wii, but I'll dig into that when the need to do so comes.