Tales of Vs. Ripping. (lol, that was quick).

[Penance]

Let's just say... I got bored...
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Welcome to the Tales of Wall Breaker sprite/graphics ripping thread!
-Yes, the logo above is ripped too.

I'll admit, as soon as I heard that the ISO had been leaked I went to download it because I was intent on ripping the cut-ins from the Vs. Mode. However, I can't actually find that many things that link to Vs. mode, it's probably all compressed somewhere but I did manage to find pretty much all of the Tales of Wall Breaker stuff, so enjoy!

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Table of Contents
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[1] - Title Screen
[2] - Wall Breaker Backgrounds
[3] - Character Sprites
[4] - Character Cards
[5] - Character "Vs. Screen"
[6] - Everything Else (Misc.)

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Title Screen
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I don't know how many of you would want it, I personally thought it looked pretty good but whatever.



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Wall Breaker Backgrounds
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You could use these for other sprites (Narikiri dunegon, for example) or for humorous little signatures. Once again, your choice on how you use them.
The images have not been tampered by me at all, this is how they are. I realise there are repeated things in each images but I really can't be bothered editing them all out of the templates. You can do that with the download link at the bottom of the page.








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Character Sprites
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I'm not going to upload everyone's sprites because there's no point if you can get them in the download link AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE. I'll upload a few just so you can see what they're like:
The game lays them out strange, it must pull from different parts of the images but they're not really that hard to assemble providing you've gotten the right "piece of the puzzle". Plus, if you're used to spriting then this should be easy for you.
I suck, that's why I haven't done it XD.

Each character has 3 sets of sprites (usually) and one set of Arte effects, like so:
Cless:



Chelsea:



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Character Cards
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Nicely done, imo.





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Character "Vs. Screen"
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Once again, not doing all of them because you'll get them in the download, but for examples:



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Everything Else
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Blah Blah Blah... There's more random crap in the download link.

[Craymel]

very nice  I can't seem to find the download you keep tslking sbout in your post so I'm guessing you haven't posted it yet. I'm curious who the woman in the winged helmet is, any one know?

[ClesStahn]

very nice  I can't seem to find the download you keep tslking sbout in your post so I'm guessing you haven't posted it yet. I'm curious who the woman in the winged helmet is, any one know?

Valkyrie.

[DuskShark]

Damn, you're a talented hacker!

[PikoPiko]

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Title Screen
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I don't know how many of you would want it, I personally thought it looked pretty good but whatever.

I'm rather curious about this screen. At the bottom left, you can see two little... things that say valkyrie (warukyuure) and ha~i. Does anyone who has played discovered what purpose they serve?

[Carnivol]

For anyone wondering, the game uses .GIM images. You can find most of them in plain sight. Some are also in the RSSA archives (just delete everything from the start and down to where the .GIM header starts). Haven't checked out what the deal is with some of the other formats (too lazy).

Can convert these with something like gimconv.exe (from the Sony Theme Creator?)
It bases the format detection entirely on the file extension (or maybe I'm too lazy to check if it does not):
"gimconv input.gim -o output.png"
(yeah, command line stuff)

If it weren't for the fact that this game "hopefully" will get an English release (and the fact that you can't play it on current custom firmwares anyway), I'd probably whip together a quick and dirty English translation for this thing. But, yeah, this baby still has a chance of going state side, so not gonna do any 0-day stuff or stepping on Namco's feet or anything with this one (giving it 3-6 months before I'll consider touching it, at least.)



More curious, though, is the fact that it seems like everything for Wallbreaker is pretty straight forward. I haven't checked out the audio side of things (as in character audio), but... I think it technically should be fairly easy to document what's needed in order to fully create a tool or tutorial on how to fully customize the playable characters in wallbreaker (as in creating entirely unique characters. Music should be doable too, standard ATRAC3+ music. All it would probably need is to map out some pretty plain stuff.)

If the game soon becomes playable on a CFW enabled PSP (or someone somehow gives me access to a PSP test kit)



PikoPiko: The character is "Sandra", Valkyrie's sidekick in Legend of Valkyrie. The two text bubbles probably belong to him and somehow related to Valkyrie (She's an unlockable, I presume?)

[Penance]

Carnivol, I couldn't find any text what-so-ever apart from random crap inside Wall Breaker character folders.
Do you know if the game uses a custom encoding? I've tried various SJIS .tbl I've put together for other games but nothing so far, I can't even see something that looks like text in the hex collumn, it's all neat and the same byte is repeated every so often--basically just coding.

[Carnivol]

Blind guess would be each and every .msd file (mainly in \MESSAGE\)

tod_msg_menu.msd - Probably all system text (descriptions, tutorials, options, track names, etc...)
And if RM is anything to go by:
tod_msg_skit.msd - All non-voiced "face chat" dialog
tod_msg_skit_sub.msd - All voiced "face chat" dialog

(I still refuse to call them skits in the case of RM1-2, as all dialog in those games is done through face chats, with the exception of random NPC gossip/interactions.)

Before I submit... yup. Text. If the game would run on CFW, or I had a TEST, I'd whip together a quick demo. Only posted the above as it may be of interest as far as digging around goes, but not gonna bother with touching anything as long as there's reason to believe the game will be, or has a chance of, getting an official English release. Nothing good ever comes of 0-day stuff.

[Penance]

Ahh, I see. I had a quick look at BOOT.BIN seen as in any PSP Tales game that's where atleast the Menu text is, but nothing is in there. Nothing.

Edit: Oh, you're right. You can tell that's text but it's using a custom encoding, and I can't figure that out without being able to play the game.
Stupid 5.5 FW.
Namco better bring this game stateside.

[Carnivol]

Boot is probably just acting as a dummy.

Normally, most PSP games don't use boot.bin for anything. All about the eboot.
A lot of stuff can be done in a boot.bin and then loaded by telling your CFW to use the plain module/boot.bin (or whatever it's called).

Since eboot and boot are usually the same file (just encrypted and non-encrypted), you may also manually decrypt the eboot (not sure if you can re-encrypt it, but launching a decrypted eboot works. I don't really follow the PSP tech stuff much), but I don't think that'd work when the eboot requires an unsupported firmware.  Someone's several times tried to reassure me that some games skip between using both eboot and boot (thus force loading boot.bin would cause problems), but I've got no proof to back that up. Some games also gets their nuts in a twist if you start messing around with file sizes, LBA, CRC or just simply think about doing something the game doesn't like (But, of course, that's the kind of stuff you can find on any platform)

Normally, most games would store system text in the main exe. Fortunately, Asian developers have finally started to learn and have now started moving things out of it. It's a stupid place to keep text as far as official localization work goes (which means that the lack of stuff like what you can see in the menu .msd file is a good sign that the game is probably at least designed with localization friendliness in mind)

[ClesStahn]

Normally, most games would store system text in the main exe. Fortunately, Asian developers have finally started to learn and have now started moving things out of it. It's a stupid place to keep text as far as official localization work goes (which means that the lack of stuff like what you can see in the menu .msd file is a good sign that the game is probably at least designed with localization friendliness in mind)

Just a random question: so does this mean that PSP game text is easier to extract and deal with than many other platforms--including platforms in the past that people have had trouble locating and extracting text?

[Carnivol]

Well, in general, especially when it comes to western games, it's pretty much always been easy to locate text (though, compression methods have often makes it hard to read/extract it), and it's getting easier and easier to edit things too. Especially now that a lot of console games share their assets 1:1 with their PC counterparts, recyclable advanced engines and assets, etc.. As far as console games goes, it's probably "mostly" easier to do stuff now, though, there are still quite a good few games that uses proprietary container formats, weird and/or new compression methods, etc...

But, in general, I'd say (for all platforms); things have never been easier.
(Reason I specifically mentioned Asian developers is because they, or at least the Japanese, are in my eyes the worst offenders as far as making an internal mess out of their own games goes)

[Penance]

I prefer the text being file co-ordinated. Tales of Hearts goes as far as making a file per type of item (Tools, Acc., Valuables, etc.).

Tales of Rebirth (PSP) has all of the menu text inside of the BOOT.BIN plus a bit in DAT.BIN
RM has it in a seperate file in a folder and RM2 has it in the BOOT.BIN like Rebirth.

[pedrocasilva]

very nice  I can't seem to find the download you keep talking about in your post so I'm guessing you haven't posted it yet.

Same

[Carnivol]

RM has it in a seperate file in a folder and RM2 has it in the BOOT.BIN like Rebirth.

Never inspected the US/EU version of RM1, but the Japanese version stored everything, in a nearly identical manner to how things are in RM2. I could pretty much copy and paste all the chunks of stuff I once tossed together for the Japanese version of RM1 right into RM2 without any problems at all.

Same

Stop with the frowning and go buy your games (even if they are imports) :p

[Penance]

I only ever inspected the US version so they must have created a seperate file for it.
I wonder if someone will do a RM2 translation if it's not released O: