Making an English version of Typing of the Dead Arcade

[skate323k137]

Thanks for the detailed answer! Honestly the character issue is a non issue for playability.

For now I'll just skip stage 3 boss. Even with that issue this is a major improvement!

 

[twistedsymphony]

Hopefully the issue with chapter 3 boss can be fixed.

it's not just the chapter 3 boss, there are two other bosses later on that have question and answer type challenges.

really it's an issue with EVERY text bubble as the first line of the bubble is supposed to display the word. so if you're playing 2 player you'll see the word 3 times. once for display, then the line for player one then the line for player 2.

Oh, nice! I thought it was Japanese only. Going to track it down now

I'm pretty sure Typing of the Dead Overkill was only released in English. the Dev Team behind House of the Dead overkill is usa based, and they basically decided to make the typing version as a side project on their own time as an homage to the original typing of the dead.

You can buy it on Steam and there are even language packs you can get to change up the words. Such as a "Shakespeare" pack and a "Filthy Words" pack.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/The_Typing_of_The_Dead_Overkill/

My only gripe with the game is that there is no local multiplayer, but they did eventually add online multiplayer, so that's something. I'd suspect it might have to do with trying to identify 2 unique keyboards on 1 PC, IIRC the original PC version of Typing of the Dead was single player also, likely for the same reason.

 

[sammargh]

Hopefully the issue with chapter 3 boss can be fixed.

it's not just the chapter 3 boss, there are two other bosses later on that have question and answer type challenges.
really it's an issue with EVERY text bubble as the first line of the bubble is supposed to display the word. so if you're playing 2 player you'll see the word 3 times. once for display, then the line for player one then the line for player 2.

Can you elaborate on this? Looking at the dictionary files the format is stupidly simple so it shouldn't be them causing whatever this issue is you're explaining. I only have 1 keyboard & 1 maple bus adapter so I can't try it on my Naomi.

 

[twistedsymphony]

Can you elaborate on this? Looking at the dictionary files the format is stupidly simple so it shouldn't be them causing whatever this issue is you're explaining. I only have 1 keyboard & 1 maple bus adapter so I can't try it on my Naomi.

you don't need a second player to see the problem. hopefully this picture helps:

when using the English dictionary files that top line always comes in blank.

in the english version it's the same text as the the lower line (or lower 2 lines if 2 player), but in the Japanese version the top line text is ALWAYS different since the top line displays the word in Japanese (kanji/katakana/hirigana) with the bottom line(s) in english (romanji).

I have to imagine the format of the Japanese dictionary files are slightly different to include the different top text while the english dictionary files don't have this since it's not needed.


Thinking about this more it's likely NOT related to the question/answer boss battles. But the question/answer boss battles is likely related to the bonus round text being missing as well. at certain points you can unlock a bonus where in the Dreamcast version it will say something like "type 10 rhyming words in 30 seconds" followed by words that all rhyme. or it may have a "theme" where all the words are on a similar topic. With the translated naomi version this instruction text is missing and it's unclear if it's actually pulling the correct "similar" words for these sections.

this video at the 9:05 mark shows the dictionary power up in the first level followed by the bonus round:

 

[SmokeMonster]

Oh, I just realized that TOTD 2 is the Japanese-only TOTD game I was thinking of earlier. It has English characters but they're just gibberish. That is a game that could be cool to do a dictionary hack for. Sorry to keep going off topic, just tell me to shut up and I'll stop

 

[twistedsymphony]

Oh, I just realized that TOTD 2 is the Japanese-only TOTD game I was thinking of earlier. It has English characters but they're just gibberish. That is a game that could be cool to do a dictionary hack for. Sorry to keep going off topic, just tell me to shut up and I'll stop

yeah TOTD2 was PC only and Japanese Only, however Sega did show an arcade version running on Chihiro at a trade show. sadly it was never released.

If the time were to be spent fully translating a typing game I would suggest we translate Lupin The Third: the Typing, it's another NAOMI game that plays just like TOTD, only that one never saw a home release nor an English version.

 

[sammargh]

Ah, I see what you mean now... Looking through the dictionary files in the JP language there's no romanji at all so it's likely the font/game translates from hiragana to romanji while in-game if a user selects the option at game start and the top row doesn't have glyphs for romanji letters.

Luckily however the font is included with the dictionary files so it might be so simple of a fix as to just editing the hiragana glyphs to point to the romanji letters. Having done a few other translation projects though I'm going to assume this is wishful thinking and there's a bunch of headaches to happen in the future.

 

[werejag]

ive been tryin to replicate this iso crreation and i have yet to get it to work on other netboot games. is there something im doing wrong


before the cd001 there is from two other isos just 33 bytes of 00

 

[gamemaster14]

Oh, I just realized that TOTD 2 is the Japanese-only TOTD game I was thinking of earlier. It has English characters but they're just gibberish. That is a game that could be cool to do a dictionary hack for. Sorry to keep going off topic, just tell me to shut up and I'll stop

yeah TOTD2 was PC only and Japanese Only, however Sega did show an arcade version running on Chihiro at a trade show. sadly it was never released.
If the time were to be spent fully translating a typing game I would suggest we translate Lupin The Third: the Typing, it's another NAOMI game that plays just like TOTD, only that one never saw a home release nor an English version.

Lupin III The Typing was actually my first ever Naomi GD-Rom game. I bought the disc and dongle before I even had the Naomi system knowing from Lukemorse1's videos it was possible to get the system working at home. I eventually picked up a TOTD cart and that nice Maple interface adapter board (instead of my spliced cable).

The furthest I have got on Lupin III The Typing was mission 7, Basically you see a bunch of Mannequins and slowly some Japanese characters are revealed and you need to type the Romanji version of these characters or the Mannequin shots you. Sadly, I just don't know much Japanese. Perhaps some day I will take my many videos of this scene and atleast Romanji-ize the phrases so I can get to Mission 8 and beyond to see the rest of the game. (Basically making an FAQ for Mission 7 or Cheat sheet, is the only way I can think of solving this choke point, I actually find it funny that I didn't think of this until now)


I am very glad to see someone take up this Typing of the Dead project. I someone was able to manage a full playthrough even in its Japanese only State. I will be glad to finally play a fully Translated arcade version.

 

[waiwainl]

There is a Dreamcast console setup of Type of the Dead in the Dutch National Video Game Museum (https://www.nationaalvideogamemuseum.nl) - I love the game.

I am also very glad this project exists!

 

[sammargh]

Admittedly my Dreamcast knowledge has gone stale over the years as I haven't played with the system from a dev perspective since the early 2000s. With that said however it looks like to fix the upper-box may involve patching the binary itself. I mention Dreamcast because it's where I came from and it has a method as to how it loads a game that seems to apply to Naomi as well. There's ip.bin which sets up the Dreamcast's game name, drive type, license screen, etc which hands off to 1st_read.bin which is typically the binary of a program that has linked files against the rest of everything else. Looking at ic22 it appears that this is made somewhat similar however the format of the header at the beginning does not conform to ip.bin or 1st_read.bin so it's difficult to decipher due to no sdk being public for Naomi.

With that said I mention all of this because I found where I believe it's doing hiragana > romanji translation within ic22 which means the font and likely things like the text box exist within it and will need edited directly. This is actually fairly standard for Dreamcast games as the system has no font natively and a program must link against a font and load as an object on boot if you want to post any sort of debug information at all. Considering that it wouldn't surprise me if Naomi took the same path and the FONT.BIN file is something entirely unrelated.

In this picture you can see the romanji alphabet for and then following in highlighted are the shift-jis hex equivalents of the text above. The good news at least is shift-jis is 2 bytes wide meaning some phrases can fit fine while others will be too long. Problem is A: I have no idea how to extract and work with IC22 and B: I am unaware of any sort of Naomi debugging system that would let you poke at it live so progress may stall for quite a bit. Lastly this doesn't solve the kanji that the game uses as well. It also seems that the kana format doesn't follow the plain text format being that they're 8 bytes wide and padded with FF so who knows.

 

[sammargh]

ive been tryin to replicate this iso crreation and i have yet to get it to work on other netboot games. is there something im doing wrong


before the cd001 there is from two other isos just 33 bytes of 00

It really depends on the game, I've seen a bunch that do not follow iso9660 and have some custom filesystem. In these if you plug ic1 into a hex editor you'll be greeted with the files and would have to figure the format to parse them out.

With that said the iso9660 trick you can kinda figure things out by looking at the data in the header for the iso

Here is the last track in Typing of the Dead which you can find by going to the very end of the netboot bin and searching in reverse for CD001 twice. You have to search twice as in the file header it will appear twice and you need to find the beginning header which will always begin with xx43443031. In the header you will see that set of 8 bytes I highlighted in red which is the proper endian order of how many sectors are in the track. In this one you see it is 0x046F which when converted to decimal you come up with 1135. The sector size on these isos is standard 2048 - 0x0800 highlighted in blue. With some math you find the iso size is 1135*2048=2324480 bytes. ISO9660 are padded with 35,000 or 0x88B8 bytes of null (00) data so subtracting that you find you need to pull 2324480-35000=2289480 bytes starting with xx43443031. Once copied create a new file, pad it with 35000 bytes of 00 and then paste the copied data to the end of the file. This should result in a mountable iso.

 

[twistedsymphony]

Going through the game a bit I've started identifying areas that will need manual translation. Most of these are just one or two words, and some of these could probably be blanked out all-together but others will be more work.
01. The Mode Select Screen

This is arguably the most important translation as it lets the player know which game mode they're selecting.

02. The Instruction Screen:

I wonder if this is actual text or a static image.

03. The Attention Screen:

This Screen seem to be instructing the player that they can type a single Japanese word multiple ways. Since this is completely irrelevant to the English version I wonder if this screen could simply be bypassed. Again, not clear if this is text or an image.

04. The Chapter Selection Screen

chapter name and description could probably be taken from the English version

05. "Press the Enter key to skip" text

This appears on several of the other screen as well, I wonder if the text is only stored in 1 place and then referenced multiple times.

06. Subtitles

The Cutscenes in both attract mode and while playing have sub-titles along the right side of the screen. The English version doesn't have any at all so I'd think these could simply be blanked out, or removed.

07. Boss Instructions

before each boss battle there are instructions on how to defeat, The text could probably be taken from the English version. After Mode Selection this is arguably the most important translation as it's relevant to game play.

08. Score screen:

At the end of each level the score screen has some text on the right hand side.


Others that I couldn't find good screenshots of but I know exist are
09. Attract Mode Tutorial
This is several on-screen text bubbles that appear as part of attract mode where the game explains how to play.

10. Score Attack messages
When playing score attack mode there is a screen with some text that appears before the game starts, and another message that appears on screen during gameplay. There may be others, I haven't played this mode much.

 

[sammargh]

Unfortunately pretty much all of those messages are actually textures rather than rendered text. Most all of it does exist within the home release data however it all resides in POLTEX.AFS which I cannot get to extract properly no matter what I do.

 

[kuze]

Unfortunately pretty much all of those messages are actually textures rather than rendered text. Most all of it does exist within the home release data however it all resides in POLTEX.AFS which I cannot get to extract properly no matter what I do.

There are some AFS tools that were released from a Shenmue translation group that might be useful, but you probably have already tried them.

 

[twistedsymphony]

Do they use a standard format for textures or is it something proprietary for Sega.

 

[sammargh]

Dreamcast used fairly standard textures depending upon the middleware the developer used. The problem with poltex is it seems a lot of data from it must be streamed directly into game because there are hundreds of undefined files in the archive digest

 

[twistedsymphony]

Unfortunately pretty much all of those messages are actually textures rather than rendered text. Most all of it does exist within the home release data however it all resides in POLTEX.AFS which I cannot get to extract properly no matter what I do.

Dreamcast used fairly standard textures depending upon the middleware the developer used. The problem with poltex is it seems a lot of data from it must be streamed directly into game because there are hundreds of undefined files in the archive digest

@MetalliC Do you have any insight as to how we might extract/view/modify/reinsert texture data from the poltex file?

 

[sammargh]

Poltex is only on the Dreamcast version and there's no archiving in Naomi. On a whim I grabbed the pc version and there's uncompressed pol and tex dirs so that solves that problem.

Bigger problem is the files don't match up to arcade but I have't looked at it much at all and could be missing something simple. Still not sure what pol is shorthand for though. PC version also has a matching font.bin file so that isn't what breaks the input box.

Edit: turns out I was being lazy. I pulled all 11 tracks from the rom image and laid them out and noticed overlapping. Split them into their own folders for each track and ran the TRANS.TBL against the files to get the long form names of them and now a lot more things match up with PC version. I'm able to identify the first track is the texture folder, 7th is cam, 8th is pol, 9th is mot, 10 is sound and 11 is the dictionary. The other ones seem like weird tiny patch-in fixes because it's just single files with not much in them.

 

[sammargh]

There's still work to be done but eh, I'll take progress as progress.

Colors are completely messed up, need to get the pc version working so I can see how it handles loading files in what order to figure how these all tie together and what pol actually does. It eventually falls apart.

Tried just blindly shoving the level select in but it wasn't happy about that.

I was however at least able to get one request in here working though. Down with censorship!