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Making an English version of Typing of the Dead Arcade

maramilitia said:
MetalliC said:
welcome, btw
maramilitia said:
First I wanted to point out that there is already some English in the naomi version alongside the Japanese, it just takes switching the images around within the texture to get the game to display it.
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as I've noticed this game's data is like 10(sic!) ISO images located in game data ROMs.and ISOs in roms 1-5 and 9-12 contains mostly same file names (but 1st have ~50 more files), so I'd guess they are Japanese and English textures and/or data ?how do you switch eng/jap textures, did you find some byte-switch in game code or just replacing textures in game data ?
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Thanks for the welcome.
If I was able to debug the game properly I would have looked for where the game reads the image data from the texture files and redirected it to the English data but as I've said I couldn't get anything to work. So once I managed to decompress the files I just swapped the image data around in a hex editor (before I made the image program). Ive attached an example, original on the left, swapped around on the right.

The first 4 pictures in my first post are the only real examples of English that already existed in the NAOMI ver. Everything else has been taken from the PC ver. None of the texture files are the same between the versions, they have images for different parts of the game in them or are in a different order so I have had to open all of these files up and copy and paste the image data into the relevant files/locations, sometimes adjusting the image quality to get a better compressed file size.

The screenshots sammargh posted after switching the files are a good example of this. The files for the tutorial speech bubbles only contained English so were half the size which is why it displayed the wrong bubble first then just displayed garbage as it read beyond the file. Again for the chapter select screen, the file replacing the original had some extra stuff at the bottom of the image throwing everything off.


swapped example.png


I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the kind words and the likes, I was worried this wouldn't be seen as any significant progress, I almost didn't post this.
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I laid the ISOs out previously and their directory mapping in regards to the pc version:

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.
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The gotcha is that when you are working with these ISO images you need to run TRANS.TBL across the extracted files to see what they actually are. It's a file within the iso structure that allows a system to translate a ms-dos 8.3 format into long file.
 
Any update? I would totally play this on my Naomi if possible. I have the Dreamcast version and two keyboards. Such a weird awesome game.
 
I haven't looked at this game since I gave up a long time ago because of the texture limitation/engine limitations I ran into.

As for how to use a DVORAK layout yes it would be possible. The key map I provided is the hex representation of the ascii table ripped from the US HOTD which should be a keymap for all US-based keyboards - https://www.ascii-code.com/

Being armed with the hex values for each character and knowing the differences from DVORAK to QWERTY is just a matter of shuffling the hex around as needed.

Perhaps a visual will help:
uc2fKlT.png


Here you can see how the two keymaps look - hex on the left, text representation on the right. If I were to flip "A" and "B" around it would make it so in a QWERTY environment when I type "B" "A" would appear on the screen thus changing the keyap.

If you were wanting to do this on the Dreamcast version the same should apply as well. Use the base string of either JP or US depending on which version you're remapping and you can likely just search the entire gdi track in a hex editor for the string to replace.
 
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Bump!

Going to reiterate comments here regarding how to apply a .delta patch to the TotD.bin
@sammargh What program are people using for this? Is it possible to provide an .xdelta patch instead?

Cheers!
 
Update!

So I found this online patcher: https://hack64.net/tools/patcher.php

Fed it the TotD BIN file and the .delta patch from page 8.
It did its thing and gave me a new BIN file..
Still need to test this, but I could have worked?
I just need to tear down my Naomi in order to get this installed :rolleyes:
 
nam9 said:
Update!

So I found this online patcher: https://hack64.net/tools/patcher.php

Fed it the TotD BIN file and the .delta patch from page 8.
It did its thing and gave me a new BIN file..
Still need to test this, but I could have worked?
I just need to tear down my Naomi in order to get this installed :rolleyes:
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Did you ever get a chance to get this installed in you Naomi? I want to build one for my arcade lol
 
SBZack said:
Did you ever get a chance to get this installed in you Naomi? I want to build one for my arcade lol
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Sure did! Works great with a @Mitsurugi-w Naomi adapter and keyboard (I have a JPN model). Just choose the right game mode and you’re good to go (if it’s all Japanese characters then you chose the wrong mode). There may be some issues with the more advanced levels, but I didn’t get that far...
 
Just hopping on here to see how things are going for the English translation. I just got a keyboard set up with my naomi and would love to give this a try.

-Edit-

So I got the patch listed above to work and played through the first boss. Pretty good! I don't think it's up to date with what @sammargh and @maramilitia have been working on though. If there's some way I can help, I'd be happy to try my best to see what I can do here.
 
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The patch I had provided has most of the progress with regards to my input to translating the game. It should have the full translated dictionaries as well as keymap. I might have neglected to include the red blood patch but that would be the only thing missing. Everything else was done in discovery and abandoned due to lack of ability to interact with the texture files.
 
Is it possible to have both original Japanese and Patched English roms on a PiForce netboot setup? Not sure what the PiForce is looking for in file name/type, but I tried adding TotD [ENG].bin to my micro SD card and could only see 1 Typing of the Dead file on the PiForce.
 
Yubm12 said:
Is it possible to have both original Japanese and Patched English roms on a PiForce netboot setup?
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yes
Yubm12 said:
Not sure what the PiForce is looking for in file name/type, but I tried adding TotD [ENG].bin to my micro SD card and could only see 1 Typing of the Dead file on the PiForce.
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The Pi Force typically has a file that lists out all of the game names and the associated file names, so to add additional games they wont show up in the menu unless you add them to that file. There about 923235123 versions of Pi Force these days so which file you need to modify depends heavily on which version you're running.
 
I recently got one of those dreamcast to usb adapters and a dvorak keyboard (amazon has one for around $20) and can confirm it works great! I actually don't type dvorak but my brother does and he likes the game so I got this stuff so we can play 2 player. i wonder if it would work through the maple adapter. I might test eventually. Are there many differences between the arcade and dreamcast versions?

https://www.amazon.com/Mcbazel-Wingman-Converter-Controller-Dreamcast/dp/B08CHD6XYW/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=dreamcast+usb&qid=1635188608&qsid=139-1092919-0822467&sr=8-2&sres=B08CHD6XYW,B0891L7RYY,B08P4G5STN,B07ML6C8VR,B08KKQ7954,B07P37ZGTF,B08KKNSDH4,B07QPYSXY4,B01N7ANDLC,B07FCXL2VV,B07K3Y8NCT,B099HVR8PV,B073J885NN,B07VFMNLWM,B01H6GUCCQ,B07XM5FR1L

and here is the keyboard confirmed working
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MZ8ZNF...k0_1_10&crid=1848D0C3LE37H&sprefix=dvorak+key
 
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