Alice Soft / Windows Translation Questions

[Blue Lemma]

Hello! I had a few questions:

I know it's not likely, but could anyone here share any knowledge about the file formats Alice Soft uses for some of their games? (namely .ald, .sco)
I'm trying a (probably partial) translation of Rance 3, one of their old games which they released to the general public for free. http://retropc.net/alice/menu.html

I have figured out some information about the .ald file format and the .sco formats through hex editing and referencing Shift-JIS codes, but I still don't know everything I need to. Where can I find out more about "hacking" Japanese Windows files like this in general? How does one learn this stuff? I've just been going by my own programming instincts so far ^_^;

(Please don't point me to Zophar's Domain... I looked there already and couldn't find anything very useful.)

Thank you for any help! :)

[Shii]

Useful links.

http://8ne.sakura.ne.jp:20008/chika/unitbase/xsys35/
http://chig.vis.ne.jp/m/port.html (maybe not so useful, this one. although I didn't realize that I could play Kanon on my Palm Pilot!)

[GreatSaintLouis]

http://chig.vis.ne.jp/m/port.html (maybe not so useful, this one. although I didn't realize that I could play Kanon on my Palm Pilot!)
Indeed, and on the author's website (http://www.trasys.gr.jp/palm/), there are many more visual novel games converted to run on the Palm. I can confirm Kanon - though not the current translation patch - runs well on my lowly Palm IIIc. ^_^

It'll be interesting to see if the final translation works - or can be coaxed to work - with this program. Having an English Kanon on the go would be absolutely amazing.

[Haeleth]

In theory it probably could be. Since Palm Kanon appears not to be open source, however, it would be a case of running the data converter on the Japanese version, reverse-engineering the converted scenario file, and writing a clone of it that succeeded on the English data. And, possibly, hacking the Palm interpreter to support English text, if it doesn't already...

Far better to buy a Zaurus, for which there's an open-source AVG32 clone (based on Waffle, IIRC) that could probably easily be modified to work with the English data. ^_^

[GreatSaintLouis]

I had a Zaurus several years ago. It was a wonderful little device, capable of nearly anything. I eventually sold it because it was too much like a little PC, and I didn't want that sort of drama on a handheld. The IIIc is underpowered by a few orders of magnitude, but I never had to hassle with dependencies or whether a program had to be in flash or the device memory. Every now and then, there's a use that makes me with I still had the Zaurus, sortof. This is one of them.