Alice Soft Translation Tool

[toolbox]

Yay, afker's not afk anymore! ;)

I've already started a TT 1 translation and it works fine on 3.x (3.9 specifically since that's what they released the SDK for). It has about 4100 message blocks, though many are small, like enemy names, yes/no menus, etc. So far it is 11% translated :)

Your editing/checking help would be most appreciated! I can get most of the stuff to a passable level, but for the harder messages I will send point them out and send them along. :-D

If all goes well on TT1, it would be fun to do TT2, but one thing at a time, huh? I'm sure TT2 has much more to translate.

Btw, if anyone else is interested in helping translate, please let us know!

[Afker]

Originally Posted by toolbox

Yay, afker's not afk anymore! ;)

I've already started a TT 1 translation and it works fine on 3.x (3.9 specifically since that's what they released the SDK for). It has about 4100 message blocks, though many are small, like enemy names, yes/no menus, etc. So far it is 11% translated :)

Your editing/checking help would be most appreciated! I can get most of the stuff to a passable level, but for the harder messages I will send point them out and send them along. :-D

If all goes well on TT1, it would be fun to do TT2, but one thing at a time, huh? I'm sure TT2 has much more to translate.

Btw, if anyone else is interested in helping translate, please let us know!

BTW, whiel you are translating, if you can also add some documentation for the game on the wiki, that'd be great! The wiki is very lacking on articles for common enemies. It'd be nice to have a base set of standard name translations for some of them and their common attributes (-:

[Yucie]

Hello all,

Sorry for my poor English.
Since Chinese Programmer (Crass Programmer & Gameviewer Programmer) made packing tools for system 4.0 for the translator.
Anyone who want to translate Alicesoft game can use it.

The attached picture is test by that program
http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/a...ate/alice2.jpg

Yes, I know of that tool. The script dumping portion of the tool only works with version 1.3 of the game since it looks like the tool is a quick hack and it checks for hard-coded values defined in the program. You can get it to work with 1.4 but there are a lot of caveats that make it more trouble than it's worth. Other parts of the tool work such as .ain encryption and decryption and archive packing.

Well enough of that, images speak louder than words:

Oh yeah, images above do not imply that a translation of the game in in the works. It's just proof of concept.

[Firestorm717]

What sort of compression do the .SCO files use? They all have the byte tag S380 in the beginning. Reason I ask is because the Discompiler keeps crashing when I try to process the .ALD file for a particular game I am looking to translate (Ore no Shita de Agake).

[toolbox]

Where is this game? I'm not seeing it on the Alicesoft Archives.
I remember seeing .SCO files before when playing around with AmbivalenZ. They look fairly straightforward as far as text, but I didn't put much time into getting anywhere with them. It *seemed* like you might be able to just modify the text in-place, though. Can you extract the .SCO files from the .ALD without decompiling them? That might be what you need. Just unlink them from the .ALD.

[Firestorm717]

Right, I can get the .SCO files from the .ALD, however, I don't know how to convert them to .ADV for editing. (I'm wondering, why the script is stored in both System39.ain and *SA.ALD anyway). Comparing Test_01.adv and Test_01.sco from the Sys39SDK, it looks like they are of different file size, so I'm guessing there's some kind of compression. When I use the System 3.9 decompiler by Hasegawa, it gets the HEL files fine, but then runs into an infinite loop with the same repeated byte string:

call error pre = 0
;ERR F A:000f0a-S:05ea : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 :................................

;ERR D A:000f0a-S:05ea : 82 4f 00 82 50 00 82 51 00 82 52 00 82 53 00 82 54 00 82 55 00 82 56 00 82 57 00 82 58 00 00 00 :０.１.２.３.４.５.６.７.８.９...

...Tried scanning through the source code, but didn't get very far, since it's somewhat of a mess...are there any other references out there for handling ADV <--> SCO conversion?

Ore no Shita de Agake is actually from Alice Soft's branch company, Alice Blue (which is now defunct), but they use the same game engine. I've attached the .ALD file and a couple of .SCO files. Thanks for looking into this.

[toolbox]

Will look into your problem, but in the meantime, I should post the new release.
I believe there is a 3.9 decompiler out there... (DC39100) on a web search might yield something. I could never get it to work, but maybe that was just because I was trying older games?

Edit:
I tried it on the 3.9 decompiler but it said it couldn't open the .ald file. Weird. Now that I think about it, SCO files are basically compiled files, not just a different format. So editing the .SCO files directly won't do you much good due to pointers and all that good stuff. I was getting them confused with another Alicesoft file format used for System3 whose name I can't recall right now.
Anyway, since the DCs come with source (I think) you could dig into them there and see what the problem is... but ugh :p
I'll keep thinking, but I don't know of any SCO --> ADV converter.

[Firestorm717]

I tried it on the 3.9 decompiler and the 3.6 decompiler, but both give me an infinite loop. It should open the .ald file, though. They're compiled files? You mean that it only holds pointers to the lines in System39.ain? Hm...in that case, it makes a lot more sense...can you tell me any more about the specific structure of the .ald file?

The earlier screens were from Sengoku Rance 7, a game that would be great to see translated. If someone can post the script file for Rance 7, I read some Japanese so I will have a go.

Also, I thought Sengoku Rance was written for System 4.0, yet the post is discussing system 3.9... I guess the scripting system is unchanged.

[toolbox]

I think there's been a bit of confusion here.

First the Sengoku Rance thing:
Sengoku Rance is for System4, and that was brought up by someone because Yucie posted extraction tools for Alicesoft System4. System4 is a completely different engine than System3.x. Very very different. No backwards compatibility I'm pretty sure. So if someone wants to work with Sengoku Rance, they would need to use Yucie's tools earlier in the thread.

What Firestorm717 is talking about is a game that seems to use System3.9. What seems to be different between System3.9 and earlier 3.x versions like 3.5 and 3.6 is that they can apparently use a .AIN file for some stuff. I'm not entirely sure how .AIN files work, but everything I've been doing with System3.x games has not used them. Therefore I am at a loss as to how to handle that. I do know there are some AIN tools out there though somewhere, but they might have been for System4 AIN files. The pointer issue I was talking about in System3.x SCO files is that shrinking or expanding text in the SCO files will change the memory location of the SCO's contents. This poses a problem when the ALD or even SCO wants to look up memory locations.
The bottom line is that (as far as I know) in order to modify System3.x game text, you need the decompiled source. However, the System3.9 AIN file might let you get around that. Maybe. Somehow. :p

I hope that helps to clear some stuff up :)

[Toaster]

Thanks for the reply. I have been checking out the translation community a bit.. hope I am not taking this thread off track.. anyway.

The link to the main tool for System 4 games is:
http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=crass
use this link to find the current version number and then google up the zip file with the source etc - you can probably do better if you read Chinese.
--> Google will lead you to here - http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kz=469955974

There is a good summary of ripping tools here:
http://bbs.2dgal.com/read.php?tid=51101

and an amazing well organized translation community here:
http://www.tsukuru.info/tlwiki/index...itle=Main_Page

>> Anyway I have the crass_0.4.10 tool but am not having lots of luck figuring it out. It would be welcome if anyone can post a clear explanation of how to use it (preferably on Sengoku Rance 7). (i am aware that the tool comes with some documentation... not having a lot of luck with it.)

[Firestorm717]

Okay, comparing the .ain and .sco files with the .adv files, I'm starting to understand. All the script lines are kept in the .ain files, whereas the system functions are in the .sco files...in order to get the .adv file, you need to put them together. However, it's not just a simple hex addressing. I see a pattern of gradually incrementing byte strings in the .sco file, for example, 412F7C04 -> 412F7C05 -> 522F7C06, etc. Like you said, probably pointer addresses. But I'm still not quite clear of their exact nature because they're not simple offset values in the .ain file. (By the way, I'm not looking at the files I sent you, I'm looking at the Test_01.adv, Test_01.sco and decrypted System39.ain - wrote a quick program for it, since it's a simple left circular rotate - from the Sys39SDK). Unfortunately, my experience with assembly code is rather poor, so someone else is going to have to open up the .exe for a peek in OllyDbg.

[toolbox]

If the script's in the AIN, can you just edit the text in there directly?