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beelzy, posted Mon Dec 16, 2019 4:27 am (52608)

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I am currently trying to hack a Japanese PS2 game called Endonesia. I've tried taking a look at some of the files:

world.tex
world.mdd
world.map
exo.bin
pbpx_952.01

There's some other sound related files in two separate folders, sound and modules, as well as system.cnf, but I found nothing unusual about it.

So the pbpx_952.01 file is the ELF, and it seems to contain a few strings for some code, and it's probably loading the world files and exo.bin. Most of the graphics are in exo.bin; I was able to find most of the sprites and background images in 32bpp with 256x128 tiles on Crystaltile (Works just as well on TileMolester). A few of the sprites can be viewed in 8bpp or 16bpp, but I didn't find out the palettes for those just yet. There is a font for the credits and certain texts, but it is not the main font. I have a suspicion that the main font is compressed because I tried looking for it in a memory dump, and it looks all garbled up. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong?

I never found out what graphics might be in world.tex, or if it even is a graphics file; it never looked right in either Crystaltile or TileMolester.

I couldn't find any obvious texts in either exo.bin or any of the other files. But they're mostly in Japanese, so I'm not sure where to start or how to go about looking for those. I've tried relative searching in Crystaltile, but didn't get much back.

I realize that this game isn't that well known, and may not be interesting to others, but if no one is interested in hacking the game themselves, I'd at least like some hints so that I can try hacking it myself. I can also provide more details about exo.bin on demand, or text strings to try, if required.

beelzy, posted Wed Dec 18, 2019 9:48 pm (52663)

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Okay, so I managed to find out where the fonts are stored and the color palettes, but the fonts are compressed, and don't look right.



I'm unfortunately not really sure how best to figure out the compression method used for this. I think I can find the mips assembly instructions while running the PCSX2 debugger, but I don't really understand how the compression works.

The elf file is in the attachments above in endonesia.zip; it's pbpx_952.01.

beelzy, posted Thu Dec 19, 2019 11:59 pm (52697)

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Turns out the fonts just needed to have the right tile settings; it needs a size of 2256 x 1128. I've also now found most of the text, and adding new text for most of the texts in the ELF file is no problem; you just insert into empty space somewhere and change the pointer.

Unfortunately, what's not so simple is doing the same thing for character dialog texts. Those are on the exo.bin file, in some blocks near the bottom, along with the pointers, and they are relative. Which means all the text has to be contained in that block; I thought I could just change the sizes in the header, but doing this and adding more text causes all the data after it to be offsetted, and the game freezes. I'm not sure what the best strategy for this is.