Sorcerian Original and Sorcerian Forever

[gungunner]

I'm making a thread for both of these games since they are basically the same engine and data formats so they can be hacked and translated together.

I'm working on Sorcerian Original first since there's a patch already for Sorcerian Forever that translates everything except the text in the scenarios. Also Sorcerian Original contains all the scenarios from the original game plus the scenarios of Sorcerian Forever.

I managed to find and extract most of the strings in the game's .EXE, what I haven't tried to find yet are the strings that are only a character long since they are impossible to distinguish from other data that happens to be a valid shift-jis character. I also have the addresses of these strings and cross references to around half of them in case they need to be moved because the translation wouldn't fit otherwise.

What I'm having problems with (and the guy who made the patch for Sorcerian Forever also had problems with) is finding the text from the scenarios. After unpacking and decompressing the scenarios' .BIN files with flamethrower's tools (I also tried with falcnvrt) I managed to find very little text inside them. I found what seems to be names for a few weapons, but I can't find the scenario's title, description, NPC messages, etc.

Maybe someone is interested on helping with this project or already has some knowledge from other Falcom games that use similar data formats. I can upload the text dumps and extracted scenario files if anyone is interested.

[josejl]

Hey there.

I think I looked into these files a while ago. I think I posted something about the font, and that the text might be using a custom encoding?

It's been a while after all, and I don't remember much, but I can look up what I have.
I remember I was able to find some of the scenario text at least.

Edit:

https://heroesoflegend.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=269

That's what I posted, but I think I got a bit further before moving on with something else, I'll have to check my PC.

[gungunner]

It would be great if you find that stuff.

I read your thread before but I hadn't read it well. So the scenario's text is encoded with the same order as the font file? Is it using 2 bytes for each character starting from 0? or some other combination?

Also what program did you use to convert the TEXTFONT.DAT file?

[josejl]

Textfont.dat was just a file with raw pixel data.

You can view that with GIMP, or the tool I use called 7yuv (the latter lets you switch between different pixel formats on the fly).

As for the text mapping, I'm afraid I never wrote down anything.

[preta]

Would you potentially want to have an editor on the project at some point? If so, I might be interested.