Zill O'll infinite plus english translation

[Wendell]

We appreciate your work and we love you 

Yeah, I agree with this.

[Mugi]

Okay bois, we finally took our heads out of our asses and peeked into what makes the audio routines tick.



the audio playing routine has 2 subroutines in it, paired with a table that holds 8bytes per track, 4 for in-game BGM and another 4 for musicplayer tracks.

the subroutine detects which one is in use and offsets the trackindex by 4-bytes depending on whether you're in-game or the musicplayer,
so what we're gonna do is hijack the routine for the musicplayer, and substitute the musicplayer tracks with our second set of in-game audio,
which is then linked to a new menu item that will make the game offset the index or not, allowing the use of 2 sets of tracks.

it's pretty clear in paper but there's some extra assembly to write, and there's a matter of rebuilding the main archive that actually
holds the audio files in it. It's TOC contains a 8-byte portion of data per file which purpose we havent really figured out yet and we're not sure whether or not its actually needed for the game to function (the other files of the game don't seem to care, but we havent tried injecting new files yet.)

[EpicDave]

Good luck Mugi and Tom. -puts on my cool shades- TT_TT I believe in you

[Mugi]

We got some progress done on the whole audio thing, but it turned out to be slightly more annoying than i wanted to.

the TOC of the arcbin holds 8 bytes of data per file entry that we originally ignored (it's not related to file offsets or sizes so extracting and rebuilding wasn't an issue) but now that we're modifying the filestructure, the container TOC started disagreeing, which led to a new quest of reverse engineering the rest of it.

it turns out that the 4 byte pairs the filelist holds are a secondary sub-TOC that holds reference chains to arrays of files for increased seeking speed (basically there are chains of files where each file holds an address to the next and previous file in the chain.) We have the basic idea down of how exactly it works but it appears to be built out of an external reference that constructs the file sub-arrays and without that list, rebuilding it as-is is propably impossible, which might lead to a loss of file read speed.

it shouldn't really be an issue but we'll see. The idea is to try and get a preliminary rebuilder done during next weekend.

[EpicDave]

We got some progress done on the whole audio thing, but it turned out to be slightly more annoying than i wanted to.

the TOC of the arcbin holds 8 bytes of data per file entry that we originally ignored (it's not related to file offsets or sizes so extracting and rebuilding wasn't an issue) but now that we're modifying the filestructure, the container TOC started disagreeing, which led to a new quest of reverse engineering the rest of it.

it turns out that the 4 byte pairs the filelist holds are a secondary sub-TOC that holds reference chains to arrays of files for increased seeking speed (basically there are chains of files where each file holds an address to the next and previous file in the chain.) We have the basic idea down of how exactly it works but it appears to be built out of an external reference that constructs the file sub-arrays and without that list, rebuilding it as-is is propably impossible, which might lead to a loss of file read speed.

it shouldn't really be an issue but we'll see. The idea is to try and get a preliminary rebuilder done during next weekend.

I have zero idea what any of that means but progress was made so awesome my dude!

[Bonesy]

Always great to hear progress!

[Mugi]

there's always something, but like i mentioned earlier, the coding side has mostly regressed to the point we can only work on it
a little while during weekends so it's a tad slow.
May 19, 2019, 07:55:24 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)

Since you're heavily modifying the code anyway, you know what would be godly? Extending the options screen and settings save so it's a runtime switch instead (or as a feature) of a alternative patch.

Probably too much to ask - extending the iso so it can fit two soundtracks and fix their pointers to be runtime switchable instead of just replacing the files can not be trivial - but i'm just throwing the idea out here.

as requested above, the runtime switch for the audio has now been implemented and the soundtracks are both embedded into the game,
and are selectable from the game options (either in-game or mainmenu)

currently the menu itself has not been coded but the data is implemented and fully functional. (needs a debugger to change atm )
the musicplayer also still works (though atm, it only plays the ps1 tracks.)

the game's data install function will be removed and the menu used for that will be repurposed for selecting the soundtracks,
and if all goes well, we will also reuse the data install setting bit from the save file to store the selected audio mode into the
save file itself so that you dont have to set it up again everytime you start playing.

there's a lot of little things to clean up on this, but the base idea is fully working so this feature will be included in the patch
once upon a time when it finally is ready.


That said, I do wish to apologize to anyone waiting for this translation that it's taking us so long to get done.
When i started this project I was fully aware of how much in shit I actually dipped myself into and that it would take a long while to
get this game done, but even so, it's taking far longer than I actually wanted it to.

we're still at it, but yeah... I really have no idea how long does this actually take to get done x_x

[mikeprado30]

We understand that's so many time to be done, because is a true MONSTER of a translation & hacking work.  So we'll be waiting patiently (at least that's what I do ).

[EpicDave]

We understand that's so many time to be done, because is a true MONSTER of a translation & hacking work.  So we'll be waiting patiently (at least that's what I do ).

Hey man... absolutely speak for me. I am 100 percent on board for waiting patiently. You dudes are grade A wonderful dudes.

[Mugi]

this weekends progress was decent considering the time restraints we work with,

we managed to locate the "save" bit, and all the routines that deal with it, in order to remove the install function itself.

next weekend will consist of mainly removing those and repurposing them for the actual audio shift function along with coding the
actual function itself that deals with the menu after the install routines are gone.

after that it will be some cleanup like removing the menu entries for installing and uninstalling the data file, and making sure the menu
looks and plays nicely.

[chivien]

This is some heavy modding, nice works as usual 
Just wondering what are you guys gonna do about the patcher?

[Mugi]

It's a bit of a open end atm.

The assembly will be done through armips and a single .asm file but the audio stuff and whatnot will propably jsut be distributed as files and a tool to implement them into the iso.

I dont really think i'll go through the trouble of making tools for all 3 versions of the game and pull and convert data from each of them.
not to mention it would be a real hasttle for the user to track down the ps1 image, the ps2 image and the psp image and then merge all them together to produce the end result.

Its a bit of a gray area of how this will work really, but seeing the magnitude of what we've done to the game at this point we're sort of out of options wiht it.

nonetheless, it's still all open. I'll see when we get to that point.
June 01, 2019, 02:47:29 PM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
okay boiiiiiiiiiiis!

https://youtu.be/Yklm93Bc4xo

feast your eyes on in-game switchable soundtracks.

this was a preliminary test of the code and while it works, it does not have full functionality yet.
we are looking into making the change apply instantly when the setting is changed instead of during next track load.
(whether or not we'll success is another matter but it's on the to-do list.)

[chivien]

Recently had a dream about this game getting a remake, I'm like  then I woke up and I'm like 
Least I still have this to look forward to 

[EpicDave]

God damn Mugi you absolute badass o.o This is turning out to be a hell of a lot better than just a standard translation. Switchable soundtracks is pretty awesome.

[Mugi]

We're working on it.

the code got cleaned up a little and we removed teh install/uninstall options from the main menu so that they cant be derped with
since they dont work anymore too, for the dual audio thing, it's completely ready and usable as you can see from the video in the
previous post but we still havent gotten it to instantly change the track when the mode is switched. We're working on that at the moment.

stuff has been even slower than it used for the past few weeks, im having some really bad issues with my life going on at the moment
and working on games has really been the least of my worries lately.

that said, nothing is going to get dropped or abandoned. I dint come here to fail this again.

[chivien]

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 60 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.   

I'm just gonna go ahead and say "I'm gonna be back to check on you guys next year"
Good luck with the progress and all 

[Saint_C]

Take your time, I'm excited to see the final product! My friends and I have been watching this for sometime now. We're looking forward to playing this very much!

[Bonesy]

To anyone considering posting in this thread going forward: Might want to go post on the gbatemp thread instead.

[Tom]

I don't have an account on that forum, so I'll post here.

Currently, I am working on a huge file that has bits of text scattered around from all over the game. Though it's just one file of hundreds, this single file is about as big as a late-era NES RPG. There are several of these huge files in the game, but if I can do the biggest one, it should give Mugi some understanding of how he should go about handling them.

I don't know the details, but for some reason, the file itself may already be too big to fit because of the way it's inserted. If the file is too big to reinsert, it will mean that the way the game handles text insertion might have to be redone entirely.

Cross your fingers and hope that doesn't happen.