PSX Final Fantasy VII Text Editor

[Penance]

Greetings.

I noticed two neat utilities at these forums, which edit the field.lgp and kernel2.bin files in the PC version of Final Fantasy VII. With those two, one can edit virtually every text in the game. But this applies to the PC version. I was wondering, is there any way to do the same for the PSX version of the game? Is there any editor available for this?

I want to make a proper english translation for the PAL version of the game:

i) Correct the translation mistakes
ii) Replace "american" englsh words with "english" ones (armor -> armour, etc)
iii) Fix the various ability names (magic, summons, etc) to match the original japanese ones (ice, ice2 -> blizzard, blizzara, etc)

I can do this for the PC, but I want to do that for the original PSX title. If anyone knows how to do that, any help is appreciated.

[Cyberman]

I suggest you do some research first try this for starters.

[Penance]

I see what you mean, however this leads towards a direction I cannot understand.
I do not whant to deal with a programmer's field, I want to translate.
The above mentioned utilities allow you to easily do that.
On the other hand, you direct me to the file structure itself, of which files are compressed in a way I do not know how to decompress them (I see no LZS decompressing utility in the wiki), and maybe even modifying scripts.
This is a painfull procedure, irrelevant with translating.
So, let's view this question from a translator's perspective:

Without dwelling into a programmer's field, is there a way to hack the text in the filed modules, and in the kernel, the same way one may do that for the PC?

[Cyberman]

I suggest you not be so nieve about what you are asking.  It's possible to do indeed, however there are VERY strict rules for editing any of the information in the PS1 version of FF7. It's not as simple as changing the file information.  I strongly urge you to goto Romhacking.net for help really.  It has an active group of translators there who will guide you through the interesting experience you are considering going through, they are extremely helpful knowledgeable and many have quite a bit of experience.  They might even have some of the custom tools you will need to do so. There are several groups doing porteguese, hebrew, and polish translations that I know of.

However I recomend you not think that you do not have to concern yourself about the information I pointed you too either.  Square only selectively uses the ISO9660 system on the disks.  The files you wish to access, the FF7 engine does not use the ISO9660 FS to access, it uses absolute and thus permanent indices stored somewhere on the disk.  Every file in that case may not change it's sector count size or you will cause the engine to crash (on boot or whenever anything after the file you modified is accessed), halt, or get some very strange results.  You must also update the size information at the begining of the file (or it will not load correctly and again the engine will crash and behave badly).  The files you are looking for are the .DAT files in \FIELD, the script section dialogs are what you wish to edit.

Are you using the Japanese version to perform the translation from? If so that might prove to be interesting to know the encoding of the symbols in the script dialog section (as far as I know this is unknown as yet and needs to be added to Q-gears and the wiki). 

Good luck.

Cyb

[Penance]

Thnak you for your reply. I understand what you mean about the sizes, and the way files are handled, and indeed that might prove to be a pain without a tool. I will try romhacking to see what is available there.

I will be using the PAL version of the game to do so, since my "quest" is to have a localised PAL version as Final Fantasy IX is (Fina Fantasy VIII is half way localised, since half words are american englesh and half were done in UK english...).

I imagined the .dat files were where the dialog is stored, but this includes only the field dialog. I need to find the equivalent of kerenl2.bin file of the PC version, since I need to edit spell names as well. I can't find thaty for the life of me, as there is no "kernel" folder in the PSX version. But, I shall try asking at romhacking.net as well.

Thanks again.

PS: The reason I tried to avoid the "low-level" technical details, is because it is a matter of approach as to home much time is needed to spend on it, comparing to the time needed to actually translate. I have a very bad experience from many linux users, who forget the simple word "efficiency" when distributing packages, and one has to spend half of his life looking for dependancies, because they, for some reason, suppose they are easy to be found, or simply forget who they are aiming at which is a user not a programmer. I apologise for my tone, but we technicians (me on a hardware level) tend to forget sometimes that the average joe simply may not want to dwell in the information we as technicians like to dwell into . I just wanted to be straight from the beginning. Thanks again.

[Vehek]

kernel2.bin was part of kernel.bin in the PSX version. Also might want to mess with scene.bin as well for the enemies stuff.

[Cyberman]

Thnak you for your reply. I understand what you mean about the sizes, and the way files are handled, and indeed that might prove to be a pain without a tool. I will try romhacking to see what is available there.

They have more low level oriented things there. So you may find what you are looking for more readily.

I will be using the PAL version of the game to do so, since my "quest" is to have a localised PAL version as Final Fantasy IX is (Fina Fantasy VIII is half way localised, since half words are american englesh and half were done in UK english...).

I seldom can tell the difference between US English and British English, in written prose. However in spoken, I can barely understand many people from the UK because of the inordinate amount of slang often used.  I suppose simple things such as a tractor trail truck sound trivial but, they call as such a lorrie. It's kind of interesting really. The one case that is obvious is the use of the coma, apparently US English is much stricter in it's use.

I imagined the .dat files were where the dialog is stored, but this includes only the field dialog. I need to find the equivalent of kerenl2.bin file of the PC version, since I need to edit spell names as well. I can't find thaty for the life of me, as there is no "kernel" folder in the PSX version. But, I shall try asking at romhacking.net as well.

Spell names... hmmmm I think you should try looking in \INIT for WINDOW.BIN and KERNEL.BIN .. as that is where they reside You may need to deal with some of the files in \MENU.  Don't forget you need to do this on all 3 disks as well.  If you plan on changing the names of enemies as well, that would be \BATTLE\SCENE.BIN

Thanks again.

PS: The reason I tried to avoid the "low-level" technical details, is because it is a matter of approach as to home much time is needed to spend on it, comparing to the time needed to actually translate. I have a very bad experience from many linux users, who forget the simple word "efficiency" when distributing packages, and one has to spend half of his life looking for dependancies, because they, for some reason, suppose they are easy to be found, or simply forget who they are aiming at which is a user not a programmer. I apologise for my tone, but we technicians (me on a hardware level) tend to forget sometimes that the average joe simply may not want to dwell in the information we as technicians like to dwell into . I just wanted to be straight from the beginning. Thanks again.

I understand completely, I've had to upgrade libraries several times due to some using new versions of the libraries I do have. Fun stuff that. At least Q-gears now compiles. I just have to install GLX (woops)

Cyb

Mod Edit: Corrected quote-tags... ^_^

[Penance]

OK, last question (probably). Those *.bin files are encrypted right? Is there any specific tool for those, since txt and hex editors do not work for those?

[lasyan3]

Hi there.

For editing the dialog files, you can use my program : Hack7

Enjoy

[Cyberman]

lasyan3
Ahhhhhh!
You scared me
Geesh you pop up at interesting times! How have you been.

I forgot about your tools you have my humble(d) apologies on that.

Penance
You should look at the wiki regarding the .BIN files specifically kernel.bin as they are not encrypted but compressed (just like all the .XXX files in the FIELD directory) also look at this thread on SCENE.BIN.

Cyb

[Penance]

Thank you for your help guys.
Thank you for the programme, lasyan3, this is really helpfull

I went to the wiki. I read about kernel.bin and and *.bin files in general, but I seem to have some questions:

1) They are either uncompressed, or a compilation of gzip compressed files. So, in either case, how does one open them?
I mean, specifically, how can I edit kerenl.bin? Do those scene editors for battle work? Please, I am a wee bit noob on this, and it may solve my hands, since once I solve that, I can easily begin my work.