Modifying an ISO

[BlackCitadel]

Hello,
my question is how can I modify an ISO and modify the in-game texts if possible?

Now when I mounted Chrono Cross ISO, I got these 2 files, there isn't any .txt files or sound files.



The reason I want to modify the in-game text is that I am translating it to my own language so other people can easily understand.

These are two pictures which I translated in Chrono Cross:-




But how I did that? I just took screenshots of the dialogue and then modified it in PAINT. That's why I am asking, taking each dialogue as a Paint screenshot takes a huge time and so many pictures, The Arni Village itself, which is the very first village where the game starts in exceeded 300 pictures... Instead of that I thought about if I could modify the ISO itself.

[Zorlon]

I will recomend a site with translation tools but in most cases the text is not easy to manipulate as the game tends to compression and coding that needs to be cracked so realy you need to be able to program and disasemble code in order to break it down then be able to build it back up again afterwards in this case all the files are stored in the SLUS_010.41 file

http://www.romhacking.net/ has tons of tools used by translators but alot of the time translators have to make there own tools as general ones don't cover most games this is even going back to NES rom hacking

for that game I would just extract both files and use PSX CD Gen to rebuild it after you mod the files

Ha your in luck there are Chrono Cross Translation tools out

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/840/
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/75/

[BlackCitadel]

OK, with this question and its answer:
Can I modify the text into Arabic one?
If the answer is now, then no need to bother thinking about modifying any ISO.
I think I will have no other choice than to use the Paint to change the English Text.

[Zorlon]

You will need to modify the font

If you don't have tools for extracting fonts, you are out of luck

Paint.. yeah ok, thats not going to happen unless you can extract the graphics in the first place and most PSX image files even if you do extract them are not your standard bitmap image you will need to convert those to PC format or use a PSX image editor

Get the tools first read there docs and see exactly what they can do first don't jump ahead of yourself

There may be alot of text files in there aswell but these are in ASCII format that aribic is just not so you will struggle with translating any game to aribic, not impossible, but maybe for you a first time console game hacker

I also do not have time to step by step walk you through, but that first tool does have an extensive doc with it

[BlackCitadel]

OK! Just the answer of this question and I will not be worried anymore!
I found out using these tools sounds like programming. So Does modifying the text in game using such tools take the same time as doing it in PAINT? If so I can use Paint instead if it takes the same effort!

And looks like there is not a special tool that translates any game? I guess the tool is only released by a person for a specific game.
I mean I need a tool that I can use to extract the ISO or this SLUS file to get the text files and a way in which I can replace the text.
Look at this game. I am surprised what application did he use to change the original text:-





Also looks like the translator didn't translate well.

This is the English Translation of the above 2 pictures:-




The translation of the 2nd picture doesn't make any sense! Although it's in Arabic and this is my language I couldn't even understand it. It doesn't make any sense.

And Mario as well.

[Zorlon]

No you can't even open the file with paint just trying would of answered that

Sorry you can't just use Paint, it's not possible

Learn to use the tools, read through the pdf and change small parts to start with to get used to doing thing, it is not as simple as using paint unfortionatly

[Cosmic]

I don't think you can edit game text with Paint, but if you're Matthew Broderick and repeatedly mash the keys I hear you can kickstart nuclear armageddon. Hope this helps.

[BlackCitadel]

No, I didn't mean asking if I can open the SLUS file or edit the text files using Paint.
I mean does using such tools to modify the game text is as simple as using Paint to do this process? (Taking the game screenshots while playing and then opening it with Paint, deleting the original text and writing my own one and then saving the changes to the picture.

I used to translate some of Chrono Cross texts using Paint but it took me about 300 pictures and about 17 hours and I get bored and stopped the process..

[Zorlon]

Nice Cosmic

Don't take this personal BlackCitadel but you do not have the skills needed for hacking a game so it can be translated. Paint is not used for hacking and the tools I linked will extract the game contents for that one game, unfortionatly that will not work with all games, there are too many differnt methods that the original programmers stored there files, without advanced programming know how you have no chance at all at even starting a mod/translation project some of those projects have taken years before the game was even cracked to begin any sort of translation project, there are still SNES games only just getting cracked but have been being worked on since they came out

Taking snap shots with an emulator and using Paint is not going to translate them either no, it is not that simple

Besids the text is vitually never stored as an image, you may find that very small parts of the text is stored that way, FMV for example sometimes has hardcoded text i.e. it is stored on the movie images rather than a subs file but this isn't very often most text is stored in text formats there is usually a font file around aswell list the charactors used as in ABCDEFGH ect...

The First thing you would need to do is change the font file/files to have every charactor used in the language you want to translate to, next you need to be able to manually edit text to read in the language you want it to using the font file as a reference, problem is if it is ASCII to start with you may find that there are not enough charactors for the language you want and the font spaces may be a lil too big for it to look nice, you may need to do this in HEX rather than just re-typing, another issue is some games do not like the file sizes changed so you would need to re-link those files correctly by programming the relating files to point at the new locations.

[BlackCitadel]

I did translated the text using Paint, I used Snipping Tool for Windows 7 to take the game screenshot.
2- I opened the picture with Paint.
3- I used the Color picker tool and clicked on the dialogue box so I get a copy of that color.
4- I switched to Brush and deleted the whole original text with the brush, remember why I used color picker, because when I used the brush to delete the text, now the empty space is colored brown.

5- I used the Text tool then I entered the new text as the translation for that text.

But at last, although I translated it, it's just an image, not a modified ISO.

[Zorlon]

Please read my posts and understand Paint can't be used to translate that way the images you make are pointless and can't be used inside an ISO or ROM

You can still be a translater if you work with someone that can do this stuff and just stick to text translation for someone else that has the skills to insert your text

Look at the links I originally gave you that site is for translators and game hackers looking for people that can translate, I do admit it is mostly to translate to english not from

I'm off to try and fix a couple of PS2 iso's now anyway so can't continue this at the moment

[BlackCitadel]

How do you fix PS2 ISOs, you're also modifying ISOs?

[Zorlon]

Depends what you want to do with them I'm fixing FMV stutter in PS2 DVD's ran with ESR (ESR is a softmod)

I'm using Apache 3 an extractor for DVD media including Dual Layer DVD media then I am using PSS software to re-compress video

Neither will help you translate with bmp files or any other PC image format

[BlackCitadel]

See. This is from the Arabic version of Resident Evil 4, they only modified the videos into Arabic (Kuwaiti guys voices), I guess this language is familiar to you.
So you don't have any idea how they did that?

[Zorlon]

they edited the sound with other voice actors

1 split the video
2 edit the wav sound file (you need to single out the original voices though otherwise you will lose the original music and other background sounds) [basicly split the audio into seperate channels (not just left and right either)]
3 join the files back together in whatever format it is originally

I am not going to do a whole tutorial on how to single out sound in a sound file it is not something that is easy to do and one method does not work for all sound files you will just have to play round until you figure that out

P.S. why don't you ask the guys that done it in the first place, they didn't use Paint I know that