Tokugawa Corporate Forums

Hello all, I was reccomended to this website by BabaJeanmel, for whom I playtested /proofread the YU-NO PC-98 native version. I'm currently translating Dragon Knight 4 for PC-98, which will take some time. However, I tried loading the first Lodoss War game for PC-98 into ND to see how hard it would be to edit the text in the future. I got an error message:
"Incorrect data was found
Failed to read the FAT information
Can not close the file and continue"
DiskExplorer had a similar error message (If needed I can look it up, but I generally have better luck with ND.) I tried loading in Fivec, and got this information, minus the file location on my modern PC:
"File Size: 1261568 bytes, extension: hdm
Image type: Headerless / BKDSK
C/H/S: 77,2,8
Disk Comment:

FAT Bytes/Sector: 1024 Sector/Cluster: 1
VBR found, OEM String: NEC 5.0
File System Descriptor: FAT12 "
I'm not the most technically inclined person in terms of PC-98 specific technologies (my upcoming DK4 project had much help from a user called Tomyun on the hacking front.) Can anyone reccomend me a way to extract the files for the floppy disk files of The Record of Lodoss War: The Grey Witch on PC-98? Bonus points if the text file(s) is(are) editable, but for now I simply want to view/extract the individual files.

Huh... interesting. Some programs used corrupted FAT entries as copy protection, but they were all FAT8 that I'd seen, not FAT12.

Maybe this is one. You can email me the image at my gmail account as listed on http://www.pc98.org and I'll take a look at it.

I sent you an email the day that you posted this, but on second thought, I'm posting too to make sure that you received it. No rush to actually work with the files, but can you confirm that you indeed received my email?

Bad news, unfortunately... it's not some slightly altered version of FAT12, or some version of FAT8 as I can tell, but instead is Hummingbird's custom DOS. It starts executing code immediately at 0/0/0 instead of the usual jump to bypass the BIOS Parameter Block:



So there's likely no generic, easy way to dump the file contents and replace them in a similar manner. Complicating things is the "Turbo" version also appears to be a significantly later (and presumably upgraded?) version of the same custom DOS.



(Now there is a jump at the beginning, but it's only to 0x0D, so there's no real BPB.)

Understood. Well thanks for looking into this.

A bit late, but I decided to give it a shot, taking a break from Branmarker.

First, here are the text files from the scenario disk (files don't really have names, just a number):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

The game uses some ASCII characters for control:


On the plus side, the format is simple to edit as there aren't any pointers. On the other hand, the text display routines ignore ASCII characters and it's always annoying when these are used as special characters. Still, the game can handle half-width digits and latin letters by using Shift-JIS 8540h to 859Ah (as seen on the character list i.e. "Lvl 1 War", "HP")
A possibility could be to process the translated file to use these Shift-JIS codes, which would double the file size, and space is tight. Else, all string related code will need to be hacked to accommodate characters below 80h.

Some of the text is also stored in the executable files and other data files (like the premade characters, Parn & co. in PROG_042).

Ah thank you! Still busy translating Dragon Knight 4, but I've downloaded your files for the future. Good luck with translating Branmarker!

On Branmarker, I'm only trying to figure out how it works for now. Older games seem to be trickier, as is the case with Lodoss, but at least I've learned a lot with this one.

Both games have their own file system AND have multiple executables that handle parts of the game. In Lodoss' case there are 8 modules on the program disk.
file 1: Camp menu
file 10: Overworld
file 48: Intro and character creation
file 49: Dungeons
file 50: Towns
file 53: Ending
file 55: Handles transitions between overworld, towns and dungeons
file 101: Battles

And that's where I think translation will be pretty hard. Of the files I uploaded previously, many strings are just fragment of sentences. Here's an example of how they're used (you need to juggle between the text files and the disassembly to make sense)

From the town module, Scenario file 115 is loaded at segment 2040.
DrawMainString2040_si draws string number si from segment 2040 in the main window.
DrawMainString2040_si_CR does the same with a carriage return at the end.



will display ここはターバの村です, and that's one of the nicer cases. Of the various games I gave a try, this one seems to be the hardest to hack.

Anyway, I managed to extract the various images. There are some nice 8 colors artwork.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16KpGKX ... drive_link

Well, good luck on Dragon Knight 4. Looking forward to enjoy Marlene and Bianca in English