Sakura Taisen 2 for Dreamcast, initial JP translation progress log

Sakura Taisen 2 for Dreamcast, initial JP translation progress log (Zenryoku#2982)

Feb 25 2022
Started on the project! Found the .gdi needed and was able to extract the files to my local computer. Working with (Rev A) version, not the one without (Rev A).

Did some basic scouting of the files to see if anything about the text was plainly visible. Didn’t find anything concrete, but learned a bunch about typical files in Dreamcast games and about what some other files/directories were. I searched mainly for きのう (it appears in the first text box of the game) as plaintext and as its Unicode and Shift-JIS hex representations, but no luck.

The closest thing I found to a lead on the text was the file SAKURA1/ADVADX1.AFS, which seems to contain the voice lines for the text boxes in the game, in order! So if opened in an AFS viewer you can see the first two lines of text box dialogue as ADVADX1_00001 and _00002, respectively. The only (plaintext) reference I found to this file was in /1_SK2.BIN, among references to other AFS files containing what sounds like battle sound clips.

Also in /1_SK2.BIN, found plaintext mentions of a debug menu’s text content (text that describes setting different parameters of the game) and mention of Shinobi Library for Dreamcast Version 1.65 which might give further clues for reverse engineering the game.

Summary of initial probing:
Certain/Verified:
/DPWWW - Contains files for a simple website for the game for when you'd put the CD in a computer.
/DPSS - Screenshots of the main cast.
/SAKURA0 - Movie files.
/DPMODEL - Contains a single text file, in English, warning not to remove the /DPMODEL folder. Strange!
/SAKURA2/*.AFS - Sound file archives. Use ADXUtil to browse them.
/SAKURA1/*.ADX - Sound files. Listen with VLC Player.
/SAKURA2/VCE*.AFS - Sound file archive for that character; battle voice lines. Opening a .afs file in ADXUtil lets you view multiple sound files.
/DPETC/* - HTML files and preset messages in plaintext for some sort of online chat/IRC system.
/SAKURA1/ADVADX1.AFS - Critical find! A stream file of all the cutscene voice acting?? ADVADX1_00001.adx is the first spoken line by Yoneda Ikki ("Kinou...")


Likely:
/DPTEX - Likely for textures, as .pvr files were used for models in Dreamcast games.
/SAKURA1/*.CMP - Sound files?
/SAKURA1/*.TTF - Fonts? (Can't install them on my laptop)
*/*.MPB - Contains sound samples and channel sequencing instructions

Basically no idea:
/SG_DPLDR.BIN - Copyright software? (MAIGO is visible in HxD hex editor)
/MAIGO.BIN - Maybe also Copyright? (MAIGO is visible)
/1_SK2.BIN - Starts with mentions of a library. Game logic? GD-ROM Explorer labels this as the "main binary"
    - at line 00030b80 we have "PRESS A BUTTON" "START" and some logic immediately beforehand. See in wxMEdit, encoding=East Asian->Shift-JiS
    - 00030bb0: Debug Menu?! This doesn't look like logic, but text contents that fill forms ("PAUSE MODE :OFF" and "PAUSE MODE :ON" are seen)
    - some filenames were present. Maybe you can search for ADVADX1_00001.adx, it might be linked to triggering particular text.
    - 0009cef0: "Shinobi Library for Dreamcast Version 1.65 Copyright (C) 1998,1999 SEGA"
/2_DP.BIN - Also starts with mention of a library. Has a lot of mentions of webpage/browser related stuff.


Feb 27 2022
Continued searching for instances of plaintext text box dialogue before having to resort to decompression. Now assured thanks to Derek that Shift-JIS encoding is used, re-did my earlier searches but still no hits.

Tried a new lead of looking for the string of numbers 13510 that appears in one of the text boxes.

Searched for 13510, its hex representation (identical for Unicode and Shift-JIS encoding), also with regular expressions looking for a single character between them (regex 1.3.5.1.0) as per what this person did with Policenauts https://lparchive.org/Policenauts/Update%2050/ , but no luck.

Using a simple tool I made to search hexdumps of files for hex strings (because only now had I realized that the other tool I used, bgrep, was only searching the strings decoded from the hexdumps), I also searched for the shift-jis encoding of きのう (appears in the game's first text box), 0x82ab82cc82a4, with no hits. Also tried the hex of 13510, no hits.