Persona 3 Portable, missing text to translate.

[Niopack]

Hi guys, I need your help, I'm currently translating Persona 3 Portable, I've had been working in this project for the last year, I finally finishing it, but there are things I can't find anywhere to translate:

- Tartarus Text: characters dialog texts when you add them into your party, clock texts, Mitsuru's text when you interact with her motorcycle, etc... I already translated guardians, floors, and interactions between characters during the expeditions, I only need to know where is the Tartarus entrance text (and if it's possible to modify it).

- Battle Text: I remember finding a file with all the "All-out Attack" quotes (I've been waiting for this, u know) but I can't find neither the file nor the translated one again (if I found it in the first place, I've had to immediately translated it, but I can't find it), do you guys know where it is?

- Menus/Glossary: Pretty self-explanatory, when you press triangle to load, erase, go to tittle screen or change the settings (with the explanation of each setting) and the meaning of key words inside the glossary are no where to find, I think these can't be translated, but I want to believe it is...

- Social Links names/Items/Clubs: when you open a file with what I call a "variable" (such as items, athletic clubs, gifts in dates, etc.) the variable is represented with a "code", like this:

> Yukari has handed you a {F1 54 01 01 04 01}.

> Spend time in the {FA 02 A3 54} Club after school?

> You have established the {F2 A7 01 01} Social Link of the {F2 44 01 01} Arcana!

The codes are "variables" so the game uses the same text always, just changes the variables depending on what is needed, these "referenced" texts are in English, like "Dying Young Man" for Akinari, or "Music/Art/Photography" for the possible clubs you can attend. Is there any way to find and change this info? So I can change name of items, clubs, and Social Links?

Thank you beforehand :D, oh right, how I said i have the 90% of the game translated, so if you have any question about it, or where a file is (excluding these ones I'm asking for, obviously) I'll be happy to help, have a great day :D!

[crisdebug]

Hello, I'm working on the Persona 3 FES Brazilian translation. I can help with some files.

Tartarus Texts - So, they're 100% in maps interactions. In the Persona series, the maps (named "Fields") are divided into groups, and each group has individual groups. For example, Group 007 (or just 07 in Portable) is the Dorm maps, Map 002 from group 007 (f007_002). In FES, the Tartarus is the group 32. I tried to do some digging for you yesterday, but it was like midnight, and it has a lot of files, so I couldn't find it. But, my suggestion is: Try searching in the .abin files (PersonaEditor doesn't open them, but Amicitia does) in umd0/data/field2d/bg.

Battle Text - I'm not gonna lie, I'm 100% sure that I translated these in FES. The thing is: I don't have the slightest idea of where the file is so I can give you an idea. I searched everywhere logical (like battle-related files) but I couldn't find it.

Menus/Glossary and Social Links names, Items, Clubs - So, these texts are most probably hardcoded in the game. You can try searching them using a Hexadecimal Editor (I use HxD) in the game's executable, the EBOOT.BIN file. You'll probably have some problems with the enconding of special characters that you added to the font, you can ask me if you need some help with it, and with the space, that you can't put text a bigger than the one it's already there because you'll change all the bytes position after it and the game will just break.

[crisdebug]

Small Update: I found where the All-Out Attack texts are, they're in umd0/data/battle/MSG.TBL. Open it up in PersonaEditor and you should see a file called "MSG.BMD". It's There.

[Niopack]

Thanks man! Here is a little update:

Tartarus Text: after reading your reply, I started to look for the files again inside the field2d/bg folder but with a different approach, I started to look inside the .bin instead of the .abin files, searching through the tmx; If I could find the ones used in the entrance, I could use the file's name to pinpoint the abin with such files, and it worked!

It was the b15_18.abin. I just skipped the file while translating, haha, awkward :roll:

All-Out Attacks: there is something strange about this one... I've had previously "replaced" files, just to not see the changes applied... of course, it was always my fault because the files were not in the correct path, and because of it, Mod Compendium didn't replace them correctly... but after replacing the BMD inside battle/MSG.TBL AND init_free.bin (the same file is inside that one too) the game still doesn't replace the text... I don't know why it keeps happening, maybe there is a third file elsewhere? I doubt it. There is another file called "AICALC.TBL" inside the battle folder and init_free.bin as well, it contains various things including the tutorial in Tartarus (the basics of battle explained by Mitsuru), I just replaced the one inside init_free.bin and it worked perfectly, don't even bother for the one inside the battle folder, in this case, I replaced both MSG.TBL and the text still unchanged, so idk what's up with this file...

I know you have your project, and is the FES version, so maybe P3P is not your area of knowledge, but, any ideas?

EBOOT.BIN: I don't know too much about hexadecimal editing, to be honest, I tried to open the EBOOT.BIN file and search for codes used in texts to replace items names but it didn't found any of them inside the file, I don't even know what I'm looking for honestly, so if you can explain me the basics, I'm confident I can do it by myself.

Thanks a bunch man :D, you're helping me out a lot!

UPDATE: I replaced the init_free.bin from the USA version with the unmodified Japanese one, doing so, all skills, attacks, Personas, and enemies names change to Japanese, some sprite does it as well, but surprisingly, all the All-Out Attacks texts remains the same... That means that the attack names on screen when battling are editable (you can extract and open the MSG01.DAT file inside MSG.TBL with a hex editor to change them), and in theory, it seems somehow possible to edit enemies names (so far, opening MSG02.DAT file with a hex editor isn't enough to change them in-game).
All-Out Attacks are in English, which means they are not inside init_free.bin, and changing the MSG inside the battle folder doesn't make any difference. You can delete it and the game still runs without any issue.
I'll keep searching for the file, if I can't find it, the text is hardcoded somewhere else.