popotan translation

I have played a bit this game, it's good, the style of drawing I like most. But it's japanese, so I'm start to prepare to translate it...

I've done mgf2png convertion utility. It possible to convert images in both directions.
Also i've done russian codepage and font patch. (it possible to switch to another codepage and apply some styles to font)
But it's hard to examine how exec.dat works, where it stores indexes and where it loads strings into memory in the executable.
exec.dat seems useless here. Only way i see is to place strings into another file and think about how to load them, not an original strings.

I can see russian, english and another dialogs ingame, but it should match original length of a string, otherwise game will crash with error.

Have anyone any suggestion about this?

Yeah, I tried myself. mgf to png is easy, just overwrite the header lol.

As for the text data, the file uses a pointer system, but I couldnt exactly figure it out as I'm not too skilled at that stuff. On the beginning of the file, there is a list of pointers as to where the parts of data (read "packed files") are located inside the very same file.

We would need to find out how these values work and extract the text files from the file.
Oh and, of course, get them back in as well.
Tedious task...

Sat

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there is a list of pointers as to where the parts of data (read "packed files")

Strings aren't packed in exec.dat, all texts are open at the end of file.
It's in the Shift-JIS codepage, thats why i made a patch to fix codepage to ansi (1251). Only thing left is to understand how to increase/decrease length of those strings.

sorry, I expressed it wrong.
It's not packed, its more like when you rar a file with the "store only" settings.
It's multiple files inside a file. The offset list for the several files is at the start of the file.
It should be possible to "extract them" then modify them, and then change the offsets according to
the changed file sizes. I have already achieved that manually, but we will really need something automated.

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I have already achieved that manually

Can you show, how or where you got an absolute offsets?

At the very beginning of the file I found:
Header: 147
Found: g_gra | Pointer: 0
Found: g_ai | Pointer: 4
Found: g_mea | Pointer: 8
Found: g_mai | Pointer: c
...

But those "pointers" points to incorrect places.