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Primary Menu Blog Mods Tools About Search Search for: Discontinuing HD GUI April 22, 2024 April 22, 2024 PkR This is a quick note to let you know that I will no longer provide updates for the HD GUI mod. The repository has been archived. If you are interested in continuing the mod’s development, feel free to unarchive it and/or make a fork of it. SADX mods The fascinating Korean version of SADX PC and release of the Korean mod March 12, 2024 April 7, 2024 PkR TLDR version: There was a Korean version of SADX PC released back in 2004. I ported the Korean translation to the Mod Loader, so you can now play SADX in Korean if you install this mod . The mod is compatible with Dreamcast Conversion and Dreamcast DLC but incompatible with HD GUI. Four years ago I got my hands on a somewhat rare version of SADX PC. I was completely unaware of its existence until I accidentally ran into a listing on an auction, so I got it right away. I’ve mentioned it before in a previous post , and today’s mod release brings the occasion to finally talk about it again. Introduction and game package This version was released in July 2004 in Korea by a game and toy company called Sonokong. It’s a complete Korean translation of the game with English voices. The game comes in a box with a fully translated manual, which is also in color! It looks a lot better than black-and-white Japanese and US manuals I’ve seen until now. Here are some pictures of the box, the discs and the manual. Please excuse the poor picture quality, maybe someday I’ll get to scanning these properly. Installation and initial testing Just like the US version, the game comes on two CDs. The simple CD check is also the same, so you can install and run the game on Windows 10 and above, unlike the Japanese version which no longer works because of SafeDisc. With the Korean version, you can pass the CD check even with the US version’s CD 2. The autorun and the installer are also fully translated. I can’t comment on the quality of the localization since I don’t read Korean, but I can say for sure a lot of work was put into it. Unlike French, Spanish and German translations that come with the US and Japanese versions, this one translates not only all textual data, but also all menu textures, the title screen and thebackground. But the most impressive part is the Korean font used for subtitles and Chao Garden messages. To my knowledge, this is the only official release of SADX that introduces both asset and programming changes to accommodate a language that wasn’t in the original game. It’s also executed in an interesting way, which we will get to a bit later. As amazing as this version is, it’s still the 2004 PC port of SADX at its core, so the game has terrible graphics with no mipmaps, broken windowed mode at non-4:3 resolutions, poor music quality etc. It’s pretty hard on the eyes, especially in motion. (From now on, I’ll be using screenshots from the US version with the Mod Loader and the Korean mod) Korean localization and option menu differences Korean text replaces Japanese in this version. English text is also available, although the title screen and thebackground will always use the Korean versions of the textures. The game doesn’t let you pick Japanese voice language, so only English voices can be used. Interestingly enough, Japanese voices are still included with the game: it just doesn’t show the voice language setting in the options menu and overrides the voice language variable with English as soon as a save file is loaded. However, before a save file is loaded the game still plays the Select a file” voice from the Japanese voices folder. To work around it, the developers replaced that voice with its English counterpart. The rest of the Japanese voices are untouched. I’m not entirely sure, but I think such elaborate workarounds to make sure no Japanese is heard in the game may have had something to do with Korean laws regarding Japanese media , which were stricter when the game came out. Funnily enough the texture for the option was still translated, so when you use the mod on the US version with the Mod Loader, you can select Japanese voices as if the option was intended to be there originally (although it says Korean” instead of Japanese”). You can also select other languages for text (not sure if you’d really need to if you’re playing this!), which the Korean version doesn’t let you do. The localization has everything you’d expect, including character tutorials, Mini Game Collection etc.: Reverse engineering the Korean font The implementation of the font used in the last two screenshots is intriguing. What caught my attention initially was the large size of the FONTDATA0.BIN file, which is used for Japanese characters in the original version (1.72MB vs 759KB in the original). My first guess was that they either replaced Japanese characters with Korean ones, or added them to the end of the file with the IDs matching the Korean codepage 949 . I started inspecting the file in SADXFontEdit in SA Tools. As expected, this file contains Hangul characters used to display Korean subtitles and Chao texts. However, apart from those, the file also has some characters from other languages, including Greek, Russian, Chinese and Japanese, which amounts to a total of 20609 characters (for comparison, the original file used for Japanese has only 8836, and almost all of those are Kanji, although Cyrillic and some other characters are present as part of the Japanese codepage). On top of that, soon I realized that character IDs stored in the file matched those of the codepage 1200 (UTF-16). Yes, you read that right. In the Korean version of the game the subtitle font is an actual Unicode font. Although it only supplies specific blocks of the Basic Multilingual Plane , in theory you could add back the other blocks to implement any language included in the plane. Back in 2020 when I first discovered this, I updated SADXFontEdit with some new functionality, including support for the Unicode layout, so when you select the correct codepage you can see the matching character next to its ID. As we know, the US and JP versions don’t support Unicode, so how does this work? The game’s dialog texts, menu prompts etc. were compiled into the game as strings encoded with the Korean codepage 949 , not Unicode. However, when the game processes text data to create a subtitle texture, it parses the characters and assigns them Unicode IDs to be used to pick graphics from the font data you see in the screenshots above. This was where I ran into an issue I didn’t understand at first. When I first ran the game, it would either display garbage text in place of subtitles, or just crash. That was how I found out that the Korean version required the system locale (language for non-Unicode programs) to be set to Korean for subtitles to render properly. If the game already knows it’s converting Korean to Unicode, why does it need that? Eventually I found the answer when I was looking at the game’s font related functions in the disassembly that I quickly cobbled together. The Korean version uses the function MultiByteToWideChar to convert C strings” (in this case Korean strings in the local codepage) to UTF-16 wide strings”. It’s an interesting solution considering that other versions have a custom function to parse characters and assign font IDs to them. So why does it fail when the system locale isn’t set to Korean? The developers call the function with the default first argument (0), which takes the current system locale as the source codepage. As a result, Korean text is converted to Unicode as if its original codepage is whatever you have set as the language for non-Unicode programs. If the developers of the Korean version set the first argument of MultiByteToWideChar to 949, the Korean version would display subtitles correctly on any system regardless of the locale. I think a lot of people would’ve never caught this issue because the game...