Rockman DASH 5 Islands is Preserved!

[RockmanCosmo]

Hey all! It's been a while, but I'm happy to jump in here and say that our team has preserved the entirety of Rockman DASH: Great Adventure on 5 Islands! It's taken us three years to get to this point, but the full game is finally in our hands. You can find more information and resources here. I've been reading through all these old forum posts about 5 Islands how it was so sought after, so I'm glad that I've been able to help make that dream a reality.

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[Gerald]

Are we actually able to play the game and can it be done on PC? Is it translated? Just curious... If not, I'm sure that someone is working on it! So cool! I've always wanted to play this game...

[Dashe]

You did it! I'm proud of you for your hard work and perseverance, this has been a REALLY long time coming!

[RockmanCosmo]

Feb 25, 2024 22:24:29 GMT -5 Gerald said:

Are we actually able to play the game and can it be done on PC? Is it translated? Just curious... If not, I'm sure that someone is working on it! So cool! I've always wanted to play this game...

Yep! I've arranged a portable emulator setup for it; no installs necessary. You can find it in the linked article. The entire game's script was translated many years ago, so we're currently working on finding ways to edit the game's text.

[betasword]

After doing some very basic digging around in the files, it looks like at the very least, partial translation should be possible. I've had luck being able to extract files from the .jar and reinsert, but that's about it so far. I've been able to extract files out of the RDDATA .bin files, but haven't been able to put anything back in, unlike with the .jar, but I'm also just using 7zip. I'm guessing someone with more knowledge of file insertion and such could probably do a whole lot more than that. I haven't been able to find where the various interface and menu text itself is stored yet, but the event text seems to be stored in the .rde files in the RDDATA*2.bin files.

There's a couple .csv files in the .jar that contain a bunch of text, mainly the item_list.csv. Obviously, that contains all the items. Kaihatsu.csv appears to just be Roll's hints towards what she needs to develop weapons, and the other .csv's are nothing with any translatable text. The game seems to handle regular old English replacing the original Shift-JIS Japanese pretty well in item_list, though the game only seems to handle the description text along two lines. I tried to extend the Old Pot description to 3 lines, but that just caused the game to instantly crash when trying to launch it. Removing the extra \n immediately fixed it, so that must be some sort of hard-coded limit. Also, had to use the Japanese 、 instead of a regular comma, because... Well, the file is comma separated.

I'm probably not going to dive too deeply into all of this, as I lack the knowledge to get anything going in those .bin files, and that's where it seems the majority of the text is. I also don't understand a lick of Japanese, and these couple of translations are entirely Google powered, and slightly edited for space by me. But hey, it's definitely possible!

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[RockmanCosmo]

This is already a great step forward! One of my team members probably knows what to do with the bin files (those are data stored on the SD). I know what I'm working on this weekend 

[fAB]

Major congratulations to you and your entire team on this momentous accomplishment!

You've done something amazing, and I hope the fanbase gives you due appreciation as word continues to spread.

[RockmanCosmo]

Thank you for the kind words! After going through the game files, I've discovered the original map images for each of the islands. Here is a folder with them case you'd like to update MMLS's 5 Islands page with them in their original glory. Below are samples (I can't attach all of them because of the file size limit).

[fAB]

Done! Thanks for making it so easy for me.