Project Diva f with English subs

2019-06-26T22:37:56-0600

• english
• videogames
• weeb

When Project Diva f hit the shelves, it was a big step for the series, being was the first one to ever be officially released outside of Japan— and that meant official English translation.

Before this game, of course, other entries in the series had unofficial fan translations, but they were often incomplete or somewhat dodgy. Unfortunately, the official f translation feels almost like a fan translation, simply because it was missing one big thing: translated lyrics.

People didn't like that.
At least, it irked the heck out of both me and that dude.

Since Trinity hit, I decided to go to my local used game-store and buy another Vita— fully intending to pirate the shit out of some games, emulated and otherwise. I used to have a Vita, but eventually sold it, because it was useless to me: FW 1.6.0, homebrew verboten.

The first thing I did after installing Trinity was to get a VPK of Project Diva f— I actually bought the game, on my old Vita, but long-since lost my PSN info.
But it's a heavy little thing.

2.3GB~, for gods' sakes!

So I set out to compress the music a tad— y'know, unzip the VPK file and use ffmpeg to reduce the quality of the songs (in “roms/sound/song/*.ogg”).

I ended up using the command
ffmpeg -i $FILE -acodec copy -b:a 10k -q -1 $FILE_NEW
on each file (replace “$FILE“ with the old file and “$FILE_NEW“ with the output, respectively), shrinking the game to about 2.03GB.

Not too shabby— 300MB's precious, man.
You can fit like 10 copies of Doom 2 in that much space!

In the process of this, I snooped around the textfiles, and ran across the one that actually contains all of the lyrics: “rom/pv_db.txt”. It's not a binary file, no weird format, nothing. Every line of Romanji was in there, completely unobfuscated. It's even got UNIX-style newlines.

What? It's that easy?!
… Apparently so!

So naturally, I spent a few hours replacing the Romanji line-by-line with their English counterparts— some from official translations, others from sketchy weebs' livejournal pages.

Anyway, it's done, now.

It looks something like this:

Installation

• Download the replacement pv_db.txt
  • (Right-click, “Save Page As…”)

For editing a fresh VPK:

1. Extract it like a zip file and navigate to the “rom/” folder
2. Delete the “pv_db.txt” file that's already there
3. Copy over the new one you downloaded earlier
4. Compress the all the files into a new zip with a `VPK` extension
   • It needs “eboot.bin”, “rom/”, “sce_module/”, and “sce_sys/”
5. Move it over to your Vita
6. Enjoy ☆

For editing a pre-existing install (not cartridge)

1. Move the new “pv_db.txt” to your Vita
2. Using VitaShell (or w/e), copy the file
3. Move to the game's install directory— usually in `ux0:/app/PCSE00326/`
   • It's dir will have “rom/”, “sce_module/”, “sce_sys”, and “eboot.bin” in it
4. Paste the file in “rom/”
5. ???
6. Profit! ♥

Torrent?