dq-vi-sfc

I randomly decided to try looking into the inner workings of Dragon Quest VI for Super Famicom in January 2025. I was surprised to find a decent amount of overlap between it and Otogirisou, and was able to adapt my font and script dumpers from that project for DQ VI.

These tools use the original Japanese version of the game as a base, not the English translation patch by NoPrgress. The specification in the No-Intro database is:

CRC32:	33304519
MD5:	ac9955fa4c1aa8ebcc1d09511808c58b
SHA-1:	3e699dc7e064d6ac84b1981aa150fdf1672b5456
SHA-256:	90ba1868f0e75734a19f873401fab515cb945c62cd0ad173f89cf352ab86f29e

I don't know if I necessarily want to work on a translation project for this game (e.g. fix/finish NoPrgress patch, make entirely new patch), but maybe someone who does can find these tools useful.

Included items

• Table file for the Japanese script.
  • Please contact me (issue, pull request, etc.) if I misidentified any characters.
• Some notes I made about the script font and text decompression.
• Dumper programs for any (most?) text that appears in a dedicated text box.
  • Decompress the text itself (Huffman coding) into a text file compatible with Atlas.
  • Decompress the font for the text box.
  • Generate a text file with all the binary Huffman codes. More of an added bonus. I assume you're most interested in the script dumper.

How to use

Provided that you have Java installed, open a terminal and run these commands:

javac *.java
java FontDumperDQ6
java DragonQuest6ScriptDumper [rom_file] [table_file]
java GenerateHuffCodes

Where [rom_file] is a legally obtained Japanese ROM with the above specification, and [table_file] is dq6 jp.tbl formatted however your terminal handles filenames with spaces in them.

Things that are not covered

• Menu text.
• Default names for the playable characters.
• Names for items, weapons, armor, etc.
• Identification of script control codes besides "end string" and "line break".

DQ III SNES

I later discovered that the developer of DQ VI SFC reused both systems for the font and the dialogue script in the SFC remake of DQ III. The only changes are in the pointers for where stuff is located!

As a bonus, I thus made versions that will work with the revision of DQ III in No-Intro:

CRC32:	13836bd2
MD5:	7c7c7db73b0608a184cc5e1d73d7695b
SHA-1:	b711341e4b1022d7645c5313840874aebc01b7b7
SHA-256:	dcf8fde55cec7095bc8b522820ffac65790a60054555f8665d54265d2ac36d8a

Please note that the table file for DQ III was sourced from byuu's tools and notes that used to be available on RHDN's abandoned projects page (links to Wayback Machine).