Purpose

This program allows lossless conversion between MES dialog bytecode archives and a plaintext format for the English and Japanese GameCube versions of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life, along with Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life Special Edition.

The text format is not intended to be compatible with other text formats, or other versions of this program, but should allow the corresponding version to generate a valid MES file so long as the editor is limited to the bytecode vocabulary supported by the MES file.

Currently the only text encoding supported by this version is UTF-8.

This program was inspired by Harrison's MES editor.

To compile

Install either g++ (packaged with MinGW for Windows) or some other c++ compiler to compile this program.

The minimal command line for g++ for this program:

g++ -std=c++11 -iquote header "source/main.cpp" "source/MES.cpp"

To allow the program to perform sequential deduplication of generated MES files, add the -DDUPE compiler flag.

To run

The program takes 3 parameters and one optional parameter It exposes the following two functions:

To extract the contents of an MES file as text

program.exe unpack "./mesinputfile.mes" "./textoutputfile.txt" ["data/bytecodedef.txt"]

To generate an MES file from the text file

program.exe pack "./textinputfile.txt" "./mesoutputfile.mes" ["data/bytecodedef.txt"]

The data/bytecodedef.txt file specifies which bytecode/character set decoder definitions should be used for processing the files.

The following decoders are defined:

• data/awl.txt is the default decoder parameter, used to decode MES files from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life
• data/anawl.txt decodes MES files from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life
• data/awlse.txt for Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life Special Edition for the PS2 (partial charset)
• data/awljpn.txt for Bokujou Monogatari: Wonderful Life
• data/anawljpn.txt for Bokujou Monogatari: Wonderful Life for Girls
• data/awljpn-eng.txt for the Japanese games with English index parameter names.

Only index parameter files differ between awljpn.txt and anawljpn.txt

Additional development/Notes

The following files for Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life are corrupted and will not be supported:

• All *_wife.mes files.
• debug.mes
• phrase.mes The files use a sequential mapping in order encountered in file to the Japanese characters from AWL. Characters beyond the range of the single byte text symbol mapping used in Another Wonderful Life are arbitrarily mapped to 2 bytes, which conflicts with lower message codes, making the encoding irreversible except through manual decoding. Aside from some haphazard English translations (and 'error') in debug.mes, there are no other changes in these files.

Planned features/fixes:

• Add error messages.
• Verify behavior with source, add any bytecodes not in test set.