Initial D Progress
Some good progress has been made on the Initial D project. pactool seems more or less solid and has been able to extract and create PAC archives without issues. gim2png (really gimtool now) can convert GIM textures to PNG as well as inject a PNG back into a GIM. It’s much easier to inject a PNG rather than create the whole GIM structure from scratch since I don’t fully understand the format. When injecting a PNG, it will be palettized to fit either a 16 or 256 color RBGA palette depending on what type the target GIM uses.
Here’s what a modified texture will look like in game:
As for actually translating parts of the game, I’ve made some progress but it is very tedious. I don’t know any Japanese, but Google Translator has been surprisingly good at identifying characters I scribble in and spits out translations that (for the most part) seem accurate. I’d definitely like to sit down and learn parts of the language, but that’s a job for another day.