widebrim HD

assets by Level-5, running in widebrim HD

widebrim HD is a work-in-progress Godot-based high-level engine recreation for the mobile versions of LAYTON2 (Layton: Diabolical Box in HD / Layton: Pandora's Box in HD) for running the game natively, without emulation on any compatible system.

Quickstart: How do I get this running?

Required Prerequisites

You will need the following:

• A dump of LAYTON2 HD for Android, including both the APK and OBB
• Godot 4.2 or newer
• Python 3.11
• PyCriCodecs, tested with 0.4.8

Optional Prerequisites

To improve your experience, the following is recommended:

• Environment for building Python extensions (e.g., Microsoft Build Tools for Visual Studio)
• FFMPEG with libvorbis (e.g., any modern FFMPEG 'essentials' build)
  • This should be accessible from any terminal, i.e., on PATH for Windows.

Installation Guide

1. Install the required prerequisites (and optional for a better experience)
2. Clone the repository.
3. Start a terminal inside widebrim_hd/assets_py_unpacker and run the following:
   • Install requirements with pip install -r requirements.txt
     • (Optional, recommended) Build Cython extension for faster unpacking with python setup.py build_ext --inplace
   • Unpack and convert assets with python install_apk_obb.py <path to apk> <path to obb>
     • If you do not have the optional prerequisites installed, this will be very slow and will consume significantly more space. This is the intended way to install the assets, but if this is too slow you can try QuickBMS with this script. You will need to manually extract the asset folder from the APK and combine both the OBB output and APK files into the widebrim_hd/assets folder. This method is deprecated and will be incompatible in the future. Audio support is not planned with this method.
4. Import widebrim_hd/project.godot into the Godot Editor.

Quickstart: How do I use this?

Open Godot, load the project and press Play in the top-right. By default, the game loads and saves a DS-like save slot as state.sav in the project root. To delete all progression and restart, delete this save.

What is widebrim HD for?

widebrim HD continues where widebrim left off and tackles research for the HD ports of LAYTON2... ^{...but to be honest, it's actually just for fun, I don't know much about Godot 😄}

How accurate is this?

widebrim HD is a rewrite of widebrim combined with additional knowledge from reversing LAYTON2 HD. It tries to be largely accurate and should replicate most engine-related bugs in the future, especially because the new engine itself has none of the quirks of the Nintendo DS version.

How far along is this?

Not very, gamemode switching is implemented and a basic event and room parser have been written. It's not known how far along the story can be completed yet.

How can I contribute?

Something broke and I'd like to file a bug report

Please open a GitHub issue describing the problem, your save file and steps to reproduce. The save system in-game isn't complete yet so we might need significant information if the bug isn't easily reproducible. Thanks!

I'd like to request a feature

Open a GitHub issue - keep in mind that features in the original game are already intended to have implementations in widebrim HD.

I'd like to contribute code

Feel free, open a pull request 😎

Who's fault is this?

Thanks goes to...

• The contributors of PyCriCodecs, audio support is planned and this library is responsible for making it possible ❤️
• Christian Robertson for the font Roboto, I'm lazy and can't be bothered to finish reversing font.dat but this is similar enough
• ssh for figuring out the decryption routine for the HD Layton games (RIP ZenHAX)
• Everyone who helped with widebrim and by extension, madhatter for understanding HD file formats