There have never been as many Saturn fan translation patches in progress as there are now. Considering that, it can be hard to keep track of their progress. You can always look at a complete list of all the known translation projects on the SHIRO! Translation Projects page , but here’s a more in-depth look at how a few of them are progressing.

Wizardry VI & VII Complete

In May 1996, Data East published Wizardry VI & VII Complete, bringing two of Sir-Tech’s PC RPGs to the Saturn in Japan complete with Japanese translations. While it did appear in Sega’s 1997 fiscal year brand review documents set for a November 1996 stateside release, it never materialized. That missed opportunity may be made right thanks to a fan.

Last week, Remisse posted a thread on SegaXtreme about his intention to insert the original DOS games’ English scripts into the Saturn ports. Starting with another person’s project to do the same with the PlayStation port of Wizardry VII, Remisse created a decoder/encoder for the text files in the DOS and Saturn versions, both of which use Huffman-style compression.

But there was still a long road to get correct to display in the game. The hacker’s first attempt resulted in a blank opening dialogue box. “Using Ghidra to decompile it, I’ve found that almost all ASCII characters are outright ignored, whereas some few special symbols are used for formatting, such as whitespace triggering a line break,” Remisse said.

After converting the script to Shift-JIS, a commonly used encoding for text in Japanese games, Remisse got something to display … but it was garbage. “This garbled phrase is supposed to appear much later on in the game,” they said. “I found out by cutting like 80% of the text that this was due to the size of the newly encoded DBS file (166 KB), which was almost double that of the original (84 KB).”

After optimizing the Huffman encoding table, Remisse found success at last — the correct opening dialogue displayed.

A lot of optimization as well as a little bug fixing later, and the project now has some combat screen and player choice text translated:

“I will release a patch once I’ve at least managed to translate the whole of Wizardry VI,” Remisse said at the end of the post. “If there are any new notable developments, I’ll make sure to post about them.”

Magic School Lunar

Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue have English translation patches thanks to Mr. Conan and TrekkiesUnite, but there’s another Lunar game on the Saturn that remains in Japanese — Magic School Lunar, a November 1997 remake of the 1996 Game Gear game Lunar: Walking School that made changes in changes in animation, gameplay, characterization and story.

Since buying a copy of the game in summer 2017, Ms. Tea (aka Misty) has been working with Supper to create an English translation patch for Magic School Lunar. Even after eight years, they’re still at it, and last week Ms. Tea discussed on BlueSky some recent hurdles they’ve overcome.

“…apparently it took until three quarters through the game to run into something using the 8×8 font with punctuation,” she said. “Looks like there’s a minor bug that causes it to use the wrong character in some circumstances.”

She gave an in-depth explanation for how the bug happened and what they did to fix it:

“As for why this happened — in English, the 8×8 font is now being used for three different things. It has an 8×8 ASCII font, but it also has tiles used for names in battles and a 6×8 font for menus. Both of those came from Supper, my collaborator on the project. If the string inserter detects a string should be small, it shifts the text index up by 96 to move from the 8×8 font block to the 6×8 block. But… there isn’t enough room for a *full* duplicate of the 8×8 font in the 6×8 font. So the 6×8 font starts partway through ASCII, skipping punctuation. I “fixed” this by just making it so characters under a certain index just don’t get shifted from the 8×8 to the 6×8 region. So long as the 8×8 character is the last thing in the word, it should work — and it’s punctuation, so that’s fine.”

The bug was discovered as Ms. Tea continues to playtest the entire game, looking for crashes or other problems with the inserted translation script. She’s finished playtesting through chapter 8 — there are 12 chapters and a prologue in total.

Yu-No: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World

One of the most beloved visual novels on the Saturn in Japan is Yu-No: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World, a game ported from the PC-98. While it now has an official English localization in its modern Steam version , back in 2011 a team of fans from the now-defunct TLWiki website made a translation patch for the old Windows release, as pointed out four years ago by Mr. Burns in a SegaXtreme thread .

That thread got revived a couple weeks ago by deadsnare, who said that it may be feasible to port the 2011 fan translation to the Saturn version of Yu-No.

”Since reading the  article on YU-NO on hardcoregaming101.net  a few weeks ago, I’ve been interested in the Saturn version of the game and poked around the game’s files,” deadsnare said in the post. “In time, I managed to reverse-engineer all relevant file formats.”

In the SHIRO! Discord server earlier this week, deadsnare said they were only able to get as far as they have thanks to the TLWiki fans’ work on the 2011 Windows patch, in which they managed to reverse-engineer the compression scheme used for the game’s files.

“The Saturn version of YU-NO uses the very same compression method, albeit the rest of the data format is very different,” deadsnare said.

Deadsnare wrote a tool in the Python programming language to import and export in-game graphics to and from PNG, a file format that’s easier to edit with a PC.

”The next step is to implement in-game text import and export for the scenario files,” deadsnare said. “I have found out how the text is stored and accessed, so this is mainly programming work.”

The hacker said they’ll post again once they have some progress to show in the coming weeks.

	Danthrax
		Danthrax is a contributor to the SHIRO! Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the '90s, he didn't get a Saturn until 2018. It didn't take him long to fall in love with the console's library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and he's helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.