A fan-made English patch for the Saturn version of first-person roguelike RPG Baroque is now available, coming less than two months after developer Plissken announced he was working on it.
The patch uses the Xdelta patcher. You can download a ZIP file with the patch and a copy of the Xdelda patcher here.
Note that the patch’s readme file says “Input file should be merged bin (all tracks in one file)” but you may have ripped your legally obtained copy of Baroque — or found a version on a certain popular archival website — that splits the game into two BIN files. That means you’ll have to merge those two BINs into one, which can be done using Knight0fDragon’s Sega Saturn Patcher utility.
For a tutorial on how to do that, see the end of this article.
Baroque was a Japanese Saturn exclusive when developer Sting and publisher ESP launched it in May 1998 until it was ported to the PlayStation — also in Japan only — in October 1999. It eventually got North American and European releases when it was remade on the PS2 in 2007 and on the Wii in 2008. Each version has had tweaks, though, such as having longer campaigns — the Saturn original has a main dungeon that’s shorter than the PS1 port by about 10 floors, for example.
Plissken already put out a translation patch for the PlayStation version of Baroque in October 2021. It was his first translation project, and he used the extensive translations found on a fan website called The Nerve Tower with the author’s permission. That author is identified in today’s patch as a person named Grey.
Fast forward a year and a half to May 2023 when Plissken translated an adventure game called Prisoner of Ice. He released a patch for the PS1 version first, then shortly thereafter created one for the Saturn, which Shiro reported on at the time. That was his first time working on a Saturn project, and he said it went so well that he wanted to try applying his Baroque translation to the Saturn version of that game, too.
So just a couple weeks after the Prisoner of Ice patch, on May 21, Plissken announced he was working on the Saturn version of Baroque, complete with teaser video.
When Plissken initially began poking around with the Saturn version of Baroque, it looked promising.
“I was shocked that the code that I need to change is completely the same on both versions, so all I had to do is locate the place where code is and port my changes from MIPS to SH2,” he said.
“One of the noticeable differences is that [the] Saturn version has compression applied for levels binaries (they contain level specific data and code). On the PS1, compression was only applied to graphics and not the code. I reverse engineered [the] decompression algorithm [a] year ago, so [adding] compression to it was only a matter of time, it wasn’t a big challenge, just [an] interesting difference.”
— Plissken
Less than week after his Saturn patch announcement, he’d completed his first full run of the game, saying in his Discord server that he considered it a notable milestone.
Much of the following month or so was consumed by playing through the game over and over to check that in-game messages were displaying correctly. By early July, Plissken was working on translating the menus.
The patch’s readme file says that in addition to helping with the translation, Grey also helped to test the Saturn patch before release. On the Nerve Tower website, Grey said the English patch for Baroque was a dream made into reality:
“A fully translated patch for the Sega Saturn version of Baroque is now available!
— Gray
Huge thanks to Plissken once again for seeing this project through to completion and making this dream a reality. For any newcomers, be aware that there is both a full guide for the game and an abridged guide (which contains only the essential events needed to advance the plot). However, this site personally recommends going into Baroque completely blind.”
Guide to combining bin files with Sega Saturn Patcher
Step 1
After you’ve downloaded Knight0fDragon’s Sega Saturn Patcher utility from SegaXtreme, start it up. At the opening screen, click “Select Saturn Game” at the top and then “CD Image” from the drop-down box.
Step 2
Use the explorer window that appears to navigate to where you have a copy of Baroque that you’ve definitely ripped from a legally owned copy of the game. Only the cue file will be visible, not the bin files, which is OK. Select the cue file.
Step 3
You’ll be back to the main screen, which now is filled with information about the game that the SSP has detected in the game files. At the lower-right corner, make sure the “Separate Track Files” box is unchecked, then click the “Build Image” button.
Step 4
Another explorer window will appear to let you select where to save the soon-to-be-combined game file. I suggest making a new folder and saving it somewhere other than where your Japanese original copy is — just so you don’t get things mixed up.
IMPORTANT: Make sure to check the drop-down box at the bottom of this window and make sure it’s set to “bin/cue” and not any other format. Once you’ve selected bin/cue from that drop-down box, click the Save button.
Step 5
Wait a few moments, during which some circles will spin around indicating that it’s working. If it’s successful, you’ll see a message saying so.
Step 6
Now you can go check in a Windows Explorer window to see that you have a single bin file for Baroque (as well as a cue file, which you need). Now you’re ready to patch!
Patching the game
To patch your newly combined game file, start up the DeltaPatcherLite.exe file that came in the ZIP file with Plissken’s patch. Click the folder icon under “Original file” and choose the BAROQUE.bin file that you combined a moment ago. Then click the folder icon under “XDelta patch” and select the patch.xdelta file that came in the patch’s ZIP file.
Click “Apply patch” and after a few moments, you should get confirmation that it was successful. Now you can take the Baroque bin and cue file and play it in your emulator of choice, throw it on an SD card and play it on your optical drive emulator of choice, or burn it to a CD. However you play, it should work!
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 has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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