Progress Report: Saturn Fan Translations

While a fan translation for the Sega Saturn hasn’t been finished since July — when we got Baroque in English, and Deep Fear and Resident Evil in Spanish — a lot of projects reported progress in just the last week. Let’s take a look at what’s new from them.

IN THIS STORY:

• J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues (English)
• Silhouette Mirage (English)
• Street Fighter Zero 3 (English)
• Deep Fear (French)
• Tomb Raider and Rayman (Spanish)

Adventure game J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues’ English patch is complete and will release any day now, according to its lead developer, Arjak.

Arjak said Monday in the SHIRO! Discord server that he’s testing a release candidate on real hardware with his Satiator and said that, barring any surprises, the finished patch should be available fairly soon.

His last update was in late July when he finished chapter three. That version can be downloaded from SegaXtreme here.

Silhouette Mirage got an update, too. A new patch released Aug. 31 translates into English the Tutorial through the start of Area 3. They still have the rest of Area 3 as well as areas 4 through 7 to go.

Gregori Rasputin said in the SHIRO! Discord that some areas have branching dialogue, which makes them effectively twice the work to translate. Area 2 was one such area. Areas 3 and 6 feature divergent dialogue as well.

Judging by the resource page on SegaXtreme, in the last few days, the team already has finished Area 3’s story text — the area’s shop text is still on the docket before that section of the translation will be complete.

A surprise translation effort for Street Fighter Zero 3 was begun by Malenko — of Fire Pro Wrestling and Drift King ’97 fame, among other projects — and he posted about it on SegaXtreme last Sunday.

The translation is very early, with just some main menu and World Tour save data text turned into English. Still, you can download the patch from SegaXtreme here to try it out for yourself.

Malenko said he’d already been poking around with Street Fighter Zero 3’s files when he saw someone on Reddit named Mikumatt ask whether an English patch existed for the game. That moved him to see what he could do. While he said it’s not an “active project” for him, he’s nonetheless trying to get World Tour translated.

English patches aren’t the only ones getting updates, though — a French patch for Deep Fear is nearly complete.

Prolific French fan translator Kitchen34 has been posting on retro gaming forum Delta Island about his efforts since July. On Sunday, he updated the thread’s opening post to say that the project is 99 percent complete.

All that remains is some bug squashing. Other members of Delta Island have helped with testing and giving feedback on the translated script.

Kitchen34 uploaded a video to YouTube a couple weeks ago showing off the progress, which he estimated was at 85 percent completion at the time:

As mentioned earlier, Deep Fear also got a Spanish translation patch in July.

And speaking of Spanish, a group translating the Saturn, PlayStation and PC versions of Tomb Raider and Rayman into Spanish gave an update on their progress last weekend.

Suikaze Raider wrote on the Tomb Raider Translations Spain website that a person named Lex Hausens has finished recreating instrumental music and sound effects heard during Tomb Raider’s cutscenes to combine with a new dub — something the Bulk Slash English team had to do as well.

Suikaze said the project is working with Nais Studios, a group of trained voice actors who do nonprofit work for practice, to redub the game in Spanish. Nothing is recorded yet, though.

Judging by their progress page, menu and dialogue text are already complete, with just the dub left to go.

Similar efforts are underway for Rayman, as Suikaze said they’re waiting for the game’s intro music to be recreated before continuing work on a Spanish dub.

Those who are interested can download the latest versions of the Tomb Raider patch and the Rayman patch from the Tomb Raider Translations Spain website.