Fan Translation Updates: Gundam, Silhouette Mirage and More

There have been a variety of new releases from Sega Saturn fan localization projects over the last couple weeks. Let’s take a look at what the community has been up to.

Mobile Suit Gundam

ShadowMask released a beta patch Monday for his team’s English localization of Mobile Suit Gundam. Designated version 0.2, it translates all loadout menus between stages.

The patch can be downloaded from its resource page on SegaXtreme. It uses Knight0fDragon’s Sega Saturn Patcher format.

It’s the first update since the initial beta patch came out Sept. 22. That one added English subtitles to the FMVs.

Their next tasks include translating stage names and the warning screen notifying players that they don’t have enough save space.

Silhouette Mirage

Rasputin3000 put up the latest version of his team’s Silhouette Mirage patch Tuesday. It translates area 5 into English.

Like the Mobile Suit Gundam project, Silhouette Mirage’s patch uses the SSP format. It can be downloaded from its resources page on SegaXtreme.

Its previous update Sept. 21 translated area 4. But it introduced a bug in which the game freezes if the player pauses it during area 4’s boss fight.

Thankfully, Rasputin found what seemed to be the problem: some text linked to an unused shop that still existed in the code. His team translated it into English even though it doesn’t appear during gameplay, and they found that by reverting it back to the original Japanese, the freeze issue disappeared. That bugfix is included in this week’s new patch.

There are just two areas in the game left to translate. Rasputin said that he hopes to have the game playable in English from start to finish by mid- to late October.

Rasputin, Soniccd123 and Malenko began the project in July and began releasing translation patches in August.

Non-English translations

On his blog, Uncle Victor said on Sept. 22 that he teamed up with Kitchen34 to make a Spanish translation patch for Prisoner of Ice. They inserted the official Spanish text and dub from the PC original into the Japan-exclusive Saturn and PlayStation ports. Uncle Victor said the process was simplified thanks to Plissken’s work to put English localizations into the console versions this past May.

Those patches can be downloaded from Uncle Victor’s site or from a SegaXtreme resources page. They use the XDelta format, and a copy of the XDelta patcher can be downloaded from Victor’s page as well.

Just two days before that, the ever-busy Kitchen34 uploaded to SegaXtreme a French translation patch for the Japanese version of Astal. It keeps the Japanese dialogue but subtitles the intro FMV as well as changing the menus and level names in French.

The Astal patch, which uses the SSP format, can be downloaded from its resources page.

And just in case anyone wondered whether Kitchen took a break this past weekend, worry not — on Saturday, he released a patch that updates the French localization of Dragon Ball Z Idainaru Densetsu.

The game did officially release in France, Spain and Portugal in December 1996, but the French localization is considered subpar. Kitchen’s patch notes, which were written in French and have been machine translated here into English, list the changes the patch makes:

• Pallet issues have been reviewed.
• The audio tracks have been edited (please follow the instructions in the instructions included in the patch).
• The French errors in the vintage game have been corrected.
• Untranslated elements, such as sound, have now been taken into account.
• The chapter titles have been re-edited to match the logic of the cartoon.
• Summaries as well as the voices of the cartoon narrator in French have been included.

The SSP patch can be downloaded from its SegaXtreme resource page. It’s intended to be applied to the Japanese version of the game, though, not the French one.

There’s also some additional fussing around to be done to replace specific audio tracks, as the patch notes allude to. The 7Z zip file that the patch comes in also has nine re-edited audio tracks that Kitchen said must be used to manually replace the existing Japanese ones.