An update to the English fan translation patch for “R?MJ The Mystery Hospital” last week added subtitles to nearly all of the horror adventure game’s videos.
The hacker working on the patch, Kitchen34, uploaded an SSP patch to SegaXtreme on Nov. 21. It can be downloaded from its resource page.
To apply the patch to the game, use the Sega Saturn Patcher.
Kitchen34 began working on the patch earlier this month using the translation used to make a patch for the PlayStation version of the game with that team’s blessing.
He hit a snag, though — he’s unable to put subtitles on screen to translate audio clips that are heard during gameplay.
“The translation on PS1 modifies the [executable] and injects subtitles for each audio and video file during playback,” Kitchen34 said in a thread on SegaXtreme. “This procedure is not yet possible on Saturn. So I’m looking at an AI that synthesizes several voices for me.”
He said the audio files are AIFs — a format similar to WAV used in other Saturn games like Stellar Assault SS — and it’s easy to replace them with translated versions thanks to TrekkiesUnite118’s Sega Saturn Film Tools 2.1.0 utility.
He’s also using that tool to replace all of the game’s Cinepak-format video files with versions that have English subtitles on them.
He’s already started replacing the audio files, as he said over the weekend that he’d used AI to translate about 100 audio files.
“I encounter a few bugs from time to time. I’ll delve deeper into the executable to address this. But overall, things are progressing well; it’s already functioning quite smoothly. Just need to debug.”
— Kitchen34
Kitchen34 said the audio seemed to work when he kept his replaced files within the originals’ runtimes. The teams behind the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS translation efforts found that to be true as well.
R?MJ The Mystery Hospital is a 1997 interactive horror adventure game from System Sacom, who are best known for The Mansion of Hidden Souls and Lunacy — aka Torico — thanks to those games being officially released in the West. But the developer made several more that never left Japan, and Mystery Hospital is one of them. System Sacom teamed up with Bandai to make “R?MJ The Mystery Hospital” and released it on the PlayStation in November 1997 about a month before porting it to the Saturn.
It has full voice acting and movement like Kenji Eno’s D, where a video plays to show the player’s selected movement. In addition to looking around for items and solving puzzles, the player must utilize the “5 senses button,” which acts as an additional way to investigate. Other characters will prompt you for these moments, such as “what’s that smell?”
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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