Jump for joy, Saturn fans — there’s a new English translation patch for one of the console’s exclusive fighting games, Rabbit.
The patch released earlier today was made by Derek “ateam” Pascarella, with hacking assistance from Bo Bayles, translation by Walnut, asset discovery by Malenko and help identifying the game’s compression from Knight0fDragon. It’s an SSP file that uses Knight0fDragon’s Sega Saturn Patcher and is available at Pascarella’s Github page — just click on the link in the line “The latest version of this patch is 1.0” just above the readme’s table of contents to download it.
The Github gives patching instructions for those unfamiliar with using the Sega Saturn Patcher. For those using a Fenrir ODE to play Saturn games, it’s crucial to remember to check the box at the bottom-right of the window labeled “Separate Track Files (if applicable)” — otherwise, the patched game won’t boot for you.
Rabbit is a 2D fighting game ported from the arcades to the Saturn in June 1997 by short-lived developer Aorn and published by Electronic Arts Victor, a collaboration between Electronic Arts and JVC to bring more of EA’s games to Japan.
Its gimmick is that each of its eight characters are paired with a beast spirit they can summon to perform special attacks when the beast meter is full. When playing in single-player arcade mode, each time an opponent is defeated, the player adds their animal spirit to their arsenal. The protagonist of the game, Wu-ling, uses a rabbit spirit, hence the title.
While character names and the options menu are in English in the original untouched game, the command list moves, endings and win quotes as well as explanations for how to use beast spirits between matches are still in Japanese. With Pascarella and company’s patch, all of that is now in English, adding even more personality to the colorful proceedings.
But that’s not all the patch does — it also enables from the start all of the extras in the options menu that usually need to be unlocked by beating the game multiple times. Those options include zoom, animal stock, stock count and damage.
Zoom changes the game’s starting camera from its default zoomed-in state to a more zoomed-out “75%” state. When set to 75%, the camera won’t zoom in and out as the combatants get farther apart or close distance with each other, as it typically does.
When damage is set to “off,” neither player takes any damage — at least, that’s how it is in the unpatched game after unlocking this option. Pascarella wrote new code to make this option only give player one invincibility, turning it into kind of a cheat mode.
“I ended up just writing brand new invincibility code rather than use what was already there,” Pascarella said in SHIRO!’s Discord server, “[it] was actually easier to go that route.”
The other two unlockable options, animal stock and stock count, remain a mystery to the patching team.
“I finished the other build a bunch of times and am still pretty fuzzy on exactly how the spirit animals work,” Bayles said.
The game hid other mysteries, too, like algorithms that checked its files while it was running to make sure they hadn’t been edited. That would have been a showstopper for the patch if Pascarella and Bayles hadn’t found a way around it.
“It does a checksum on each file it reads off the file system and then compares to a table of expected values,” Bayles said. “If there’s not a match, it retries. So if you change a file, it will just sit there and spin.”
The checksum function is present in all of the game’s executables, according to Pascarella, leading them to track it down in multiple places.
They’re still not sure why the game does this. Mr. Conan, another Saturn fan translator who’s working on a Soul Hackers patch with Trekkies Unite, wondered if Rabbit’s developers used it as a form of CD reading error correction, while Knight0fDragon speculated that was an anti-cheat mechanism.
“Did they not trust CD error correction?” Bayles said. “Was their arcade board flaky and they just blindly ported it over from there? Unclear.”
The team found another complication in Rabbit’s ending text, which uses compression — and it’s the only text in the game that does so.
Members of the SHIRO! Discord server got to see Pascarella and Knight0fDragon figure out the compression in real time last week, as they spent two and a half hours hashing out what the game was doing. They eventually determined it uses run-length encoding, which is sometimes used in other Saturn games, not to mention applications in general.
Knight produced a little code for decompressing the graphics — “just need to reverse it to compress,” he instructed Pascarella — and the problem was essentially solved.
Bayles said he plans on writing a blog post tomorrow about another build of Rabbit that discusses their options menu hacks.
This is the first Saturn patch that Pascarella has worked on after being a prolific force in the Dreamcast translation scene for years. When asked whether this was a one-and-done situation or he might look into more Saturn games, he said he plans to do more. Considering how this first foray went with Rabbit, the Saturn community hopes he hops to it.
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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