English- and French-speaking Saturn fans looking to dive into a horror adventure have a new one to check out: Dark Seed, for which a pair of translation patches came out this week.
Kitchen34 uploaded the English patch Saturday to a Resources page on SegaXtreme. The download comes with a copy of the XDelta patcher — it should be used rather than another version of XDelta to ensure no errors in the patching process.
The French patch has its own SegaXtreme Resources page created Wednesday after it initially was uploaded on French retro gaming forum Delta Island.
Dark Seed is a point-and-click adventure game featuring the artwork of H.R. Giger originally developed by California-based developer Cyberdreams for MS-DOS PCs in 1992. Following ports to the Macintosh and Amiga in 1993, Cyberdreams ported Dark Seed to the Saturn in July 1995 and the PlayStation a few months later, both Japanese exclusives. The Saturn version supports the Shuttle Mouse.
Instead of having to translate the game from Japanese back into English, Kitchen34 said he coded a script in Python to extract the original PC game’s script to plug into the Saturn version. He even extracted the original art assets with English text on them to replace the Japanese ones in the Sega port.
Luckily, the original English voice acting was retained in the Saturn version, so Kitchen34 didn’t need to fuss with the audio files at all.
While the game’s font set does include English letters, Kitchen34 didn’t like some of the letters’ inconsistent spacing, so he tweaked them to look better. The French patch needed a bit more work, though. “In the French version, I changed the font to put the special characters one row above,” Kitchen34 told SHIRO!.
Kitchen34 showed off his work prior to the current version of the patch on his YouTube channel:
There are still some kinks to iron out, though. For example, any message involving an item puts the name of the item before the rest of the sentence. Kitchen34 said he’d address the problem in a future version.
There’s also still an untranslated screen when the game first starts. He told SHIRO! that’ll be updated in a future patch, too. “It says that Mike, on his first night, had terrible nightmares (it’s a sprite),” he said.
The next version of the patch will feature a few more changes, too.
“To be honest, the PC version doesn’t have the object descriptions (a small document I gathered),” Kitchen34 said. “However, the Saturn version has descriptions for these objects, probably due to the Saturn’s output resolution to the screen (CRT). I’m reactivating the object descriptions. I’m also going to make some changes to the splash screen.”
A sequel, Dark Seed II, was made for Windows PCs in December 1995 and ported to the Saturn — again, in Japan only — in August 1997. Kitchen34 said he’s looked into plugging a translation into that game, too, but it may be more complicated.
“First, you have to hack the game,” he said on the SegaXtreme Discord server. “Go from 2 bits per character to 1 bit per character. Then you absolutely have to reduce the font size. You might even have to enlarge the dialog area. Because even if 1 bit per character worked, you could only display 20 or 26 characters in two rows.”
This is phenomenal work! Ive played through the game myself before in Japanese, but playing this in full English is just awesome! I’ll definitely be giving it another go with this patch. Goes without saying that I’d love to see Dark Seed II get the same treatment if possible, one day. That game with its Japanese voices was harder to playthrough than this first one here. Even though I managed to finish it, it would be amazing to have in English as well. Much thanks to Kitchen34 for his work on this one!!!