A hacker new to the Saturn scene released a patch Tuesday that translates Kyuutenkai, also known as Fantastic Pinball, into English.
ShivaSaturn posted a thread on SegaXtreme talking about their new patch. Although the SSP patch is in a zipped RAR file attached to the initial post, it was incompatible most versions of the Sega Saturn Patcher. Scroll down to post No. 9 in the thread to download a corrected SSP or an XDelta version of the patch.
“This is my first game translation,” ShivaSaturn said in the thread. “I read and speak a little bit of Japanese with some formal education, but most of my recent progress in understanding the language has come from playing untranslated Sega Saturn games and reading Japanese gaming magazines from the 90’s with a translator app for help.”
They went on to say that they chose Kyuutenkai because it’s a game they love and have played for many hours, but it turned out to be a challenging project because all of the game’s text is sprite art using compression. To help overcome that, ShivaSaturn said they employed Claude AI.
“I’m a game programmer by day,” ShivaSaturn said. “I sympathize with the negative sentiment around LLM development and its real world effects. Recently, however, I realized I had no choice but to learn the Claude tools to protect my own livelihood and I thought that hacking Saturn games and hardware would be a fun place to test Claude’s capabilities.
“I tried to produce a high quality faithful translation and didn’t rely solely on machine translated text.”
Kyuutenkai was developed by Technosoft, known better for making shoot-em-ups. The company self-published the pinball game exclusively in Japan in August 1995 about six months after releasing it on PlayStation. Even though its in-game name is Kyuutenkai and it never released outside Japan, Technosoft did print an English title, “Fantastic Pinball,” on the manual and CD.
For more on Kyuutenkai, check out Peter Malek’s #BestOfSaturn piece on the game, or SHIRO!’s podcast about Saturn pinball games.
Cracking the code
ShivaSaturn cracked Technosoft’s graphics compression first by examining another of their games, Hyper Duel. Then they disassembled Kyuutenkai’s code and to reverse engineer how to make changes to it.
“The most interesting technical thing we did that I’m proud of was that in order to deliver some of our patches we had to add extra assembly instructions to the game code, but we were shoving them into occupied game data in RAM,” ShivaSaturn said. “This led to corruption and we were constantly needing more instructions, but that meant finding more room.”
They ended up using Claude to build code that loads and interprets code from the CD, keeping the size of that interpretation code as small as possible. ShivaSaturn found a place in RAM that wasn’t being used by game data to stash it.
“The basic idea is that the game loads, jumps to our interpreter code, the interpreter patches data by reading commands from our command list, changes pointers, etc. and then jumps back to the main game code,” ShivaSaturn said.
One thing the hacker discovered was Kyuutenkai’s password system. The game provides a password when getting a game over to continue later and to provide high scores to a contest Technosoft ran in 1995.
ShivaSaturn provided some example passwords generated using the secret phrases Technosoft used to salt them:
| Password | Score | Credits | Bosses | Meaning |
| ------------ | ----------- | ------- | --------- | ----------------------------- |
| `C66H1QEM14` | 0 | 2 | 0 (0000) | Fresh start (default credits) |
| `C6XPAQGM1A` | 500,000 | 0 | 0 (0000) | No credits or bosses |
| `C6XPAQEHCA` | 500,000 | 2 | 5 (0101) | 2 credits, bosses 1+3 |
| `C6J1Y7GR2F` | 999,999 | 0 | 15 (1111) | All 4 bosses defeated |
| `C6XPAQ7MAA` | 500,000 | 9 | 0 (0000) | Max credits |
| `C6XPAQ7R99` | 500,000 | 9 | 15 (1111) | Max credits + all bosses |
| `H393G7G6DA` | 999,999,999 | 0 | 0 (0000) | Max score |Those secret phrases were found four months ago by Bo Bayles and published on SHIRO! in his weekly Under the Microscope feature. He also provided some passwords in that piece.
The translation
In one of their thread’s attached RAR files, ShivaSaturn included a text file with translation notes to shed some light on their decision-making process.
“A lot of the dialogue and character names are puns or generally unserious or silly,” they said in the notes. “This was a great surprise and I tried to match this tone and replace puns that were more Japanese culturally leaning with puns that would have targeted a young American English speaking audience in the 90s.”
ShivaSaturn overhauled the names of the three playable characters but seemed to give a lot of consideration to the new names they chose.
The blue knight is originally named SwordShield, and ShivaSaturn renamed him GawainAlot.
“I couldn’t settle on anything that felt natural within the character limit, but I had decided
the character class would be Knight, and since he was a Knight I figured I’d source from King Arthur’s tale as younger kids in the west would be familiar with it and understand the jokes we might make with the story elements,” ShivaSaturn said.
The playable girl is originally named Yuuki Tonae. ShivaSaturn explained that “Tonae” means “to chant” in Japanese, and the character is a spellcaster. “I tried to match this wordplay by calling the character Amy Spells,” they said. “Amy is a pretty common girls name, and spells is a double pun on the fact that she’s a mage and a kid ( 13 years old ), so she’s probably proud of and doing a lot of spelling.”
The green dragon character originally is named Midoran, which is a pun that means “green dragon egg.” His father his named Midoras, another pun name that means “green dragon nest.”
“I chose Hatchley for Midoran, and Hatchel for his father,” ShivaSaturn said. “Still a play on the two names, but less direct.”
Check out the translation notes for more thoughts on how they translated the password screen, character biographies and mini bosses.
Changing the names so drastically isn’t cool IMO, but otherwise, this sounds like a great patch.