Cyber Doll

Back in July of 2025, Fan Translator Exxistance began work on the Cyberpunk RPG Cyber Doll on the Saturn with translator Wiredcrackpot:

While there hasn’t been an open fan translation beta to try out, he’s been slowly over the years hacking away over the last year. His latest update announced the script is done for the game and just requires testing:

Dunno if this’ll display or not… but the script is done! Now I just gotta test each string and then do a playthrough test to make sure there’s no crashes or glitches.

Exxistance

Video for a teaser of Cyber Doll’s fan translation

While no release date has been announced, we’ll let you know once the game is ready to delve into!

Wachenröder

We previously covered the work from Knight0fDragon on his fan translation of the titular game Wachenröder. While he seemingly continuing work on it, another translator known as sparkster began work on their fan translation of said game around four months ago:

Just recently, sparkster posted what they refereed to as, “about 99% complete”:

Text translation and replacement are now about 99% complete, and image replacement is also about 99% possible. The reason I say 99% instead of 100% is that I’ve only played through about four stages so far. I still need to see how text appears in places like shops, but I haven’t even reached anything like that yet. I’m not even sure whether the game has shops.

For the visible text, I’ve confirmed that most of it displays correctly. However, item names that are too long are still an issue, because there doesn’t seem to be a way to fit them into their original positions as-is. Expanding the area also looks difficult.

As you can see in the video, all of the text has been replaced, and the images have been temporarily edited in a rough way so that the changes are easy to see. The important part is that the images can be changed; they don’t need to look final yet. There are quite a few images, so I’m still thinking about how to edit them so they fit the game properly.

Based on the investigation so far, I think most of the subroutines and behavior have been understood. However, as mentioned before, there are still concerns: some subroutines were forcibly inserted during memory initialization, and some areas were swapped with others to increase the text buffer size. I’m not sure whether this will remain safe all the way to the final stage.

I also want to add multilingual support. Unlike cartridge ROMs, CDs are file-name based, so I think it should be possible to handle. However, I’m not sure whether the game will still work the same way if the CD size changes and the sector positions shift. More importantly, to add Korean support, I would need to implement Korean text handling again based on everything I’ve analyzed so far. That will take more time.

From here on, I think I need to stop focusing on game analysis and start building tools. I’ll need a game text editor that renders text the same way the game does, tools that check resources and only reinsert them when there are no problems, and consistency checks as well. This is probably where things will start taking a lot of time again.

For now, I think I’ll take a short break and do something other than ROM hacking for a while.

Sparkster on the Wachenröder translation

While there is no info regarding AI for any part of the translation effort, they mentioned ChatGPT was used for their translation effort of Surging Aura, but only as a placeholder until an actual translation can be done:

So for now, we cannot confirm if AI has been, or would be used for the release of Wachenröder.

Nekketsu Oyako

Back in April of 2026, after their work on the Kyuutenkai/Fantastic Pinball fan translation, Saturn hacker ShivaSaturn announced work began for the Saturn version of the Beat ‘Em Up title Nekketsu Oyako: