== Madou Monogatari I Game Gear hardware fix == by Supper This is a small, unofficial update to filler and Kingofcrusher's 2010 English translation patch for the Game Gear version of Madou Monogatari I, which is known to have impossibly fast VRAM accesses that make the text completely garbled and unreadable when played on a real Game Gear. This patch fixes the bulk of the issues, making the text readable and (so far as I know) the game playable to the end. Reportedly, there are still issues with text sometimes getting offset from its intended position, but unfortunately, I didn't make the original translation and I don't know what could be causing it. In any case, this patch is certainly an improvement. This patch must be applied *on top of* the existing translation. First, apply filler and Kingofcrusher's original translation patch to a Madou Monogatari I ROM (following the instructions in its readme). This should result in a ROM file with an MD5 sum of 81c3447b356a808a8e8e7b7c6a815c32. Then, apply the accompanying IPS patch from this package to the translated ROM. Don't apply the IPS patch by itself! Note that this fix does not address any of the non-hardware-related issues with the translation. The authors of the patch explicitly stated that it was "incomplete" when it was released, and intended to go back and fix problems with it in a later revision. Unfortunately, this never happened, and it shows. Some lines are too long and overflow the text box, and places where numbers are supposed to be dynamically inserted into the text aren't properly edited and generally look sloppy. The translation itself also has severe issues with dialogue having been translated out of context and never edited, resulting in a very strange and disjointed experience. I feel bad criticizing the patch like this, because it's clear quite a bit of effort already went into both the translation and the hacking, but... well, even if all the text is technically there, it simply isn't a finished translation. (Though I won't criticize anyone for making the mistake that led to the garbled text; I did the exact same thing in my early Game Gear hacks.) Anyway, I've made no effort to change anything beyond the issues that break the game on real hardware and have no plans to, because it's a whole lot of work and I've got enough going on as it is. Sorry! But to toot my own horn a bit, I did help put together a translation for the Mega Drive version of the game, so you might check that out if you're interested. Thanks to tbpbird for reporting the hardware issues and helping test the fix. Version history: - v1.0 (14 Feb 2020): Initial release.