Kaitou Saint Tail for the Sega Game Gear English Language Translation Patch Readme Introduction: Japanese Developer: Minato Giken Japanese Publisher: Sega Japanese Release: March 29, 1996 English Patch Production: Matt's Messy Room Kaitou Saint Tail Patch History: V1.00: Initial Matt's Messy Room Release: August, 16, 2021 Kaitou Saint Tail Production Credits: Project Coordination: Filler Hacking/Bug Fixing: Taskforce Tools: Taskforce, Filler Assembly: Taskforce Initial Work/Translation: Filler Story Writing: Taskforce, Filler Graphics Taskforce Beta Testing Recca, Filler -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.ips Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.bps Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.ups Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.xdelta Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.txt -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Licensing This patch contains NO portion of the original game. It is to be distributed as a patch, in an archive with this readme and any other materials originally provided in the archive. This patch is NOT to be distributed with the original ROM image, either pre-patched, or separately. The contents of this patch are NOT TO BE SOLD in any way, including as a ROM image applied to the original ROM, or as a physical cartridge using the patch applied to the original ROM image. As the work contained in this patch is derivative, our rights regarding it are limited. However, we're releasing materials related to the translation project ONLY, including the English language script, under CC BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/). For additional materials and information please see the author's project pages: http://projects.mattsmessyroom.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OVERVIEW: Kaitou Saint Tail is based on the anime of the same name. A problem is brought to Seira Mimori's attention. Through a series of events explained in the game, fake gems have been sold as real gems. Meimi Haneoka as Saint Tail is tasked with replacing the fake gems with the real gems. You walk around on a map avoiding guards and collecting magic cards to get into people's mansions to swap jewels. Magic cards let you do things like temporarily put guards to sleep and jump over hedges as well as other things at random. Once you've reached a mansion, you play a series of minigames as a way to swap gems. Each minigame allows you to swap 1 gem. Once you've swapped all 5 you then have one final minigame to make your escape from Daiki Asuka aka Asuka Jr. who is, as usual, hot on your heels. The game also features a 1p and 2p minigame mode were you can skip the story and just select whatever minigame you want to play. The 2p minigame mode will not activate without a game gear to game gear link cable linking two game gears together. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patching: Contained within this archive is an IPS (international patching system) file or a patch file in another format for the end user's convenience that when used in conjunction with a ROM file will make the game playable in English. Do note, as I touched on above, that this patch is a result of countless hours of love and labor. Hence, they are not meant to be sold at any price under any circumstance, be it in digital form or burnt into a donor cart's ROM chip. To patch the ROM file, one needs to procure a patcher for their preferred format, a widely available class of programs, many of which can be found at http://www.romhacking.net/ for one source. At some point, ROM sites may upload pre-patched ROMs of our Kaitou Saint Tail translation. Obviously, Matt's Messy Room cannot endorse playing these versions. Neither will we support resolution of any associated problems. Moreover, pre-patched ROMs may float around the web for years. Only by downloading patches containing just our original work from Matt's Messy Room's web site may gamers obtain revisions to these patches - if any - and take advantage of possible bug-fixes and corrections. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Information pertaining to the Kaitou Saint Tail ROM: Size before patching: 512 KB (524,288 bytes) Size after patching: 528 KB (540,672 bytes) File: Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.gg Name: Kaitou Saint Tail Company: Sega Header: None Mapper: Sega Type: Normal ROM: 512 KB Country: Japan Video: NTSC Revision: 1.0 CRC32: 937FD52B CRC64: E88B7544B3081A6F SHA256: 533612D3D0F7D66CEF91681D5A8E4B2FEB325F97B85C547CFB4339AA9F80EA30 SHA1: 3E4E7EC4A4CE5D48BAED7D583EDE8BB9F92A44A6 BLAKE2sp: 8D888DF659DF93F73DF62CAAED0AC771799415AB974F9A0F8E51AF23AC79F9F3 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes: 1. Not all ROMs will necessarily be patch-able with our file. Some emulators support a feature called soft patching, which keeps the ROM file intact, merging the patch data only during run time. To make use of it, make sure both the ROM file and the IPS are in the same directory as your emulator of choice and have the same name, but not the same extension. The patch should be an .IPS patch. Do note that this is case-sensitive. i. e.: Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.gg and Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.ips will trigger soft patching at the emulator's run time. (Or sometimes via a built in menu option.) Emulator Compatibility: This patched game works in most emulators. Real hardware has not been tested. We cannot guarantee compatibility with all emulators, however so far it has worked on all emulators we have tried it on. Our recommendation is Emulicious, Kega Fusion or retroarch. Again, the game has not been tested on real hardware at this time. Taskforce's musings: Thank you Filler for giving me the script for this game and asking me if I would like to take a crack at it. Sorry that it took me so long to get to it. Life got in the way for a while there. I knew it would take hours of distraction free stretches to work on this and I just didn't have that when I first asked if you'd like me to take a crack at it. That was why I made you keep my involvement under wraps for so long and told you if someone else wanted to do it, I would be OK with that. Personally, I must admit, some of it was motivation as well. I wasn't sure I'd pull it off with compression involved, but here we are just a few weeks later and I actually pulled it off. Can't say I would accomplish it with another game. Especially on another non-z80 based system. Game Gear (and other z80 games) have the best emulator with the best debugging/disassembly tools I've found. That being Emulicious and I must give a BIG thanks to those involved in that project. It made finding the routines I needed to alter and/or reverse engineer easy. It has been 20+ years since I solely handled the hacking and most of the tool development to complete a game. I didn't create all the tools as Filler created the dumper and dumped the games script before I became involved. It was nice getting back into the swing of hacking. Even better is that this is also the first game I successfully pulled off graphics decompression and recompression. As well as a handful of other assembly hacks. Some of them might not be as elegant as others would have come up with, but they have all worked as far as I've found and that is what matters in the end to me at least. Also, man Sega this was some pretty shoddy programming in places. Guess they have the same philosophy I do. As long as it looks like a Ferrari, nobody is going to care that there is a Yugo motor powering it if you don't open the hood. :D Filler's musings: This project was started on May 28th, 2018, prior, I believe, to my initiative to dump and translate all scripts for the Game Gear. I have a soft spot for anime based games, and at the time this one must have caught my eye. I deciphered the game's custom text encoding, but I noticed that the script's formatting would make dumping it in my normal manner messier than I was comfortable with. I decided that I'd write a custom script dumper for the first time ever. On June 1st, 2018 I coded a general script dumper in PHP and configured it for Saint Tail's text script. Incidentally, this proved to be helpful on more projects than this one. I've added features to it over the past several years, and it's helped me dump over 20 game scripts and counting. By August 30th, 2018 I'd translated all dumped text and was ready to find someone to work on hacking the English script back into the ROM. I don't remember the details, but I believe I passed it on to Supper who was working with me on Magic Knight Rayearth, also for the Game Gear, at the time. Fast forward to December 31, 2020. Supper, the Majin- Zenki, and Cccmar have released a slew of English language translation patches for the Game Gear and Famicom, kick started by my script dumps. These include but are not limited to; Kishin Douji Zenki (GG), Sanma no Mei Tantei (FC), Idol Hakkenden (FC), Moldorian: The Sisters of Light and Darkness (GG), Madou Monogatari II: Arle 16-Sai (GG), etc... Supper and I also released Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S (GG) and Madou Monogatari A: DokiDoki Bake~shon (GG) together. Suffice to say, Saint Tail had fallen through the cracks. I posted a help wanted ad on Romhacking.net that never elicited a response. However, on February 5th, 2021 frequent Dynamic Designs collaborator Taskforce offered to look at any Game Gear games I'd translated scripts for, so I offered up Saint Tail. I'm really proud of Taskforce for the work he put in to this project. He appears to have done some of his very first significant console game assembly hacking and the results have been great. The major breakthrough appears to have been reverse engineering the game's graphics compression routine. Thanks also to Dynamic Designs collaborator Recca for helping us play-test this game. In my opinion this is a relatively minor release for the Game Gear. Aside from the anime license and fairly copious digitized voice samples nothing much distinguishes this from a number of other mini-game collection style games on the system. However, for whatever reason, this game was the incentive for diving deeper into the technical aspects of translation hacking not only for myself, but for Taskforce as well. I really enjoyed working on this project because of that, and I hope that few Saint Tail fans out there get a kick out of playing this game in English for the first time. Dedicated and in Memory of Near. Readme 2021 Matt's Messy Room