Chack'n Pop
Sega SG-1000
Translation [Japanese > English] v1.02
2010-09-24

BACKGROUND:

Wikipedia describes Chack'n Pop as "an arcade game released by Taito in 1983, considered to be an ancestor of Bubble Bobble due to the appearance of many similar enemies and Bubble Bobble's duplication of a Chack'n Pop level".

Several systems saw home versions of Chack'n Pop, including the NES and MSX, but the SG-1000 port is the best in my opinion.  The additional music is a nice touch, and the graphics are solid, but more than anything Chack'n Pop somehow just _feels_ better on the SG-1000 -- the controls are tighter, the gameplay more fun.  It's definitely a standout title for the system.

TRANSLATION:

Of course the game is completely playable without translation, but I thought it would be a fun project, though there's really only one spot of Japanese text in Chack'n Pop.  The first level is a "training stage", in which the whole bottom half of the gameplay area is taken up by a Japanese-language tutorial which incorporates graphics from the game.

I tried to translate this, but my Japanese skills are essentially nonexistent.  However, a poster at SMSPower.com (Raccoon Lad) clued me in to the fact that the original arcade version also has this tutorial, and displays it in English when the game is set to English-language mode.  So an original/authentic translation was already available, and just needed to be duplicated and hacked into the ROM.

This turned out to be a bit tricky, because the training stage uses a different character set than the rest of the game, with a mix of katakana and non-consecutive English letters -- specifically, the letters in "TRAINING STAGE", i.e. AEGINRST.  Relative searching didn't work, but ultimately I figured out where the characters were located, and pasted in the Latin character set used elsewhere in the game.

At first this was a complete Latin character set in alphabetical order, but certain characters (T, U, and W) weren't displaying properly, as they were being partially overwritten with black lines.   I assume there's some issue with the display routines used for the katakana that had been in those locations.  In any event, I simply moved those letters to ROM locations occupied by unused Latin letters (B, C, and J), and all was well.  I also had to edit the comma sprite, moving it up 1 pixel, for similar reasons.

In addition, there were a few bits of mangled English in the game, which I've now fixed.  Specifically, I've changed "YOUR  ELIMINATED" to "YOU'VE DESTROYED", and the typo "YOU BET" is now "YOU GET".

TOOLS:

I ended up using only the bare basics:  a hex editor (Hex Fiend), a text editor (BBEdit), and a command-line relative search program (Opensearch).  I also used an online hex-to-binary converter (http://www.hurgh.org/ascbinhex.php) so that I could see the character graphics -- I literally pasted the whole ROM into their input box, and then pasted the results back into BBEdit with a hard wrap of 9 characters.

This approach may seem quite crude, but as a PowerPC Mac user, most of the polished toolsuites aren't available to me.  Besides, I learned a lot doing it this way.  Having said that, I still basically don't know what I'm doing, so I consider myself lucky that it all worked.  :)

IMPROVEMENTS:

It'd be nice if someone could figure out how to insert a valid US Master System header into the ROM at 0x7FF0, so that the game could be played on a US SMS.  However, this would involve some major rearrangement of graphics tables (and/or expansion of the ROM), and is far beyond my skills.

Also, Raccoon Lad notes that the rock being pushed by the mighta should really be green, as it was in the arcade original.  Anyone want to fix this?

NOTES:

Since this is a SG-1000 game, the colors won't display properly in many SMS emulators.  This is a problem that also appears on real hardware, since the SG-1000 palette wasn't implemented correctly on SMS hardware.

CONTACT:

You can reach me via PM (private message) at romhacking.net, where I'm registered as "goldenband".  Please let me know if there are any bugs or unintended consequences.

VERSIONS:

v1.00 - initial release (posted at smspower.org on 2010-09-20)
v1.02 - fixed comma graphic