A new English patch has been released for a Japanese-exclusive Saturn game — and with it comes an announcement of another.
A hacker new to the Saturn scene named Plissken announced a translation patch on May 7 for Prisoner of Ice: Jashin Kourin, a point-and-click adventure game based on the Call of Cthulhu horror franchise. Then, last Sunday, he announced that he’s working on an English patch for the Saturn version of first-person roguelike Baroque next.
Both patches follow ones Plissken made for the PlayStation versions of those games.
Three days after his initial patch release, Plissken released a new version of it to fix a crash when starting the game start if there’s isn’t enough space to save.
The updated English patch can be downloaded here while an updated Russian patch — he made a Russian translation patch at the same time as the English one — can be downloaded here.
It’s an Xdelta patch, and the download comes with a copy of the Xdela patching program.
Prisoner of Ice’s translation patch was possible thanks to the game’s origin — the PC. Much like other games that have gotten translation patches in recent years, Prisoner of Ice was made in English for the PC before being ported to the Saturn in Japan only.
In Prisoner of Ice’s case, it was originally developed by Infogrames in 1995. In PAL territories it was titled Call of Cthulhu: Prisoner of Ice.
Xing Entertainment ported and published the game for the Saturn and PlayStation on Dec. 23, 1997. Happily, it supports the Saturn mouse, especially since the game forces you to manipulate a mouse cursor with the D-pad if you don’t have the mouse.
Plissken told Shiro that the first time he played Prisoner of Ice was on the PlayStation, but since it existed in English on the PC, he saw an opportunity to make a translation patch without needing to create a fan-made localization.
“I don’t know Japanese, so translation availability is a huge bonus for me,” he said.
Plissken initially didn’t have plans to touch the Saturn version. “But PS1 translation for Prisoner of Ice [went] so smoothly, that I decided that such an easy project can be perfect opportunity to try a new platform,” he said.
An enterprise programmer by trade, it was his first time hacking a Saturn game. And it’s led to his next project, Baroque.
Plissken already put out a translation patch for the PlayStation version of Baroque in October 2021. It was his first translation project, and it required a bit more elbow grease than Prisoner of Ice would — he used the extensive translations found on a fan website called The Nerve Tower with the author’s permission.
“After successful work on Prisoner of Ice I decided that it would be a shame not to try the same with Baroque,” Plissken said.
His initial foray into the Saturn version of Baroque looked promising.
“I was shocked that the code that I need to change is completely the same on both versions, so all I had to do is locate the place where code is and port my changes from MIPS to SH2,” he said.
“One of the noticeable differences is that [the] Saturn version has compression applied for levels binaries (they contain level specific data and code). On the PS1, compression was only applied to graphics and not the code. I reverse engineered [the] decompression algorithm year ago, so [adding] compression to it was only a matter of time, it wasn’t a big challenge, just [an] interesting difference.”
— Plissken
Shiro readers are likely familiar with Baroque — a prominent member of the community, Dr. Emerald Nova, along with Shiro team member Knight0fDragon, have been working on their own English patch for the Saturn version of the game since shortly before Plissken released his PlayStation patch in autumn 2021.
Called “Bastard Baroque,” owing to its quick-and-dirty nature of using English abbreviations in place of kanji characters, Shiro reported on it last summer after Emerald Nova and Knight showed off their work on the Shiro Show.
With Plissken’s announcement, it appears work on Bastard Baroque will cease. But there are no hard feelings — Emerald Nova said he wants to focus his energy on his own original game, Seniriu.
“Now that Plissken is on it, I can just link to his stuff,” Emerald Nova said in the Shiro Discord server.
As for Plissken, Shiro will be following his progress on the Saturn version of Baroque. But anyone who wants to follow along as well can join his Discord server.
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