Since the publication of this article, we have heard back from eadmaster and published an interview with him. You can read it by clicking here.
SamIAm, the person behind a yearslong translation effort for Saturn action RPG Princess Crown, spent about 10 years working on the project alongside coder CyberWarriorX. The patch endured many changes over the years, as the people working on it contended with real life responsibilities during its production.
Seemingly without notice or publicity to the greater retro video game scene, another fan hacker named eadmaster released an early version of the long-awaited patch yesterday.
A post they made on CD Romance read in part, “Early release of the Princess Crown English translation released by eadmaster based on CyberWarriorX project. The script is fully translated, the font is full width and there might be bugs.”
Labeling it as “version 0.3,” eadmaster also credits SamIAm for the translation and credits cafealpha for other aspects of the project.
Apparently, this was also posted without any notice to SamIAm or CyberWarriorX.
SamIAm spoke out about the patch on SHIRO!’s Discord server today.
“Hi. I’d like to address a few things about this Princess Crown translation release,” SamIAm wrote.
“1. CyberWarriorX and I did not sign off on this. As far as I know, no attempt to contact us was made. And I believe that even if we had been contacted, we would not have chosen to give permission to use our work like this.
“2. The code and the script that this person used as a base are both wildly obsolete. That old version of the script is loaded with problems, and I’m embarrassed that anyone is even looking at it. We have not shared our most up-to-date work with the public.
“3. The game will freeze in several places. The only way to get around this is to load a save via the Japanese game, play past the freeze point, save, and load the English version again. Even our latest version has a couple of these points,” he said.
Sam later wrote about how the resources used for the patch that was released by eadmaster are about 10 years old.
“CyberWarriorX shared that Princess Crown github page way back in maybe 2014 with the intention of recruiting hacking help. It was a snapshot of where we were at the time: various tools and a complete early draft of the script were there, but it was also limited quite deliberately so that laypeople wouldn’t be able to make a patch with it. Eventually, when nobody responded, CyberWarriorX gave up on recruiting help and moved on. In our respective areas, he and I each made significant progress, and none of this was ever shared in that github. That’s the first thing that people need to understand about all of this. CyberWarriorX and I are sitting on a version 0.9. This Eadmaster guy took our old version 0.2, made it barely functional, and released it as complete. Something I will consider doing after talking with CyberWarriorX is releasing a video of the translation in its current state. Just the intro would be enough. Looking at the screenshots in the segasaturnshiro.com page and seeing the ancient print routine literally made me facepalm. That’s not what it’s supposed to look like, guys.”
— SamIAm
It should be noted that real life events caused the original creators of the patch to put this project on the backburner a few times. They have previously expressed interest in allowing someone within the Saturn patching scene to take on the torch.
Throughout social media and Saturn social circles, fans are divided on the morality of what happened. Many support Sam’s wishes and are choosing to wait until the patch is in a more complete state. Others are less forgiving, suggesting that the original team is taking too long and is not communicative enough with the public.
EmeraldNova, a prominent SegaXtreme leader and host of the annual Saturn Homebrew Contest, wrote: “A lot of these projects need time to cook, and not only is scooping someone else’s work without checking in just not the done thing, but publishing someone else’s work in a broken or unreviewed state is often a door to making the original patcher’s life very miserable with premature complaints and requests. Projects will sometimes just get dropped due to, for lack of a better term, negative community engagement.
“There’s barely a dozen people responsible for the vast bulk of Saturn patches which have been shoving out multiple translation releases a year,” EmeraldNova added. “We can afford to respect their wishes.”
SamIAm later added that this is not the first time someone tried making a patched version of Princess Crown with the 2014 GitHub resources.
Our team is speaking with other hackers in the scene about the origins of the patch that released and what is known about eadmaster. We have also reached out to eadmaster for comment.
This is a developing story. Check this article and our website for updates.
If you take too much time etc. just release the code for further improvements to the public and make said development open.
Keeping an almost finished product private helps nobody but your own ego rejoicing that the project is yours and yours alone, with this release somebody will fix things and in a short time get a fully working release.
Real life events? 10 years?
They couldn’t pass the torch because it went out 7 years ago.
Pony up or move on.