Apply ROM hacks and translations
There are games which were never translated officially. Some talented people (this might include you) took these untranslated ROM images and altered them in a process known as ROM Hacking. They produced in the end a working English ROM (or whatever their language is).
But how would they distribute it? While Chinese ROM hackers don't give a shit and just upload the translated ROM as-is, the rest of the world is another matter. Anyone doing this, especially ROM hackers since they're more... under the vengeful watchful eye of the publishers for the first legal slip, would be asking for legal hell. The ROM data is copyrighted data to the original company, and them not selling their product here doesn't mean they'll let someone pirate their games.
ROM hackers not dumb enough to risk having their asses sued resort to another solution.
They upload just a patch. It's a file containing only the modifications, and nothing else. When applied to the original Japanese ROM, it produces the English-translated ROM the hacker has in their computer. Only a few megabytes generally, so very practical for sharing. This patch on its own is legal, it's meaningless without a copy of the ROM/ISO and hence harmless on its own.
To apply a patch you'll need to do the following steps:
Get the ROM / ISO
You need to read the readme included with the patch to know what ROM version you exactly need:
- The game name
- The region: Japanese, US, Europe...
- The revision
- The dump: [!] means good dump, but you can get a No-Intro dump for that.
Either download it off a search engine, or dump it yourself if you can.
In the case of SNES games, the patch needs to be either on rom with a header or without a header. You can convert a given rom between both states with the tush utility. In case the readme doesn't tell which one you need to have, you can tell if the patch is applied and corrupts everything in-game.
Apply the Patch
It depends on which format the patch is in.
IPS
Very common patching format. It replaces bytes at specific addresses in the file with bytes from the translation, so it's not suited to cases where the translation swaps huge quantities of data around (xdelta would be better). It's also nonfunctional with ROM sizes bigger than 16MB.
Some emulators are compatible with IPS patches. You just need to put the untranslated game ROM in the same folder as the IPS patch, with both of them sharing the same file name sans file extension. When you play the game, the emulator applies the translation automatically during gameplay. Some of these emulators include:
- NES: FCEUX
- SNES: bsnes, Snes9X, ZSNES
- GB: VBA
- GBA: VBA, VBA-M, mGBA
But not all emulators might have this feature. Also, you might prefer a single ROM file with the translation. So you can do it the proper way and generate the English-translated ROM!
- Get LunarIPS.
- Open IPS file.
- Select "Apply IPS Patch".
- Choose IPS file.
- Choose original untranslated ROM file.
- Now choose a name and a directory for your translated ROM file, and save.
- LunarIPS then generates the translated ROM file!
You can create IPS patches too using LunarIPS.
UPS
Works just like IPS, though it doesn't have the 16MB ROM size limitation. Not as nearly as common and supported though.
Some emulators are compatible with UPS patches. You just need to put the untranslated game ROM in the same folder as the patch, with both of them sharing the same file name sans file extension. When you play the game, the emulator applies the translation automatically during gameplay. Some of these emulators include:
- GBA: VBA-M, mGBA
But not all emulators might have this feature. Also, you might prefer a single ROM file with the translation. So you can do it the proper way and generate the English-translated ROM!
- Get Tsukuyomi UPS
- Select Browse in front of the "UPS Patch" field and choose the UPS patch file
- Select Browse in font of the "Input Source File" field and choose the untranslated ROM
- Choose where you want to save the generated translated ROM file under "Target"
- Apply Patch.
