CRAYON SHIN-CHAN SHOWDOWN! QUANTUM PANIC!!
Translation by Filler & Psyklax with FlashPV
v1.0 (20181224)

CONTENTS
1. Intro
2. ROM Information
3. Final Thoughts

INTRO
This is a 100% English translation of Crayon Shin-Chan -
Taiketsu! Kantamu Panikku!! - translated as Crayon Shin-chan
Showdown! Quantum Panic!! - for the Sega Game Gear. All
Japanese text has been translated into English - the only
exception being a few signs in the background of the story
mode, which add nothing to either the gameplay or the story.

This translation is fully compatible with the Game Gear to
Master System patch available at SMSPower.

ROM INFORMATION
GoodGG name:
 Crayon Shin-Chan - Taiketsu! Tankam Panic!! (J).gg
CRC32: 03D28EAB

FINAL THOUGHTS
 Filler
I dumped and translated the script for Crayon Shin-chan:
Showdown! Quantum Panic!! as part of an effort to dump and
translate scripts for all remaining Game Gear games that
don't have official or unofficial translations. I likely
used the tile viewing capabilities of Emukon - a Game Gear
emulator - to identify the text encoding used in this game.

There's a single text encoding that's used for all dialog
and instructions. The text is printed as fixed-length
segments with diacritics appearing on a preceding line. I
used a PHP script that I wrote to assist in dumping this
kind of text, and created two configuration files for the
two styles of fixed length text used in the game.

I worked on dumping the script for around one week in mid-
July of 2018, and on translating the script during the first
two thirds of September of the same year. In early October I
posted a help wanted ad on Romhacking.net requesting
assistance with re-insertion and graphics work.

Regarding the translation, I was stumped for a moment on the
term ハイグレ (highgure), but after doing some research that
led me to the following page (
https://seikatsu-hyakka.com/archives/12508) I learned that
it's a "Shin-chan-ism" for ハイレグ (high-leg), or a high-cut
style of swimsuit or leotard. As Shinnosuke is just a kid,
he manages to mispronounce this word in what I assume is a
funny manner. He refers to a ハイグレギャル (highgure gal),
basically a lady wearing a high-cut swimsuit, which I take
to mean a swimsuit model.

In an effort to maintain the intended comedy of his
mispronunciation I chose to translate this as "Playboy
Mummy", a riff on the Playboy Bunny in keeping with the
spirit of ハイレグギャル. I half suspect this was used
officially in some Crayon Shin-chan localization and I'm
simply remembering it unconsciously, but I was unable to
find evidence of this. At any rate, the term is used
properly as ハイレグギャル, in another part of the script which
I translated as "sexy swimsuit model".

Additionally, I was used to seeing "Kantam" transliterated
in fan translation works, and believed it to be a parody of
"Gundam". Upon further research I learned that this loan-
word can mean "quantum". While it may serve a parody
purpose, it's use in the title of Shin-chan's favorite giant
robot show "Quantum Robo" seems especially fitting when
translated as "quantum". This may be slightly off-putting
depending on what translated materials Shin-chan fans are
used to, but I feel confident in its use in this script.

I was pleased to see Psyklax respond promptly to my help
wanted ad, and after a reminder, he wound up digging into
the project and completing the excellent English language
translation patch that you have presumably downloaded. When
it came time to edit the title screen graphics, I made a
post on Twitter that was answered by FlashPV
(@PascalVahanian) who made a mock-up that Psyklax inserted
into the game utilizing a complicated seeming compression
routine which I'm sure you'll be able to read more about in
this readme.

A big thanks to Psyklax for script editing, graphics
editing, and hacking work, and also to FlashPV for the title
screen design. At its core this is a relatively basic
licensed mini-game collection, but not only am I working to
translate as many Game Gear games as I can, I'm also a
casual fan of Crayon Shin-chan. I used to watch fan-subs of
the Crayon Shin-chan anime, as well as the official North
American DVD releases, and have owned one or two of the
manga volumes that were localized into English. I'm glad to
see this project completed. Thanks for downloading the patch
and giving it a whirl!

A small reminder, please do not support the sale/purchase of
"repro carts" - a.k.a. bootlegs - of fan translations. The
work I did on this project was done for free. I have not and
will not receive any compensation for my work on this, and
my work is intended to be distributed for free, separately
from the original ROM data. I make no claims to the original
work/script which is still the copyright of Bandai, Yoshito
Usui, Futabasha, Shinei, and TV Asahi.

 Psyklax
This was my first real hack of the Master System/Game Gear
(the Argos no Juujiken title screen hack wasn't much, and
the same goes for Phantasy Star Doubled). When Filler
offered the script up to anyone to try, I looked and figured
a mini-game collection with a small amount of text would be
a nice easy project. Oh, how wrong I was...

At first, I was able to add text to the game profiles in no
time at all, and I assumed the rest of the project would go
just as smoothly. But then I encountered an obstacle:
compression! A large amount of the graphics - typically the
graphics that I needed to hack - were compressed, so I had
to reverse engineer the process.

I thought I'd figured it out when replacing the story mode
font with the English font, but that was with 1-bit
graphics. When dealing with the full 4-bit graphics, I
realised that it was much more sophisticated than I first
thought.

Basically, it uses two different sets of headers. The first
says what type of compression each tile uses: none at all,
removing all the zeroes, removing the zeroes plus an XOR
process to compress the bytes even further, or the tile is
nothing but zeroes. For the compressed tiles, a second
header details which bytes in the tile are zero, and which
ones have something other than zero.

Once you (or a program) go through each 8x8 tile and decide
which type of compression is best for each of them, it's
actually a very efficient system. I didn't bother
calculating how much space was saved by doing this, but
clearly it was quite a bit. My only question is... why do it
at all?! The game comes on a 4Mbit cartridge which appears
to have plenty of space for all the necessary graphics.
Furthermore, not all of the graphics in the game are
compressed (thankfully), so the need for compression seems
even more odd.

Anyway, the main reason I enjoy hacking is not simply to
translate yet another game, but to learn something, and
cracking the compression routine used in this game was a
fantastic experience that I'm sure will come in handy in
future. I'm quite proud of myself for figuring it out.

Big thanks go out to FlashPV for providing a colourful title
screen: it's very much in keeping with the style of the
original, and I certainly couldn't be bothered to do it
myself, so the inclusion is very much appreciated.

The only thing that I HOPE is done correctly, but I haven't
tested, is the two-player game, because I don't know of a
way to emulate the Game Gear's two-player functionality. If
anyone ever manages to do it, let me know! Other than that,
enjoy the game!

Tools I used for this translation:
MEKA (the best Master System emulator for debugging)
Bizhawk (for certain debugging tasks)
HxD (general hex editing)
Tile Molester (graphics)
WindHex32 EX (typing in text)
GIMP (comparing title screen for insertion)

Psyklax
http://s346165667.websitehome.co.uk/psyktrans/
