Kaitou Saint Tail for the Sega Game Gear English Language Translation Patch Readme



Introduction:

	Japanese Developer:		Minato Giken
	Japanese Publisher:		Sega
	Japanese Release:		March 29, 1996
	English Patch Production:	Matt's Messy Room



Kaitou Saint Tail Patch History:

	V1.00:  Initial Matt's Messy Room Release:	August, 16, 2021



Kaitou Saint Tail Production Credits:

	Project Coordination:				Filler
	Hacking/Bug Fixing:				Taskforce
	Tools: 						Taskforce, Filler
	Assembly: 					Taskforce
	Initial Work/Translation:			Filler
	Story Writing:					Taskforce, Filler
	Graphics 					Taskforce
	Beta Testing					Recca, Filler

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Contents

Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.ips
Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.bps
Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.ups
Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.xdelta
Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.txt

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Licensing

This patch contains NO portion of the original game. It is
to be distributed as a patch, in an archive with this readme
and any other materials originally provided in the archive.

This patch is NOT to be distributed with the original ROM
image, either pre-patched, or separately. The contents of
this patch are NOT TO BE SOLD in any way, including as a
ROM image applied to the original ROM, or as a physical
cartridge using the patch applied to the original ROM image.

As the work contained in this patch is derivative, our
rights regarding it are limited. However, we're releasing
materials related to the translation project ONLY,
including the English language script, under CC BY-NC
(Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial,
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/).

For additional materials and information please see the
author's project pages: http://projects.mattsmessyroom.com/

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OVERVIEW:

Kaitou Saint Tail is based on the anime of the same name.
A problem is brought to Seira Mimori's attention.  Through
a series of events explained in the game, fake gems have
been sold as real gems. Meimi Haneoka as Saint Tail is 
tasked with replacing the fake gems with the real gems.

You walk around on a map avoiding guards and collecting
magic cards to get into people's mansions to swap jewels.
Magic cards let you do things like temporarily put guards
to sleep and jump over hedges as well as other things at
random.  Once you've reached a mansion, you play a series
of minigames as a way to swap gems.  Each minigame allows
you to swap 1 gem.  Once you've swapped all 5 you then
have one final minigame to make your escape from
Daiki Asuka aka Asuka Jr. who is, as usual, hot
on your heels.

The game also features a 1p and 2p minigame mode were
you can skip the story and just select whatever minigame
you want to play.

The 2p minigame mode will not activate without a game
gear to game gear link cable linking two game gears
together.

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Patching:

Contained within this archive is an IPS (international patching system) file or a patch file in
another format for the end user's convenience that when used in conjunction with a ROM file will
make the game playable in English.

Do note, as I touched on above, that this patch is a result of countless hours of love and labor.
Hence, they are not meant to be sold at any price under any circumstance, be it in digital form or
burnt into a donor cart's ROM chip.

To patch the ROM file, one needs to procure a patcher for their preferred format, a widely available
class of programs, many of which can be found at http://www.romhacking.net/ for one source.  

At some point, ROM sites may upload pre-patched ROMs of our Kaitou Saint Tail translation. Obviously,
Matt's Messy Room cannot endorse playing these versions.  Neither will we support resolution of any
associated problems. Moreover, pre-patched ROMs may float around the web for years.  Only by
downloading patches containing just our original work from Matt's Messy Room's web site may
gamers obtain revisions to these patches - if any - and take advantage of possible bug-fixes
and corrections.

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Information pertaining to the Kaitou Saint Tail ROM:


Size before patching: 512 KB (524,288 bytes)

Size after patching: 528 KB (540,672 bytes)


   File: Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.gg
   Name: Kaitou Saint Tail
   Company: Sega
   Header: None
   Mapper: Sega
   Type: Normal
   ROM: 512 KB
   Country: Japan
   Video: NTSC
   Revision: 1.0
   CRC32: 937FD52B
   CRC64: E88B7544B3081A6F
   SHA256: 533612D3D0F7D66CEF91681D5A8E4B2FEB325F97B85C547CFB4339AA9F80EA30
   SHA1: 3E4E7EC4A4CE5D48BAED7D583EDE8BB9F92A44A6
   BLAKE2sp: 8D888DF659DF93F73DF62CAAED0AC771799415AB974F9A0F8E51AF23AC79F9F3
   

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Notes:

1. Not all ROMs will necessarily be patch-able with our file.


Some emulators support a feature called soft patching, which keeps the ROM file intact, merging the
patch data only during run time. To make use of it, make sure both the ROM file and the IPS are in
the same directory as your emulator of choice and have the same name, but not the same extension.
The patch should be an .IPS patch.  Do note that this is case-sensitive.  

i. e.:  Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.gg and Kaitou Saint Tail V1.00.ips will trigger soft patching at
the emulator's run time.  (Or sometimes via a built in menu option.)



Emulator Compatibility:

This patched game works in most emulators.  Real hardware has not
been tested.  We cannot guarantee compatibility with all emulators,
however so far it has worked on all emulators we have tried it on.
Our recommendation is Emulicious, Kega Fusion or retroarch. Again,
the game has not been tested on real hardware at this time.



Taskforce's musings:

Thank you Filler for giving me the script for this game 
and asking me if I would like to take a crack at it.  
Sorry that it took me so long to get to it.  Life got 
in the way for a while there.  I knew it would take hours
of distraction free stretches to work on this and I just
didn't have that when I first asked if you'd like me to 
take a crack at it.  That was why I made you keep my
involvement under wraps for so long and told you if
someone else wanted to do it, I would be OK with that.

Personally, I must admit, some of it was motivation as
well.  I wasn't sure I'd pull it off with compression
involved, but here we are just a few weeks later and
I actually pulled it off.  Can't say I would accomplish
it with another game.  Especially on another non-z80 based
system. Game Gear (and other z80 games) have the best
emulator with the best debugging/disassembly tools I've
found. That being Emulicious and I must give a BIG thanks
to those involved in that project.  It made finding the 
routines I needed to alter and/or reverse engineer easy.

It has been 20+ years since I solely handled the hacking
and most of the tool development to complete a game. 
I didn't create all the tools as Filler created the
dumper and dumped the games script before I became
involved.  It was nice getting back into the swing 
of hacking. 

Even better is that this is also the first game
I successfully pulled off graphics decompression
and recompression.  As well as a handful of other
assembly hacks.  Some of them might not be as
elegant as others would have come up with, but they
have all worked as far as I've found and that is what
matters in the end to me at least.  Also, man Sega
this was some pretty shoddy programming in places.
Guess they have the same philosophy I do.  As long 
as it looks like a Ferrari, nobody is going to care
that there is a Yugo motor powering it if you don't
open the hood. :D




Filler's musings:

This project was started on May 28th, 2018, prior,
I believe, to my initiative to dump and translate all
scripts for the Game Gear. I have a soft spot for anime
based games, and at the time this one must have caught
my eye.

I deciphered the game's custom text encoding, but I
noticed that the script's formatting would make dumping
it in my normal manner messier than I was comfortable
with. I decided that I'd write a custom script dumper
for the first time ever.

On June 1st, 2018 I coded a general script dumper in
PHP and configured it for Saint Tail's text script.
Incidentally, this proved to be helpful on more
projects than this one. I've added features to it over
the past several years, and it's helped me dump over 20
game scripts and counting.

By August 30th, 2018 I'd translated all dumped text
and was ready to find someone to work on hacking the
English script back into the ROM. I don't remember the
details, but I believe I passed it on to Supper who was
working with me on Magic Knight Rayearth, also for the
Game Gear, at the time.

Fast forward to December 31, 2020. Supper, the Majin-
Zenki, and Cccmar have released a slew of English
language translation patches for the Game Gear and
Famicom, kick started by my script dumps. These include
but are not limited to; Kishin Douji Zenki (GG), Sanma
no Mei Tantei (FC), Idol Hakkenden (FC), Moldorian: The
Sisters of Light and Darkness (GG), Madou Monogatari
II: Arle 16-Sai (GG), etc... Supper and I also released
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S (GG) and Madou Monogatari
A: DokiDoki Bake~shon (GG) together. Suffice to say,
Saint Tail had fallen through the cracks.

I posted a help wanted ad on Romhacking.net that never
elicited a response. However, on February 5th, 2021
frequent Dynamic Designs collaborator Taskforce offered
to look at any Game Gear games I'd translated scripts
for, so I offered up Saint Tail.

I'm really proud of Taskforce for the work he put in to
this project. He appears to have done some of his very
first significant console game assembly hacking and the
results have been great. The major breakthrough appears
to have been reverse engineering the game's graphics
compression routine.

Thanks also to Dynamic Designs collaborator Recca for
helping us play-test this game.

In my opinion this is a relatively minor release for
the Game Gear. Aside from the anime license and fairly
copious digitized voice samples nothing much
distinguishes this from a number of other mini-game
collection style games on the system. However, for
whatever reason, this game was the incentive for diving
deeper into the technical aspects of translation hacking
not only for myself, but for Taskforce as well. I really
enjoyed working on this project because of that, and I
hope that few Saint Tail fans out there get a kick out
of playing this game in English for the first time.

Dedicated and in Memory of Near.

Readme 2021 Matt's Messy Room
