Segagaga has Finally Been Translated into English — Here's How to Play It (and How it was Achieved!)

The headline you see above is not some form of freaky clickbait, nor is it a two-month-early April Fool’s prank. It is, however, signalling one of the biggest pieces of Sega Dreamcast news that we will probably ever report here on this website. Some thought it would never happen, but the day has finally arrived: Segagaga is now playable in English, thanks to the incredible work of a team of dedicated fans led by Exxistance. If you just want to know how to play the translation, skip to the end of this article, where you will find a link to a download and instructions on how to apply the patch to your existing disc image of Segagaga. But we felt it was important to document what made this holy-grail translation possible — and to ensure that those responsible receive the recognition they deserve. So read on if you want to learn more!

If you’ve spent more than ten minutes in Dreamcast fan circles, you’ll undoubtedly be aware of Segagaga, a 2001 Japan-exclusive RPG that tasks players with running Sega as it tries to regain market share against its main competitor, DOGMA (Sony, basically). Developed by Hitmaker and published by Sega, the game is well known for its wacky humour (much of it at Sega’s own expense) as well as its abundance of references to the company’s past IPs. Because of this, Segagaga has retained an almost mythical quality among Western Dreamcast fans, and from the moment it became clear the game wouldn’t be released outside of Japan, it has without a doubt been the most anticipated English translation of any game in the console’s library.

But as I'm sure you're aware, Segagaga's translation journey has been wrought with roadblocks. Many projects have started up over the years, only to inevitably fizzle out. But as we previously mentioned at the top of our interview with Segagaga’s creator, Tez Okano, the reason for the game’s multiple-decade stint in translation hell wasn’t due to a shortage of skilled translators capable of handling its distinctly Japanese humour, but rather a series of daunting technical hurdles.

The primary challenge stemmed from Segagaga's use of the Dreamcast’s BIOS font, as editing it was thought to be impossible for the longest time. What's more, the game only supported Shift-JIS encoding for text, a common two-byte format for Japanese language that was widely used in video games of the era (and still is today, though typically alongside ASCII or UTF support). Without changing the game to retrieve narrower Latin alphabet characters from the BIOS instead, the original Shift-JIS would leave the in-game text looking horrible, and too big to fit in numerous places.

Demonstration of Shift-JIS encoding, provided by Derek Pascarella.

By contrast, many other Japanese Dreamcast titles rely on their own internal font sheets, unique to each game, meaning that savvy hackers can go in and swap a Japanese font sheet for an English one, adjusting spacing between characters, along with other necessary tweaks. Because of this, these games were able to see successful translations much sooner, and form the majority of past fan translations we've seen for the console over the years. 

After two decades of unsuccessful attempts at translating Segagaga, it was time to bring in the big guns. Cracking a technical nut this tough required a meeting of some of the most talented minds the Dreamcast scene has to offer, including megavolt85, mr.nobody, VincentNL, Derek Pascarella, and madsheep. If it weren’t for them, I can only imagine how much longer it would have taken for us to see this translation become a reality… perhaps another decade?

In steps megavolt85, hacker extraordinaire, who was one of two previously responsible for making it possible for Atomiswave games to be ported to Dreamcast. On megavolt's input, Derek Pascarella explains:

"megavolt85 modified Segagaga to interpret ASCII, the single-byte encoding commonly used for the Latin alphabet. Not only that, but he modified the game to read from the ASCII section of the BIOS font, rather than the Shift-JIS section."

The next step was to make it so that ASCII from the BIOS could be edited. This was where Derek worked his magic, and shares how he made it happen:

"Segagaga speaks directly to the Dreamcast’s BIOS when it comes time to render text on screen. After megavolt85 did all of the assembly hacking to force the game to interpret ASCII-encoded text and then pull from the ASCII section of the BIOS font (rather than Shift-JIS), I started poking around a bit to see how it all worked. What I discovered is that the game actually copies the entirety of the BIOS font into RAM pretty near the location where the game executable ends! So, I disabled the assembly code that performed this copy, then also disabled the code that null’d out that portion of RAM before doing the copy. I then appended the BIOS font to the end of the game executable, and just like that, the font data was precisely where the game expected it to be, and it could be modified! This came in handy a number of times as font glyphs needed tweaking for optimal appearance."

See how much better ASCII looks in comparison:

Demonstration of ASCII encoding, provided by Derek Pascarella.

It appeared that the first-documented Segagaga translation patch project —which began in 2006— did manage to make progress in this regard, but unfortunately wouldn't see an update past 2013. While nothing technical from that previous project would make it into this one, project lead and texture artist Exxistance reveals that he was still able to utilise a wealth of other archived community resources.

"What was helpful [...] were the various artefacts people left on the internet, including the FAQs on GameFAQs that were created back in the mid-00s. Those were especially useful in helping me get my bearings as I initially worked through the game. Other helpful resources included The1Ross’ Open Source Translation Project, as well as various YouTube videos like Korone’s full playthrough of the game."

It was actually on a Dreamcast-Talk forum thread initially created to share The1Ross' project, where Exxistance would post his English-translated edits of Segagaga's textures. From there, mr.nobody —who previously worked on the English fan translation of Dreamcast horror title Seven Mansions— would get in contact with Exxistance.

"mr.nobody was the first person to reach out and help with textures, and he really became the glue that brought all the project players together. When I started, I was mostly just posting texture updates into the void on Dreamcast-Talk. But once mr.nobody reached out to help with textures, the project began to snowball. At first, we coordinated texture work through Google Sheets, but then he created a Discord server that brought the whole team together. One thing I want to highlight is that mr.nobody handled all of the enemy textures, and he brought a wonderful attention to detail to everything he did. For example, the enemy “Influenza” has a “face” drawn on it that is the Japanese onomatopoeia for "coughing," mr.nobody cleverly updated the face to read “flu” in English while still looking like a face. Just brilliant! Additionally, mr.nobody helped with the editing of the videos, like masking off Japanese text and such."

Left: original art for "Influenza".
Right: mr.nobody's excellent "flu" face edit.

VincentNL, known around these parts for his stellar work on the Rent-A-Hero No.1 English fan translation, would provide some vital input to make Exxistance and mr.nobody's texture work... work.

"VincentNL was vital in building the texture container extractors and repackers. Without his work on those tools, all of the texture work would have just been sitting there, waiting for someone to come along and make it usable. His texture tool, “SGGGE,” made replacing a texture with a simple edited .png an absolute breeze."

VincentNL was also the reason you'll be able to play Segagaga's infamous shoot 'em up section with English subtitles. Duralumin, who worked on patches for Nakoruru and Capcom Vs SNK 2, was the one who provided the English translation for this section. This was an important addition to the patch, since the section features an exchange between two major characters that delivers some key backstory. Derek offered some technical insight into VincentNL’s contribution to Segagaga’s shmup section:

“This hack is incredibly clever. Segagaga, like a wealth of other Dreamcast games, leaves behind debug code, including a debug font. This means there are assembly functions at the ready that hackers can call on to render text on screen however and whenever they'd like. VincentNL wrote a tool that allowed the team to enter subtitle text and its timing, and then automatically inject code to display said subtitle text at the right time, all the while leveraging that in-game debugger text rendering routine.”

madsheep, who developed one of the earliest tools to make building SD cards for GDEMU a doddle, was heavily involved in the technical side of the project. Exxistance had the following to say about madsheep’s involvement: 

"madsheep built multiple tools, including the primary main binary translation tool with a nice GUI. This made updating text in the main binary as simple as finding the text, changing it, and clicking “Save,” while the tool automatically relocated the text to the appropriate new area in the main binary and updated pointers as needed. It was actually madsheep’s “MES Tool” that pushed me to jump in and work on the text, since I had already done a fair amount of texture work and wanted to tackle something different. On top of that, madsheep helped solve many smaller issues on the project, including a problem we had with the spacing of magic spell costs."

Once some of the toughest technical hurdles were stomped out, Exxistance and his team could finally focus on translating the game into English. A big name he wanted to shout out here was Sixfortyfive, who handled text editing and shared a lot of in-depth knowledge about the game.

"Sixfortyfive reached out to me on Twitter and mentioned that he had been part of one of the earlier translation efforts, and he volunteered to help with testing. It quickly became obvious, though, that his knowledge of SGGG is vast — he likely understands how the SIM elements of the game work better than any other English-language resource I’ve encountered. Because of that, he also contributed heavily to the text editing, providing a lot of excellent recommendations that helped us further polish the translation."

That’s not to say there weren’t still challenges to overcome on both the translation and technical side. For Exxistance, a few came to mind:

"For me, there were a few challenging areas. First was the Negotiation Q&A portion, where you’re supposed to choose the answer that you think the enemy that you’re negotiating with would say, and many of the questions and answers are humorous and/or esoteric. So translating these in a way that didn’t butcher their original intent but also fit within the physical character limits we had was a tight rope to walk. Plus, there’s over 1,000 combinations of these, so from a sheer time perspective, I think it took me a month and a half to work through them. 

The Random Name Generator was tough to translate because the original combines traditional Japanese surnames with places or things. Translating them into English was easy enough, but then there wasn’t enough physical space for the final combinations (which can only have 17 characters). So these had to be truncated in a way that made sense but also kept a bit of the ridiculousness of the combinations. 

Another challenging aspect was often researching 20-30 year old gaming references and coordinating with the translation reviewers to ensure we got them right. Especially in the archives, there’s a lot of commentary from what I presume is Okano, with many references that predate my jump-in point in gaming. So ensuring that we thoroughly researched a particular reference and translated it correctly was big."

Something important that should be clarified before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took over. They spent many months carefully crafting the translation you see in the final release, including thoroughly researching and pinning down the game’s many references. For more of an in-depth explanation on this from Exxistance, click here.

If you’ve made it this far, the wait is almost over — you’re just about ready to download the English translation patch for Segagaga. The game has built up a legendary reputation among English-speaking fans over the years. Exxistance shares his idea of what you can expect:

"I suspect that many people may think SGGG is like your traditional 20-30 hour JRPG with light simulation elements. It’s really a mish-mash of things, more akin to a visual novel/RPG/simulator, and I actually think that’s what makes it hold up very well today. The game isn’t overly long and it’s meant to be played multiple times. The game also sprinkles mini-games throughout so that you’re never just doing the same thing the whole time. And it included forward-thinking elements like skipping random battles, a feature I don’t think we really saw in many games until the past decade. 

I think people can expect a very humorous, light-hearted RPG that shines as a love letter to SEGA, otaku culture, and the game development profession."

So, the time has finally come to play the English translation of Segagaga! Here's what you need to do:

1. Go to the translation project’s GitHub page and download the patch.
2. Follow the relevant patching instructions in the ReadMe to patch your existing Segagaga disc image (.GDI or .CDI).
3. Once complete, you can load your patched .GDI onto a Dreamcast ODE (such as GDEMU, MODE, etc.) or play it on an emulator. If you patched a .CDI, you can burn it to a CD‑R and pop it into your Dreamcast. If you’re unsure how to burn Dreamcast games, there are plenty of step‑by‑step tutorials on YouTube that will walk you through the process.

We hope you enjoy finally getting to experience one of the Sega Dreamcast’s most legendary Japanese games in English! Be sure to heap endless praise onto the amazing peeps who made it happen, and once you’ve finished playing it, check out Tez Okano’s awesome new game, THE GIRL FROM GUNMA Kai, too.

Watch this awesome trailer from our pals at Sega Saturn, SHIRO! for +100 hype!