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 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 the technical feats which 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.

Lost Atomiswave fighter KenJu ported to Dreamcast

The number of Atomiswave games ported to the Dreamcast continues to grow, and one of the latest offerings from developer megavolt85 over at Dreamcast-Talk is one we thought deserved a bit of attention. 

KenJu is a 3D fighting game from DreamFactory which was intended for release on Sammy's arcade system, but was apparently cancelled before it could be launched into brick and mortar arcades. The KenJu story has a happy ending though, as you can now get a glimpse at this fairly enigmatic polygonal scrapper either on actual Dreamcast hardware or via emulation! Here's a video of some (ham-fisted) gameplay by yours truly:

There's not a great deal known about KenJu, other than it was in development by DreamFactory (of Tobal No. 1 fame), who for unknown reasons decided not to release the game and consign it to the dustbin of history. Until now, that is. As far as I can ascertain, KenJu was due to hit arcades in 2005 before it mysteriously vanished without trace. KenJu did resurface in 2016 when a collector of Atomiswave boards released footage of it running, and then it slipped back into obscurity once more. The game has a fairly appealing visual style, with psuedo cel-shaded polygonal characters fighting in some nice looking 3D arenas.

The general consensus is that KenJu looks a little like Project Justice: Rival Schools 2, but for me that's pretty much where the similarities end. It has some interesting characters and plays pretty well, but it seems to be missing that certain something...which may hint at the reasons for why it was quietly canned. That said, it's quite good fun and the fact that the Dreamcast is able to recreate the game so flawlessly opens up the door for even more ambitious Atomiswave games such as Premier Eleven. Who thought we'd ever see the day the Dreamcast got a decent footy (soccer) game?!

It's worth noting that as with the other Atomiswave to Dreamcast ports released so far, KenJu is only available as a GDI file, so you'll need some additional hardware to play it on an actual Dreamcast. Personally, I had no joy getting the game to run under either DreamShell or RetroDream using both a Compact Flash modded system or an SD Card reader via the Dreamcast's serial port. It did however run using a GDEMU, so you may want to give that method a go if you're determined to play KenJu on original (well, original modded) hardware. That minor hiccup aside, KenJu seems to be perfectly playable and also mostly complete.

If you'd like to download the game for yourself, visit the Dreamcast-Talk forum thread here. Huge thanks once again to megavolt85 and other forum members who not only continue to expand the Dreamcast collection, but are also preserving some of the Atomiswave's most intriguing and lesser known titles.

Have you played KenJu on your Dreamcast or on an emulator? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Treamcast DreamPhoto DC Photo Hunter is now playable with a standard Dreamcast controller

I know you clicked on this article because you're dying to know what the hell that title means. But first, a confession. This is not a 'new' news story. It's fairly old news - especially for those who spend their time poking around the more obscure corners of the Dreamcast online community. But it's something I saw several months ago while absent-mindedly wandering the lesser-travelled backroads of the information super-highway, and subsequently forgot to write a post about. So now, months later, I'm making amends for that criminal oversight.

What am I blathering about? It's convoluted, but bear with me and we'll get there. Back in 2015 I happened across a rather odd peripheral on eBay and so - naturally - I bought it. Said peripheral was the Treamcast DreamPhoto mouse (pictured above). Treamcast in itself is quite an obscure little device, and for those not in the know, it's basically a semi-portable clone Dreamcast that comes with a 5" TFT screen attached and its own carry case (the image below shows two units loaned to us by Quang of Asobitech at Play Expo Blackpool 2018). They are very cool little units and quite rare these days, and will set you back a healthy chunk of change if you want to own one in present year. Still with me?

The two colour variants of the Treamcast

Relatively little is really known about the Treamcast, other than it originates from China, but what we do know is that the outfit which manufactured the system also released - in very limited quantities - bespoke peripherals and even software designed specifically for the Treamcast. One such peripheral was the aforementioned DreamPhoto mouse, which we investigated here at the Junkyard back when I originally bought one in 2015. The thing is, even though it could operate as a standard Dreamcast mouse and was compatible with official (or rather, genuine) Dreamcast consoles and software, the 'game' that the DreamPhoto mouse was intended to be used with was something of an enduring mystery.

"Dring you play the DC Photo Hunter..."

As detailed in our original DreamPhoto mouse article, the broken English on the sides of the box made reference to something called DC Photo Hunter, but searching online back then turned up practically nothing. Since 2015, more information has surfaced online as to what DC Photo Hunter actually is, and earlier in 2020 the software also miraculously turned up. But not just as the original DC Photo Hunter. No, that would be too simple for this tale. What actually turned up was DC Photo Hunter as a downloadable .CDI, but with the added bonus that it had been reverse engineered and compatibility with standard Dreamcast controllers added.

So in summary, a super obscure piece of unofficial software, designed for use with an unofficial, bootleg mouse designed for use with an unofficial bootleg system, has been released...but with a hack added to allow you to play it with an official Dreamcast controller...which is - as far as I can tell - not a feature that the original, unhacked version of DC Photo Hunter shipped with. Got it?

Let's play some Atomiswave games on Dreamcast!

As discussed in a recent article here at The Dreamcast Junkyard, Dreamcast-Talk forum members megavolt85 and yzb have been porting Atomiswave games to the Dreamcast. While many people reading this will no doubt get a lot of joy from playing these esoteric titles on an emulator - as did I initially - we thought we should get these titles running on an actual Dreamcast and see how they play with a standard HKT-7700 gripped in our mitts. So that's what we did!

Below is the fruit of our labour, which in reality was no more difficult than grabbing the various GDI files for games such as Dolphin Blue, Maximum Speed, King of Fighters XI, Samurai Shodown VI, Faster than Speed and Metal Slug 6, and dropping them onto the Compact Flash card which slots nicely into the side of the Compact Flash modded Dreamcast. Booting through DreamShell allows you to navigate to the files on the storage and simply boot them as you would any other game. I'm pretty sure this would work with any other type of solid state storage device you may have in your Dreamcast too, so let us know in the comments if it works with things like MODE or GDEmu. If you have any specific questions though, be sure to head to the FAQ on Dreamcast-Talk. Enough waffle, enjoy the video below!

Have you tried any of these games? If so, what are you thoughts? And are there any hidden gems on the Atomiswave crying out to be ported to the Dreamcast? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to head to Dreamcast-Talk, join the forum and thank megavolt85 and yzb for their stirling work.