The fan translation extravaganza: Tales of Rebirth, Team Innocent and 6 more games you can now play in English
Including a re-translation of SNES classic Illusion of Gaia and a Saturn Bomberman. Plus, the MiSTer's getting a 3DO core and a new Taki Udon FPGA console.

What is UP gamers. After a much-needed break, I'm back with what may accidentally be the single beefiest issue of Read Only Memo yet. Oops!! Well, I wanted to start the year off with a bang, and hopefully this will do it. As you can glean from the title, it's a themed issue particularly focused on my favorite corner of our lil' hobby: fan translations.
A frankly wackadoodle number of new fan patches dropped right at the end of the year or in the first week of January, so I decided to take some time to chat with the folks behind two of the biggest ones. And the party doesn't stop there: I've compiled every other new translation, too. The second the thought "what should I play?" crosses your mind, refer back to this issue, because some treasure awaits.
One extremely exciting development I'm not diving into this issue is BlurBusters' work on a new CRT simulation shader, which looks like it could be a genuine revolution in how high refresh displays recreate the motion clarity of old CRTs. It's going to take some time to do this topic justice, but I'll definitely be featuring it in a future issue — perhaps when it's been directly implemented into an emulator.

Meanwhile, the most bonkers retro gaming development over the last month has to be the GTA3 port to the Sega Dreamcast, which is more exciting for real hardware than for emulation. But what a feat!
If this is your first issue of ROM after signing up for my recent Front Mission giveaway, I hope you enjoy and stick around — and if you're a returning reader, thanks for hanging out with me for another year and for spreading the word about this little newsletter. Or not so little; I'm going to cut the preamble short and get right into it, because we've got a lot of games to talk about this week.
The Big Two
Tales of Rebirth begins the cycle anew

A classic Tales of... adventure from Bandai Namco has just been translated and released in English to the delight of JRPG lovers... Tales of Graces f Remastered! Wait, no, not Tales of Graces f Remastered, though it's great to see Bandai Namco digging into the back catalog for official releases. We're kicking off this issue's fan translation celebration with Tales of Rebirth, a 2004 entry in the longrunning series that, unlike Graces, has never officially been available in English.
Rebirth was released in Japan one year after Tales of Symphonia, and just six months after Symphonia's English release, which was the first game to really make waves in the United States. As a GameCube fanboy at the time I was pumped about Symphonia, but didn't really become a Tales diehard at the time — for others, though, it was a real letdown to see the very next game in the series skipped over for localization.
"Back when I was 12-ish, I played the GC version of Symphonia and learned that it had a PS2 port with extra content, so I asked my mom to get the PS2 version for me," said SymphoniaLauren, lead translator of the unofficial Rebirth translation. "I then learned that the PS2 was region locked so I convinced my mother to import a Japanese PS2. There were a few other Tales games in the lot and Rebirth was one of them. I remember thinking the cover was a little lame looking but I decided to give it a try and the intro FMV had me hooked. I played with Lanyn’s guide because I didn’t know Japanese at the time. I lurked the old Tales forums around this time too and I remember some people wondering if we would get the PSP port but that never happened. But I just kinda fell in love with the game."
Fan speculation is that Bandai Namco looked at Symphonia's success — and the not-so-stellar sales of some of the prior 2D Tales games in the West — and decided to only localize the series' 3D games going forward, which meant skipping over quite a few. Translation group Life Bottle Productions has spent the last four years reversing that trend. SymphoniaLauren, alongside a long list of other contributors, released Tales of Rebirth's translation patch into beta on December 16th, following their work on Tales of Destiny: Director's Cut and Tales of Innocence R.
Given just how many Tales games there are, I asked SymphoniaLauren why folks who don't gobble up every JRPG in sight should pay attention to this one. The answer is not just how it plays, but the story that was touching on the same territory as 2024's acclaimed Metaphor: ReFantazio a whole 20 years before:
"The main theme of the story is racism; or to be more specific, overcoming racial prejudices and experiencing a spiritual rebirth. As the story unfolds, the cast has to confront racism both within society and prejudices they hold within themselves. Perhaps it'll make certain people uncomfortable, but I feel like it's a topic that is as relevant in 2025 as it was in 2004. The game features gorgeous character designs by the late Inomata-sensei, and the hand drawn 2D graphics are a sight to behold.
Tales of Rebirth shares many familiar themes and core mechanics with the rest of the Tales series, but it approaches them in ways unique to the series. The battle system utilizes a three line system akin to Fatal Fury. Artes use a regenerating resource mechanic called Force Gauges (FG), and there is a Rush Gauge (RG) that influences how much damage is taken or received. These tie into what is perhaps TOR's most unique feature: there are no healing spells. Instead, characters regenerate HP when executing an arte with full FG, with their current RG determining the amount of HP regenerated. While somewhat unintuitive to those more familiar with other games in the series, it offers a lot more leeway in party formation and encourages proper management of resources and positioning. Button mashing will not get you far in Rebirth, but skillful play is rewarded handsomely."
Life Bottle's patch for Rebirth extends beyond just translation; it includes new subtitles in battle and in FMVs, and adds features from 2008 PSP version of the game, including two cutscenes and some healing items being more widely available in the early game. For the upcoming 1.0 release they also fixed a bug from the original game that can kill save files.
"There's one change that stands out above all the others, and it's the changes we made for the typing puzzles," said SymphoniaLauren. "This game uses a custom scripting system for its skits and story files, which compiles to its own version of assembly (commonly called bytecode) which the game interprets. In this bytecode we can find all code related to any game scene, which includes the typing puzzles. Our programmer Ethanol managed to reverse the bytecode format and create an assembler and disassembler for it, which we used to edit the code for the typing puzzles. We also had to disassemble some of the skits where the text didn't fit in the space provided so that we could split the lines. I actually did those myself.
The reversing of the custom assembly made it possible to better analyze the files and even check them for bugs. It's even possible to create our own custom events."
You can hear Lauren and other members of the Life Bottle team speak at length about the project in this livestream, while also getting a sense of how Rebirth plays:
When talking with translators I love focusing in on some specific examples of challenging or creative localization choices, and that was particularly on my mind with Tales of Rebirth. The series will always be closely linked to fan translations in my mind thanks to one of the first fan patches I ever played: DeJap's 2001 translation of Tales of Phantasia. It included an infamous line that one of the characters "fucks like a tiger" — apparently I'm not the only person who had that bit seared in their brain, as Clyde Mandelin wrote a whole article about it.
In the early 2000s it was more common for localizations, both from fans and from companies like Working Designs, to deviate from the original script and add in jokes and pop culture references. I'll admit that DeJap's translation cracked me up when I played it as a teenager. I wasn't thinking about authenticity; I just enjoyed the raunch. But standards have changed for the better, with fans like SymphoniaLauren paying a lot of attention to making translations both clear and faithful:
"One skit I remember really sticking out to me was the one where Mao is speaking ungrammatically… In the original Japanese he’s using 全然 outside of a negative construction, and Hilda and Eugene chastise him for not speaking properly with Eugene offering correct ways to use 全然. I had to think of a similarly prescriptivist example in English. That definitely was one of those moments where you have to take into consideration what the intent behind the content is and not translate literally.
One thing I was concerned about was that Rebirth refers to both Huma and Gajuma as ヒト – when translated into English, you get Human, Man, Homo Sapien... (Note the Katakana, this term is different from 人 meaning 'person'). A core theme of Rebirth is that both the races are Human... But one of the races has been rather consistently Romanized as 'Huma.' I was worried that there would be confusion over this, but to my surprise outside of a few people wondering if an early game skit contained a typo there weren't actually any problems with comprehension. I remember watching some stream VoDs and seeing people react like 'Oh, so both Gajuma and Huma are considered Human beings? So they're the same?' which in the context of the game's themes was amusing to me."
The Rebirth translation almost didn't make it out before the end of the year, with a number of volunteer testers in the community Discord server running into issues. SymphoniaLauren had to evacuate home when Hurricane Helene made landfall in September and had her PC's power supply crap out shortly after. "We joke that the game is cursed because terrible things tend to befall those who work on the English patch," she said. But it made it out into the world, and a 1.0 release will follow sometime soon.
Then Life Bottle will be on to its next project: PSP sequel Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X.
2. Team Innocent: The Point of No Return fights its way to English after 30 years

One of the treats of writing this newsletter is getting to dive into games I know nothing about. In this case, it's both a game and the system it was a launch title for: the NEC PC-FX, mid-90s successor to the PC Engine, a console that I know, uh, existed? But here we've got a translation patch for 1.6% of the entire PC-FX library (of 62 games)!
Why were there so few? Well, as Team Innocent: The Point of No Return translation team member Elmer puts it, the PC-FX just wasn't built for the looming shift to 3D:
"The PC-FX is very much a next-generation PC Engine, with twice the number of sprites, four times the amount of graphics memory (on the VDC chips), and then an extra graphics chip with extra memory to add yet more, and more-colorful background layers, including rotation like the SNES. On top of that there's yet-another graphics chips that allows for full-screen (or partial screen) video playback. Those graphics capabilities are all tied together with a delightful 32-bit processor and lots of memory. It is a lovely system for the anticipated multimedia blitz that was going to be the focus of both the fifth-generation of consoles, and also of the personal computers of that time (see Windows 95).
Unfortunately Sony came along with the Playstation and pushed the console industry into the 3D era about 5 years too early (for good quality results), Sega very hastily retooled their fifth-generation hardware by throwing in a mishmash of extra chips, and poor NEC just couldn't compete in the market with their 3D hardware still being under development and not ready (their 3D chip eventually saw the light-of-day on the PC-FXGA development boards)."
Team Innocent, as one of the system's launch titles, exemplifies the console's focus on sprites and video: you can see big, expressive 2D animation and full-motion video sequences in the trailer for the English patch, which was released in beta on December 23rd for the game and console's 30th anniversary.
The effort to translate the game started nearly 20 years ago, with ROM regular EsperKnight and translator Filler kicking off an English patch. Their work eventually stalled, but it didn't go to waste. Two years ago, Filler and his co-host Benjamin Yoder started the PC-FX Fan Club podcast to celebrate and explore the console, and from that sprang a Discord community full of people interested in seeing more of the console's games playable in English. Filler asked hacker Derek Pascarella (Birdcage of Horror, Cool Cool Toon, and many more) to lend a hand as project lead.
"Honestly, at the time I wasn't feeling overly optimistic about it ever becoming a reality. I should've had faith, though!" he told me. "Mednafen is used as an emulator/debugger, and custom tools were written (or modified) for text extraction/injection. New assembly code was written by Elmer to implement the bi-width font (similar to variable-width, except with only two possible font tile spacing options), as well as to add ASCII support to the text rendering routines that originally didn't support it. For the few pieces of hacking I did personally, I used Ghidra for disassembly (and to write my new assembly), as well as wrote custom tools to perform some of the additional text injection."
Elmer, who helped contribute to the unfinished patch years ago, chimed in with some more PC-FX history that dovetails nicely with the challenges of hacking and emulating the console:
"Mednafen is the only modern program that does a good job of emulating the PC-FX, although the official release isn't perfect, as we found out recently when we had T.I. crashing because Mednafen wasn't dealing with CD delays accurately (that's been fixed in the version that folks use for hacking). PC Engine games are all written in assembly language, and they're often made more difficult to hack because of the compression and other tricks that were needed to make the original games work in the limited amount of memory that was available.
The PC-FX, and other fifth-generation consoles, were the first generation of console games that was primarily coded in C, so you're dealing with inefficient compiled code (compilers weren't very good in the early 1990s), and a game architecture that was bound by what you could get the compiler to actually build. For PC-FX games, this means that most text will be often be stored as compiled C strings (in Shift JIS encoding), with those strings located in many non-contiguous blocks in the program, because that's just how Hudson's C compiler and linker functioned.
While we do actually have access to Hudson's old C compiler from the PC-FXGA toolkit, modern PC-FX homebrew, and my T.I. font hack, is done with a version of GCC and GNU Assembler that have been modified to compile/assemble for the PC-FX's V810 processor. Ghidra wasn't available until long after I programmed the T.I. font patch ... hopefully it is helping to make other translation projects a bit easier to accomplish these days. 😉"
A key reason you can now play Team Innocent is the testing work of PC-FX Fan Club member Josh, aka hasnopants, who ran through it over and over and over on both Medanfen and real hardware ("my stack of TI build CDs is quite a sight!" he said). He spearheaded setting up a spreadsheet for tracking bugs and eventually started editing the text, then focusing on the timing of the subtitles to match the Japanese voices.
"Japanese sentence structure is quite a bit different than English, so alot of times what the VO is saying I can simply not line up with the printing of the text. But its those few times where I can (especially the mannerisms of the original VO actors/actresses such as pauses, umms and ahhhs) where it is very fulfilling and I am pretty proud of a few of the timings. Players can look at the cutscenes for VTR03 or VTR07 for some of my favorites!"
It took until late in the revived patch development timeline for the team's hackers to understand the "control codes" for text, making the subtitles fine-tuneable, so currently only the game's first mission is really dialed in. That'll improve in future updates. But they wanted to get the first release out in time for the release in late December.
"There were quite a few sleepless nights leading up to the 23rd (I even contracted pneumonia during the time!)" Josh said. "However, there was a silver lining as during my illness (it wasn't bad, I had whats called walking pneumonia). I was quarantined to my office workspace to keep our little one from getting it. I used that time to finish major editing and playtesting on the script over the course of about 5 days. If it wasnt for that bug, I think we would have still had something to release for everyone, but I'm confident it would not have been as polished as it was on release! Thanks TI-itis!"
The original translation that Filler worked on years ago was edited by longtime fan translator Eien ni Hen, who's credited on dozens upon dozens of games. Her editing helped refine Filler's script. "For instance, translating this Japanese idiom, 'Of the 36 strategies, the best is to run away,'" Filler gave as an example — it "refers to 36 ancient Chinese military strategies. This was localized as 'discretion is the better part of valor.' She also made some choices around some of Team Innocent's loanword-style katakana terms, for instance opting for 'tram' instead of 'shooter.' She localized 'telop' as 'scrolling text' and 'sound gun' as 'aural gun.' Those kinds of things were likely transliterated in my original script, and she was able to gain additional context during playtesting to make some informed edits for the sake of an English audience."
Given the number of talented contributors behind this project, I threw out the suggestion that a real supergroup came together to translate Team Innocent, which Josh, as the newbie of the group, agreed with.
"I was surrounded by seasoned veterans and it was awesome to have so much knowledge to tap on at any time," he said. "Maybe a metaphor will help describe: It felt like jumping into the deep end of the pool not knowing how to swim, but being surrounded by olympic swimmers to teach me how in real time!
"I can not overstate when I say what Filler and Ben have put together absolutely created the environment for something like this project (and hopefully other projects!) to get completed! The PC-FX Fan Club Discord created the 'supergroup' in my opinion, and there are many others there that would fit that billing that weren't part of this project, but have worked on or are working on other projects! So what I would tell everyone is: keep an eye out on the PC-FX Fan Club, or even better come join us in the Discord!"
You can keep an eye out for updates to the Team Innocent patch on Github. And if PC-FX games seem like your bag, there's a chatroom calling your name.
Translation Station

Whoa, what's the Translation Station doing up here!? Well, in service of this issue's fan translation focus, I figured I'd keep the train rollin' right out of our two top stories and into the other patches released in the last month.
Raiders Sphere 3rd – This 2006 Japanese flight dogfighting shooter has a successor on Steam, but is now playable in English itself! I'll be honest: Never heard of this series, and the translation being based on DeepL text gives me pause, but there's clearly been enough editing done to elevate the text beyond a raw machine translation, and hacker/translator MadmanEpic also included the files necessary to enable someone else to do their own translation if they so choose. Commendable!

Saturn Bomberman Fight!! – There are a million Bombermans; why wasn't this one available and English, and why is it exciting that it is now? Well, for one thing, we've featured Saturn Bomberman Fight!! in ROM before thanks to Saturn hacking pro Bo Bayles digging around inside it for cut content. He contributed to this patch, as did Derek Pascarella, featured many times in this newsletter including today's issue! The guy's everywhere. Anyway, why play this one? I dunno man, just look at those Sega Saturn polygons. You need more?
Illusion of Gaia – A retranslation of a classic 1994 RPG, based on a now-five-year-old forum LP. Hey, if it worked out so well for Policenauts, why not Gaia? The patch also adds a sprint button, greatly improved loading speeds, and MSU music compatibility.
Silk Road 2 – No, this isn't about buying drugs on the dark web or whatever. And I'm pretty sure it's also not about the historical trading route. This game is a cute '90s action RPG for the Sharp X68000 Japanese PC.


Wedding Peach – What is a wedding if not a giant party? This Super Famicom party game is based on an anime of the same name, and more specifically a single episode of said anime. Talk about a deep cut! Translator Krokodil has done a number of other projects before this one, including the Dokapon series, so clearly they have simultaneously terrible and impeccable taste in games.



Bloody Warriors – Finally, newsletter regular BlackPaladin delivers yet another Famicom patch, though there's a bit more of a story to this one. The translation patch may be more remarkable than the game itself, which is a 1990 RPG. See, this patch is actually an adendum to a patch released earlier this year, which was not quite complete but was still a huge leap over a very much unfinished patch released way back in 2001. Job's finally done, 24 years later.


Patching In

Xemu gets chatty – Remember when Party Chat ended up ruining the unique communication mechanics of Xbox Live games that played with proximity and counted on strangers being on hot mics? Well, drop out of that Discord voice channel because we're 👏bringing 👏 it 👏 back! As of its latest update, Xbox emulator Xemu "now has support for Xbox Live Communicator emulation, so you can use your system's microphone in games that support voice chat." There's no GUI for configuring it yet, but it's working. I hope to see the same for Xbox 360 emulator Xenia someday so we can play Chromehounds as it was meant to be...
PCSX2 fixes up Flathub – The PS2 emulator was having a bit of trouble with its Flathub package, but it's all good now. If you're on Linux, updating to the latest version's now easy peasy.
ShadPS4 v0.50 marches on – The preeminent PS4 emulator is still making rapid progress. How's Bloodborne lookin'? Better and better.
Big 'ol Panda3DS update – The cuddliest 3DS emulator saw some major additions after a year's work: a new UI, Libretro support, HLE audio (though not quite 100% finished), gyroid/accelerometer support, and a long list of GPU features now properly supported. I'm looking forward to seeing the differences between Panda3DS and the upcoming Azahar as time goes on.
Core Report

MiSTer 3DOOOOO – Saturn core developer Sergiy Dvodnenko posted a video this past Wednesday showing off a new in-progress core for the MiSTer: the good old 3DO. Home to, uh, 3DO games. Gex! People liked Gex, right? "For the last two years when I have free time I've been developing the 3DO core," Dvodnenko tweeted. "Finally I have some visual result. There is still a lot of work to be done on sprite engine and dsp. So far only a few 2D games (with rectangular sprites) work."
Taki Udon's FPGA PS1 is coming soon – And the $149 "SSone" is MiSTer compatible. Taki spoke with Time Extension recently about the design of the system and what it'll be capable of. Like the MiSTer Pi, this seems like a compelling entry level FPGA device for new folks getting into the hobby; if you don't particularly want to mess around with the configuration and modularity of a MiSTer, you get an all-in-one device that can still play any system but excels at capturing the PS1 experience with real controller/memory card support. I'm particualrly interested in how it's going to play original discs with a not-yet-seen optical add-on, something the MiSTer obviously can't do currently. Per the above interview, here's what Taki had to say:
"Since we can’t work on the assumption that the end-user will always use the specific version of the software that we may or may not create to support features that don’t exist in the MiSTer ecosystem, we start from the point of how we can accomplish what we need on existing cores. For cartridge-based systems that have built-in saving functionality, you wouldn’t be able to do more than dump your carts and run them off memory without significant hardware changes. It’s possible to have your save files sent directly to the dumped cartridge, but the process is somewhat convoluted. So without forking the core and making significant changes, cartridge support will be far worse than an actual console, even if it might be enough for most people.
PS1 is a bit different. Thankfully, saving games is split from the media, and our SNAC ports give us the direct ability to load and save games without needing to use cartridge-based workarounds. That just leaves you with how to handle the CD itself. On a stock core with a stock system, it is possible to store your games on an internal SSD via a simple process. Whenever you use that CD in the future, the stock system will call the stored backup and load the game without you needing to do anything.
In both console situations, software revisions (in some cases substantial) are required to make the experience more authentic to real hardware. The changes that we have to make are almost certainly not going to be accepted by the main branch, but it’s unavoidable. We at least have workarounds for an end-user who wants to stay on stock MiSTer software."
Make that Neo Geo sound good – Aaaaand one last little note here — the Neo Geo MiSTer core got an update to its audio emulation. Bleep bloop.
Good pixels

I've been capturing a lot of random emulation screenshots lately for Reasons™, so here's just a few for your enjoyment. 💽






