Hello and welcome to the Castlevania: Rondo of Blood
English Translation Patch (PSP to TurboGrafx-CD).
After many years of leaving this project abandoned I can happily say that this
patch has reached it's much needed 100% status! However the credits have not
made it into this release of the patch (if ever) so in order to compensate for
this inconvenience we have included the translation for the credits in this readme.
To
make clear, this patch will translate the TurboGrafx-CD
version of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood into English. Everything will be translated;
even the voiced dialogue will be replaced with the official Konami English
dub from Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (PSP). However miscellaneous
grunts will retain their original Japanese.
Here is the Credits for the officail Rondo of Blood team at Konami.
Around this time pemdawg joined the project. He helped find the rest of the SJIS text and did all the translating of the Japanese. We also found the custom font in the game and figured out how it worked. Manually typing out the edits in the patcher began to get annoying so I went on to write a program to do all the text conversions. It handled ASCII to SJIS and ASCII to the custom font. Everything was still really rinky dink but it fit our needs for the small amount of text we were dealing with.
I got into contact with Nightwolve (man behind the amazing Ys 1&2 and Xak III projects). He let me know about a tool Dave Shadoff had written for their Ys IV project. This tool could dump and reinsert the audio from PC Engine games. He sent it to me and I went to work with Magic Engine save states and a hex editor. I eventually found most of the audio and had it dumped (for some reason I used a raw ISO for this work which caused Burnt Lasagna quite a few headaches when I sent it off to him years later, sorries). pemdawg was working on the level title graphics at this time.
I eventually lost contact with pemdawg but decided to continue on with the audio work. I posted on a few Castlevania related forums about getting some voice actors together since the audio dumping/inserting was working perfectly. There was zero interest. I tried again after a few months with the same results. I gave up at that point (2006 or so?). Knowing what I know now I was asking in the wrong places but I'm glad everything played out in the way it did.
The patch on the site was from before we discovered the second font so it was missing 1/3 of the work we had done for all those years. Every few months someone would ask for all the files I had left from the project. I'd send the files off and usually never hear back from them. Luckily one of the people I heard back from was Burnt Lasagna. I added a new patcher at that point. After we got the new font (half the space as the original SJIS) I was able to insert the original intro translation I did back in 2004 before I realized space was extremely limited.
Michael G. (Burnt Lasagna)I figured Rondo of Blood would be an easier starting point and saw that cubanraul had mentioned on his website that he had finished all the ADPCM extraction and insertion. The next moment I sent cubanraul an Email asking if he could send me his tools from way back then. Within three days he replied back nonchalantly giving me his entire stack of ROM hacking material!
Now at this point I have everything I need… I think. I guess the only thing I need to do now is talk in front of a microphone with a group of people and then the project gets done…right? I mean I’m only doing this to get a vague idea on how to work this kind of project for Ys IV…Right!? Well to put it bluntly…I WAS WRONG!!!
In the end I spent 5 months trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the project. The conundrum ended when I randomly found a YouTube video showing the original game running on the PSP in English! Apparently in Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (2007) you could unlock the original Rondo of Blood and it was fully dubbed into English! I was shocked that this even existed and I quickly decided at that very second to use that dub for the TurboGrafx-CD version.
At first I just ripped the audio from those YouTube videos for the audio in the patch, but luckily this latest patch uses a direct rip from the PSP. When I was syncing in all the English tracks back into the game I came across a problem. A majority of the pointers that cubanraul had given to me where screwed up! I later found out that this was because cubanraul found all the pointers using a raw ISO of the game, not an ISO/WAV archive. I fixed this eventually after ironing out all the addresses to sync properly with a straight up MODE2/2352 rip of track02 ripped via Turbo Rip.
After fully inserting the dub into the TurboGrafx-CD version I sent it off to cubanraul in which we then worked back and forth on making a new patcher that could take into consideration the new dub. Shortly afterwards the new version of the patch was released on November 09, 2011, which at that point had not been updated in roughly 8 years. Then on New Year’s Eve of 2011 we released a new version of the patch that had all the level title cards translated.
Now with the help of tomaitheous we’ve finally released the final version of the Castlevania: Rondo of Blood English Translation Patch! (YEAAAHHH!!!!) I hope you, yes you, the person reading this readme, love’s this translation patch like a 90’s kid likes snorting graphics!
Thank you and I hope you enjoy this patch.
- Michael G. (Burnt Lasagna)
