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"If you need the right tools, invent them."

- Scott Dolph

The current state of Dreamcast hacking and reverse engineering is less advanced than other consoles, due in part to a lack of a viable emulator with wide game compatibility and debugging tools. Most emulators available as of July 2022 have only one or the other, and the few that have both either do not support Sakura Taisen 3 or have incomplete debugging tools. For the purpose of researching, hacking, and translating this game, a suite of external tools are used in place of integrated emulator debuggers. This wiki aims to document the formats and processes used by the Taisho Romanization to modify the assets of Sakura Taisen 3 for translation purposes, and to assist those interested in translating to non-English languages in using their work as a base.

Note that familiarity with basic asset replacement and concepts such as hexadecimal and endianness are assumed. The procedures documented in this wiki are not intended as tutorials for game modding, but are hacking instructions specific to Sakura Taisen 3.

Acknowledgments

This project was made possible with guidance from DerekPascarella, the Dreamcast-Talk modification community, and the SHIRO Media Group Discord community. Their prior research into Dreamcast hacking and alternative methods for debugging were instrumental in beginning work on editing text parameters and graphical data.

The initial research into the primary script format by ZetpeR on the Chief-Net forum was the catalyst for technical work on the English translation, and much of the code in this repository is an expansion of their initial scripts for extracting text.

Contributing

Please file an issue in this repository to suggest additions or report errors in the documentation.

License

Like the original code in this repository, this wiki is in the public domain (CC0).