Japanese Super Famicom – English Translations, Conversions
These Super Famicom translations/conversions are very similar to the Mother 2 to Earthbound Conversion. The couple of SFC carts I’ve made or tested have had just one original MASKROM, making replacing with a flashed 29F032 even easier than Mother 2, it’s just a straight forward swap, no altering needed.
I use a desoldering station to suck the solder off of the old MASKROM chip. Some people use desoldering braid/wick, desolder pump, or they cut the legs and heat up and remove the remains etc.
An original Seiken Densetsu 3 cart
Tope row of pins desoldered
MASKROM desoldered
MASKROM desoldered
29F032 and Adapter
Adapter board soldered in place
I used uCON64 to check the original ROM file. I downloaded and configured the GUI for uCON64 to make life simpler. You can use it to remove the header, fix the checksum, check to see if it’s byteswapped etc. Here’s the info from the files I used.
Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu 3 English Translation, 3 Player Patch)
Secret of Mana Enhanced (from Seiken Densetsu 2 cart)
It was easier/cheaper for me to get a Japanese copy of Seiken Densetsu 2 and make an English Secret of Mana than buy the original English cart. As an added bonus, you can now apply the Enhanced patch to the rom.
Clock Tower
Bahamut Lagoon
Hi Pete,
What size was your Clock Tower when you burned it? I’ve manually hard-patched a rom of it, removed the header, & fixed the checksum.
I now have a file called Clock Tower.smc & its size is 3276800 Bytes (25.0000 Mb)
Ucon64 reports it is not swapped, there’s no header, & the checksum is ok. Is this safe to burn now do you think? See here – http://i49.tinypic.com/vdobdc.jpg
To treble check, I tried running the file in bsnes. However bsnes on works with sfc files, not smc. I ran it through the purify.exe that comes with bsnes, & is generated a new folder with a program rom of the game in it, & that did run through bsnes.
Would appreciate any help!
Hi Paul. Looks good to me :-) I compared your screenshot to mine and can’t see anything different.
Many thanks Pete, now onto the next question lol. Did you see on buyICnow, they seemingly list the eeproms already on the adapter boards? One such example would be – ST M29F032D-70N6 (TSOP Adapter III) if you search on their site you’ll see it, & it looks like they fir the 29F032 onto the board for you if you wish? Do you think thats the case, or they just come seperately? I’ve emailed them to clarify anyway, but it would be dead handy if you could buy the eeprom & adapter board already fit together & programmed with whatever file you send them!
buyicnow.com does indeed sell the TSOP adaptor chip combo, all you need to do is provide them the ROM, and you get the complete package, ready to solder in!
For the ROM… does it need to be split into the 2 separate files, or just the de-heardered version of whatever game you’re soldering?
williamq – depends which game you are talking about. The few that I’ve experimented with – only Star Ocean needed to be split and I created a seperate post for that – http://www.mmmonkey.co.uk/star-ocean-translated-cart/
Would you be willing to “translate” an SFC version of Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken 3) to english and fix the region lock so its playable on a PAL Snes? How much would you want to do that?
Feel free to send me an email
I rarely do jobs for people, check my links page for bad_ad84, he might take it on for you.