Trade your D20s for a Saturn controller because an English translation patch for the Sega Saturn port of sidescrolling beat-em-up Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom is complete.
The sole developer, Lirinica, posted the patch to SegaXtreme’s Resources area Saturday. It’s an XDelta patch file that should be applied to the game’s Track 1 BIN file. Lirinica said it was tested on real hardware via Fenrir ODE as well as the Kronos emulator.
The fan hacker asked that anyone who encounters errors while playing the patched game on real hardware post about it in their SegaXtreme thread.
Lirinica posted more than an hour of footage showing off a full playthrough of the patch:
Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom is one of the two games included in Capcom’s March 1999 compilation “Dungeons & Dragons Collection,” the other game being D&D Shadow Over Mystara. The Saturn collection was only released in Japan, although a pamphlet distributed by Capcom at E3 1997 insinuated that the company planned to bring it to the West.
Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara originally were arcade games that came out in 1994 and 1996, respectively. Since those hit arcades in the West, official English translations exist for them, and that’s what Lirinica used for their Saturn patch.
The games are available outside arcades with official English translations already, though. They were ported to the Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC via Steam in 2013 in a collection named “Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara” complete with the official localizations.
Still, the Saturn community always appreciates playing translations of games on their favorite console, so the Tower of Doom project is welcome.
Lirinica has been working on getting the official translation of Tower of Doom into the Saturn game since 2023. The hacker discovered that the game uses different files for each screen’s text, rather than one master font sheet as other games use.
That led to a lot of work to translate the game file by file — Lirinica went radio silent for about a year, resurfacing last December. But the forum thread was updated several times since then, as Lirinica has detailed the work involved in hacking the game.
SHIRO! first reported on Lirinica’s progress in March when they said they’d finished translating the text that appears before gameplay begins. A month later on April 16, they said the story was 100% complete, with remaining translation tasks including “things like chest messages and broken equipment, and the item names that appear in the top right,” Lirinica said at the time.
This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!