MrPopo wrote:So let me ask a clarifiying question or two. Let's say I had a bunch of SFC carts on hand that I would love to have english versions of. If you had the original SFC cart for Bahamut Lagoon or Shin Megami Tensei and a translated ROM would it be fairly easy to get the translated ROM on the cart?
It wouldn't be any easier or harder, it would be the same amount of work as far as the game PCB and EPROM go. There are some pros and cons to using the original game versus a donor cart though.
Let's say I wanna make Bahamut Lagoon. I could use Illusion of Gaia (just an example, other games could be used) as a donor cart, but then I'd be destroying a copy of Gaia from existence. If I use an original SFC Bahamut cart, no games are lost. However, most people like to have them in an American cart case. If I use Gaia, I'll already have one. If I use the original game, I'll have to get one. Of course, I could use any generic sports game that no one will miss for the case. The "donor" game also wont be lost, it'll just end up in a SFC Bahamut case.
Not that I would use Gaia as a donor cart, I believe it was NHL 95 or 96 that are the same specs. There's probably a lot of sport games and just really BAD games that I can use for donors, I actually found a nice list for that. I'm sure not too many people would care if there was one less NHL 95 in the world.
Now I'm just rambling on here, but... If you use the original game it's perfectly legal. You're just modifying that game to display English instead of Japanese. You're also not destroying a game to make another one.
MrPopo wrote:Also, something that just occured to me. I know when the Mother 3 translation project got underway they had to do some crazy things when hacking the text because the Mother 3 ROM was at the max size supported by the GBA ISA. All the SNES translations don't have to worry about that, because no ROM got that big. However, I wonder if any of the translations would have bumped a game from one size to another, and what difficulties that might cause for you.
I'm not sure that they do. Star Ocean came out the same exact size to the byte after being patched. I really know nothing of hacking and all that, so I couldn't even tell you. If the game came out bigger, and the donor cart only uses one mask ROM, than I'm not sure it would be a problem actually. Although, I really don't know.