********************************************************************************
*                          Bahamut Senki (Mega Drive)                          *
*                          English Translation Patch                           *
*                              v1.0 (02 Jun 2020)                              *
*                                                                              *
*                        TheMajinZenki -- Translation                          *
*                               Supper -- Hacking & Manual Digitization        *
*                               cccmar -- Editing & Testing                    *
*                               filler -- Initial Translation                  *
*                             Xanathis -- Testing                              *
*                               Oddeye -- Testing                              *
********************************************************************************

For 2,000 years did the peace brought to Bahamut by the royal line of Pholia 
last; but no more. The skies darken, the evil powers once banished return, 
calamities tear the land itself asunder -- and the "Age of Darkness" is at hand. 
As the world crumbles, eight rulers raise armies and war amongst themselves to 
decide the fate of the continent. None can say when or how the Age of Darkness 
will end, but amidst the chaos, there is one certainty: that the conflict can be 
done only when one Master stands alone above them all...

Bahamut Senki (Record of the Bahamut War) is a 1991 turn-based strategy game by 
Sega for the Mega Drive. In it, up to four players take control of one of eight 
rulers in the fantasy realm of Bahamut, raise armies, and battle AI opponents 
and each other until one faction emerges victorious. It's a very complex and 
advanced game for its time, featuring three rulesets of varying depth, 
adjustable difficulty, and three different levels of simulation: high-level 
political management, tactical battles (in both hex-based and simplified 
variants), and real-time action-based combat between individual units.

This patch fully translates into English both the game itself and its two 
accompanying instruction manuals, which are essential to understanding how to 
play.

                    ****************************************
                    *          Table of Contents           *
                    ****************************************

  I.   Patching Instructions
  II.  User Manual and Catalog
  III. Troubleshooting
  IV.  Secrets
  V.   Authors' Comments
  VI.  Version History

                    ****************************************
                    *       I. Patching Instructions       *
                    ****************************************

You'll first need a ROM image of Bahamut Senki for the Mega Drive. It should 
match the following specifications:

  No-Intro filename: Bahamut Senki (Japan).md
  CRC32:             B1E268DA
  MD5:               E67C277CC6CBC821C3E0C1898A635DAF
  SHA-1:             CEE49B613298E060D938DE523DFCBB27E790B5AF

The patch itself is a standard IPS patch. Use a tool such as Lunar IPS to apply 
the IPS file to the ROM. The patch will expand the ROM to 1 MB, so don't use 
ancient patching utilities that don't support that.

                    ****************************************
                    *     II. User Manual and Catalog      *
                    ****************************************

Bahamut Senki was produced during an era where the idea of games being 
self-contained experiences, with tutorials and explanations for all features 
provided in the game itself, hadn't really developed. Making a paper manual to 
explain things was both cheaper and easier than trying to do so within 
contemporary ROM and RAM constraints. To put it bluntly: Without the manual, 
this game is basically incomprehensible.

So, it wasn't easy, but we've translated the manuals! Both of them! All 112 
pages! And nicely formatted them as HTML pages! Every chart, graph, and map has 
been reproduced as accurately as we could manage in an attempt to make the 
experience as authentic as possible. We hope (really, really hope) that you'll 
appreciate the results.

There are two manuals: the standard instruction manual, and a supplementary 
catalog containing information on units, spells, and various mechanics. To get 
started with the game, it's best to read the instruction manual, referencing the 
catalog as needed.

Both manuals should have come included in the patch download. You can also read 
them online on this patch's web site:

  Instruction Manual: http://stargood.org/trans/bahamut_manual/manual.php
  Character Catalog:  http://stargood.org/trans/bahamut_manual/catalog.php

Major thanks to Sega Retro for providing the scans used to produce these 
translations. You can find the original documents on their Bahamut Senki page: 
https://segaretro.org/Bahamut_Senki

                    ****************************************
                    *         III. Troubleshooting         *
                    ****************************************

There's already a long explanatory note about this issue in the user manual, but 
since a lot of people are probably going to run into it and think it's a problem 
with the patch, we're repeating it here in the hopes of heading off at least 
some of the complaints.

When an enemy invades your territory, the game displays the message "The enemy 
is invading!" Then, it will often appear to "softlock" and stop responding to 
input. In reality, the game is waiting for you to use the Player 2 Pad to 
manipulate the invasion defense menu. The Player 1 Pad will frequently not do 
anything at all on this screen, even in a one-player game, unless the game has 
specifically been set to 1 Control Pad mode (it defaults to 2 Control Pad mode 
if it detects that two Pads are plugged in, which is what most emulators will 
tell it).

To make sure the Player 1 Pad works on this screen, open the Options menu on the 
title screen, select the "Controllers" option, and set it to "1 Control Pad".

This is the only time you'll ever have to use the second player's controller in 
a one-player game. Don't ask us why; it's most likely a bug that somehow slipped 
by.

                    ****************************************
                    *             IV. Secrets              *
                    ****************************************

Bahamut Senki has some pretty surprising secrets for a strategy game from 1991. 
We've included information about these with this patch as extras, but by 
request, they've been removed from the main readme and placed in a separate 
"spoilers.txt" file. Please check it out, because this game really does have 
some interesting things going on that you would never find out just by playing 
normally.

                    ****************************************
                    *         V. Authors' Comments         *
                    ****************************************
  
  -------------------
  -- TheMajinZenki --
  -------------------
  
  Bahamut Senki was a bit of a weird project. In theory it started as something 
"short" that would only take a few days to work on... but this kind of game 
needs clear instructions as to how to play it, so I decided translating the 
manual would be necessary. Little did I know I was facing about 100 pages of 
text! Still, I think it was worth the trouble. I hope you enjoy this game, and 
especially that you read that manual!
  
  ------------
  -- cccmar --
  ------------
  
  Record of the Bahamut War is one of the earliest strategy games on the Mega 
Drive.
It's interesting in that it's mostly about various tactical options you have to 
win the battles and a high degree of strategy needed to achieve that. Most of 
the actual 
story can be found in the manual, but there is also a very long, true ending
that's not so easy to find. All things considered, this game is quite unique on 
the 
system for its time, especially considering that a lot of strategy games were 
also 
simplified by comparison. There's a large selection of spells, units and terrain 
types also.

  Overall, the editing process here concerned mostly the menus, unlike in most 
of our other projects. So, while this game was made largely with strategy fans 
in mind, anyone can give it a shot and find something to like. Enjoy!
  
  ------------
  -- Supper --
  ------------
  
  So, years ago, I've just finished up a translation of Battle Golfer Yui with 
my frequent collaborator filler, and I'm on the hunt for another short Mega 
Drive game we can work on. I pull up the nice spreadsheet somebody's put 
together of which games are translated, and there's this "Bahamut Senki" game 
listed as untranslated. Everything else on the list looks pretty crap, and even 
though I can't understand what's going on in it at all it's clear the game 
doesn't really have that much text, so we decide to give it a shot.

  Right out of the gate, we've got an obstacle: the game's script is in an 
extremely obnoxious format. Instead of using a single universal encoding for all 
messages, the game splits messages up into little "packs" that are each encoded 
against a specific subset of the main font. So I spend a lot of time producing a 
conversion table for the game's 650 font characters, do a bunch of disassembly 
work to identify all the font packs and which messages are associated with them, 
and do some arcane manipulations in order to convert that into an actual 
human-readable script.

  I also go ahead and set everything up to be inserted back into the game. 
Another obstacle: all messages use hardcoded offsets, and nearly all of them use 
16-bit relative references rather than full 32-bit pointers as a space-saving 
measure. This means that I can't just update the pointers, and I can't even use 
the typical technique of adding a layer of indirection by replacing the strings 
themselves with ID numbers to reference against a separate table -- due to 
compression shenanigans, some of the original strings are only a byte long, and 
we have well over 256 strings, so 8-bit IDs are out. So I end up having to 
create a hash table using the computed pointers of the original strings as keys, 
which are then used to look up the replacements at runtime.

  At this point I hand the script over to filler. Time goes by, we all get to 
working on other things, and the whole thing basically gets forgotten about 
until late last year when TheMajinZenki is looking for a short project to work 
on. So I volunteer Bahamut Senki, and we all agree it's not very long and all 
the coding work is done already so this'll be quick and easy, right? So with 
filler's approval, we start working on the game.

  Zenki starts doing his thing, and after looking at it for a while he declares 
we need to translate the manual because it's impossible to understand the game 
without it. And then, to my horror, he translates the manual. Or rather, the 
manuals, because there are two. And they're 112 pages long. And _someone_ is 
going to have to format them and I have a bad feeling about who it's going to 
be.

  So at this point, my vision of this as a quick project to fill in while we 
look for something more interesting to do thoroughly destroyed, I finish up with 
whatever it is I'm working on at the time -- Madou Monogatari something or 
other, no doubt -- and pick up my dusty code from 2018 again. And it turns out 
that hey, who would have guessed, an 8x16 font is absolutely _not_ going to cut 
it for this game. Time to implement a very fake variable-width font using 
prerendered graphics.

  Oh, and unit names have to fit a 7-character space. The translations are 
double that. We don't have enough room in VRAM to make a true variable-width 
font work (and hell if I want to program it anyway, because I thought I was done 
with this game years ago!) so I try this and that and eventually find that, if I 
space things out right, there's juuuust enough room to fit them all into VRAM 
using precomposed tiles with a 4-pixel-wide font. And that's the story of why 
you have "BlackKnight" instead of "Black Knight": it saved 4 tiles that I 
absolutely needed and couldn't find any other way to get. Same deal with the 
weird "centering". I wouldn't have done it if I didn't have to!

  At this point, the translation is apparently done and the game is actually 
mostly working! It's a good feeling. Until I discover while reading over the 
translated manual that, if playing as Sieg or Vastral, you can press "A" on 
commands to get advice messages from your tactician. And boy, what messages they 
are. "On this terrain, you can summon Centaurs and Unicorns. Personally, I 
wouldn't do that, but would summon at Vistitz (30) instead." "Let's invade N. 
Umbar with Sieg, 2 Holy Warrior squadrons, and a Knight!"

  And on and on, all this extremely dynamic and specific stuff that _I had 
absolutely no idea existed in the game_. So at this point I just kind of rolled 
my eyes at the sheer absurdity of the game's ability to pull out new hurdles 
every time I think I'm done, and get to work reformatting dozens of highly 
conditional and totally hardcoded advice messages. Great effort is expended to 
make the game able to produce grammatically correct lists of squadrons, and to 
make sure it understands that units with proper names should not take a quantity 
expression. I spend so much time testing this system that at one point, I even 
find and fix a bug the original developers overlooked that caused the game to 
occasionally spit out a garbage location name.

  Then at last, everything is finally done for real this time! With the game, 
that is. Someone still needs to convert the user manuals from raw text files to 
something more convenient. At first we actually make some arrangements to get a 
scanslation done, but after several months that ends up not working out. And I 
lied, everything was _not_ done with the game, because in that span I fix 
several more problems, ranging from "the message for not having a controller 
plugged in when you start the game isn't formatted right" to "the game freezes 
on real hardware if you try to go to the second page of the War menu in Normal 
Rules".

  But anyway, as I suspected was going to be the case from the beginning, it 
falls to me to format the manuals. And you know, I'm really not much of a web 
designer, but I did the best I could. Hope it shows, because I spent a lot of 
time on it. And specifically a lot of time cleaning and lettering that map at 
the very end, so please gaze upon it lustfully. Please?

  And so, finally, something like two years after starting on this "short" 
"minor" project, we finish. All I have to do is stop writing this readme and 
that'll be the end of Bahamut Senki, forever, until someone finds a bug and I 
have to go figure out what the hell went wrong _this_ time.

  But you know what? This was tons of fun. It wasn't boring. It was totally 
different from anything else I've worked on, and the game itself is actually 
really cool once you get into it. I'm glad everything went wrong. Now go have 
some damn fun.

                    ****************************************
                    *         VI. Version History          *
                    ****************************************

v1.0 (02 Jun 2020): Initial release.
