[RHDNBot]

Update By: Gideon Zhi

Today AGTP has released a complete translation for Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Elemental Lords. This title details the very beginning of the saga surrounding Banpresto's first original Super Robot War character, and includes aboslutely no licensed units: the story and characters are all entirely original. The art style additionally is non-SD and the game includes several additional tactical elements not present in other SRW titles. It is, in fact, as ideal entrypoint as possible for anyone not familiar with the series.

The translation is complete and without any known issues. Enjoy!

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[mziab]

Congratulations on the release, Gideon! I remember when this was first announced. Have been waiting for it ever since, so I'm really hyped to play this. The usual Aeon Genesis splash screen seems to be missing, though. Is this intentional? Everything seems to run fine otherwise.

It also seems the patch requires an overdumped rom, which is pretty scarce nowadays due to the spread of NoIntro. From what I see, it's just the last meg of data that seems to be repeated. At first glance the normal-sized rom also works, but I'm not sure it doesn't crash later into the game. Not a big issue, just thought I'd put it out there in case someone else is confused with the whole overdump thing.

That aside, more SRW to play, w00t!

[Gideon Zhi]

Congratulations on the release, Gideon! I remember when this was first announced. Have been waiting for it ever since, so I'm really hyped to play this. The usual Aeon Genesis splash screen seems to be missing, though. Is this intentional? Everything seems to run fine otherwise.

It also seems the patch requires an overdumped rom, which is pretty scarce nowadays due to the spread of NoIntro. From what I see, it's just the last meg of data that seems to be repeated. At first glance the normal-sized rom also works, but I'm not sure it doesn't crash later into the game. Not a big issue, just thought I'd put it out there in case someone else is confused with the whole overdump thing.

Neither of those things is intentional, and to be perfectly honest, I had no idea that the rom I was working from was an overdump; if I'd known, I'd certainly have been less stressed about finding space in the game for text! Whew.

[Special T]

Congratulations on the release and thank you for your hard work! 

[Orochi Kusanagi]

Congrats on this amazing release! This was my first SRW back in the 90s, and it's great to see it translated!

[lastdual]

Awesome work! Also glad to see the optional music persistence patch. Makes a great game even more polished!

[SCO]

Shouldn't the normal rom be marked as compatible? Since the overdump is just the same thing repeated and the rom works with the 'clean' dump?

[travel27]

Thanks!

Just wondering, how hard is this game?  I have not played any SRW games and would like something with average difficulty that is fairly simple (to pick up).  Nothing too complex.  Is this a good game to start with? 

[Orochi Kusanagi]

It plays a bit differently from more typical SRW, and is harder than recent easy SRW. Still, it is a fine entry to start with, and has a nice story with branching paths.

[Alcahest]

Gideon Zhi, thank you so much for your hard work.
Could you give the MD5 of the 4mb ROM your patch is designed for, as I found 3 of them..?
Although a patch for the clean 3mb ROM would be ideal!

[Gi Nattak]

Nice! Is it Guy den or Gay den?

[Cahos Rahne Veloza]

Nice! Is it Guy den or Gay den?

"Guy" Den definitely.

[Megakoopax]

Congrats on the release. It's pretty rare but also very nice to see an SRW game get a completed and polished fan translation, I don't know much about Super Robot Wars Gaiden, but I will soon try it out using this patch. Thanks.

[Special]

So does this patch work from start to finish with a clean no-intro rom or not?

[Alcahest]

So does this patch work from start to finish with a clean no-intro rom or not?

No clue, still unsure about which 4mb ROM it's supposed to be applied to.
For a major group as AGTP, no exact rom info / checksum in the readme is problematic!
I did try to patch the verified no-intro ROM but it lacks the AGTP intro screen so I doubt it's 100% compatible.

[mziab]

The md5 checksum is actually mentioned here on the RHDN project page.

But in case you cannot acquire that particular overdump, you can convert the regular 3 megabyte NoIntro rom quite easily. You just need to duplicate the last meg of data (0x200000-0x2FFFFF unheadered) and append it to the end of the file. This can be done with a hexeditor for example. Not ideal, but I've checked and the resulting file has the exact same checksum.

As for whether it's fully playable when applied to the normal rom, it seems that a few bytes in the 0x3df600-0x3dfc7f range are different than they should be (0x00 instead of 0xFF). All of them seem to be graphics (I see CRITICAL and some numbers there). Nothing totally game-breaking.

The lack of the Aeon Genesis splash screen isn't symptomatic of a badly patched ROM. The patched overdump doesn't have it either. It was an oversight, by Gideon's own admission.

EDIT: For what it's worth, I've transplanted those graphics to an expanded, clean rom and made a new patch which should apply cleanly to the NoIntro rom. You can download it here. Hopefully Gideon doesn't mind me tinkering with his stuff.

Disclaimer: this is not endorsed by Aeon Genesis and not thoroughly tested (though I'm reasonably confident it should work flawlessly), use at your own risk. The patch does NOT re-add the splash screen.

[Alcahest]

Thank you mziab, I managed to find the ROM with correct MD5 from Gideon, the filename ends with "(J) [o1].smc"
I'm gonna play it safe and use the intended target ROM, but your hotfix is a great idea!

[Special]

Thanks mziab, but your patch freezes with Snes9x, not 100% of the time but during the intro right before the episode1 part it freezes, also I've noticed some graphical glitches with yours too.

I'm just going to wait and hope Gideon does a proper v1.01 patch.

[mziab]

Thanks mziab, but your patch freezes with Snes9x, not 100% of the time but during the intro right before the episode1 part it freezes, also I've noticed some graphical glitches with yours too.

I'm just going to wait and hope Gideon does a proper v1.01 patch.

Oh well. Truth be told, I tested this with bsnes-plus and it didn't crash once on me. Are you sure it doesn't happen when patching the overdump or in fact with the original game? During what does it freeze exactly? The graphical glitches are more likely related to the hotfix. Where did they appear? Did you hard-patch the ROM? Did snes9x report the CRC as being okay? I might look into this a bit more depending on the amount of work. Otherwise, I'll respectfully bow out and let Gideon himself look into it.

[Special]

I'm on phone right now, but I used a no-intro for everything, that said.

With Gideon Zhi's patch, it reports bad checksum, but otherwise seems to play alright... I haven't noticed any glitches or freezes, but I only played one stage.

With yours, checksum is good, but "sometimes" during the intro at the start of a new game it hardlocks when you make your first dialog choice, also again "sometimes" after that choice when the earthquake happened in the intro, I was getting weird white squares.

These were all hardpatched, and like I said "sometimes" when the freeze happened I reset the game, and turboed to the point again and no freeze, but another time I happened again at the same spot, seems to be a 25% of a lock, weird.

I also was using the latest test build os SNES9x http://www.s9x-w32.de/dl/testbuilds/?C=M;O=D