[JamesBond007]

Hello. Maybe some people already know this, but Japanese version of Metroid Fusion (unlike other games in the Metroid series) has more content. Most notably, more ending pictures and three difficulty levels (Easy, Normal and Hard). The only option available in the US and PAL versions of the game is the equivalent to Japanese's Normal difficulty level.

I found a hacked save file, which shows English language during gameplay (on Easy difficulty level). That means this language is still present in the ROM. German, French, Spanish and Italian languages may also be present. However, menus are not translated.

Could someone hack this ROM to force English language and translate the menus? This will be awesome.

[snarfblam]

Relevant discussion

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that it was a matter of something like changing the region byte in the header, or maybe write a certain value to a certain location in RAM. Something really simple.

If you're not nan0, you might want to ask him if he tried inter's suggestion. If you are nan0, well... Have you tried inter's suggestion?

[KC]

I took a quick look at it. The menu text is still there, but it won't work well without further changes. Simply forcing the English flag will lead to corrupted text in some cases, and other times it will display German strings - but totally different ones. Seems like the indexes are off or something like that.

Change the byte at 0x9FE02 from 00 to 02 to force the flag to English when starting a new game. The first couple of menu strings will be japanese (they would lead to screen corruption otherwise), followed by a few misplaced German strings. The ingame text seems to be fine though.

And the byte is at 0x3000014, not 0x3000011 as it was stated in that thread. Though the suggested strategy wouldn't have helped anyway.

[tc]

Hmm. Since the PAL version with actual language menu was released so close to US, it seems likely to me all releases will have remnants.

[KingMike]

The EU version was released five days after the US version, and the Japanese version was released three months after the US version.
So, my guess is at that point they felt they didn't need to worry about multi-language support anymore since the international versions had been released.

[KC]

Yeah. I looked a bit more into it. Each of those string tables is missing 4 strings at the end, probably the ones used by the difficulty selection. Apart from that the menu text seems correct.
Other stuff is missing though, specifically the location and difficulty displayed for each save slot. While the text is still in VRAM (they even added half a dozen copies of Easy/Normal/Hard, most of them in English), the logic for selecting it based on different languages seems to be missing. It only chooses one of two japanese modes, based on the content of 0x3000004.
That of course doesn't mean it's impossible or even hard to "translate" it. It's doesn't look too complicated, just a bit of work and moving stuff around.

[JamesBond007]

Well, I tried the codebreaker code 33000014 0002, and English is on. Speaking of glitches:
Start/Copy/Erase is correct, then German and graphical glitches kicks in. Samus' Daten and two empty fields (English Samus Data and remnants from Japanese's Traditional and Simplified). Both options goes to Start - Kopieren/Loschen) - that's the difficulty (Easy/Medium). There is another German word (or empty field) for Hard, but it's locked by default (can by unlocked by beating the game on Medium or using codes).

Using different values will force different languages (with glitches from the next language (03 - German, 04 - French, 05 - Spanish, 06 - Italian, 07 and above - glitchy stuff).

If at this point the game is playable (with the exceptions of not translated location/difficulty? names on the save screen) from the beginning to the end in English and without glitches, that's good for me. However, fully translated version will be better.

At the end, I have a different question. I'm playing the game on VisualBoyAdvance, and I'm encountering slowdown in certain parts of the game (especially later, with large amount of enemies or large bosses, like Nightmare). Version of the ROM doesn't matter (tried on US and JPN). Zero Mission (other GBA Metroid) works fine. Is there a way to eliminate slowdown?

[Gemini]

I don't recall having any slowdowns on hardware.

[tc]

The EU version was released five days after the US version, and the Japanese version was released three months after the US version.
So, my guess is at that point they felt they didn't need to worry about multi-language support anymore since the international versions had been released.

Fun part will be checking the Chinese version. Among those GBA games Nintendo bothered.