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Super Mario RPG - Japanese to English mod


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Hey guys,

Well its been a while and I wanted to give this one a go.

Got a Super Mario RPG Jap version in a lot of Super Famicom carts from Hollo.

I found a french website where they had done a rom chip changeover to convert it from Jap to French. Seeing that the US version of the game fetches some big dollars I decided to do the same and document the process.

Well here goes

 

First off i started with the standard Jap cart

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4098-1.jpg

 

Next was to open up the cart and identify the game rom. Its the chip in the top right hand corner

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4099-1.jpg

 

Next to remove the cart. I just used a soldering iron and a needle to lift the pins. WARNING!! Take your time. I had my iron too hot and it lift up a few of the pads. Luckily they can be easily traced and repaired later

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4101-1.jpg

 

Next was to start the wire soldering to each of the pads. I used an old IDE cable for the wire

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4103-1.jpg

 

Next was the bottom row of pads to solder wire to. As you can see I had to trace the pads that I lifted and broke and found new spots to solder the wire to.

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4104-1.jpg

 

One this was complete I did a quick test using my multi meter to ensure I had not shorted any of the wires. One I had confirmed this out came the hot glue gun. I taped the rows of wires down first then put a row of hot glue on them. These cables are not going anywhere

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4105-1.jpg

 

Now probably the easiest part soldering the new roms chip back in. A 27C322 4MB Eprom is required to hold the US game rom. Big thanks to Womble for helping out with burning this off for me!! The wires are pretty much pin for pin except for a couple. If you look at the diagram you can see that one point is not connected on the 27C322 and another is from the top row of the pads going to the middle of the 27C322.

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4106-1.jpg

The points highlighted in red are not connected

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/diagrame_super_mario_rpg.png

 

Just about ready to test it out of the shell. Please work!!

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4108-1.jpg

 

Fingers crossed. hit the power switch and.....

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4107-1.jpg

 

SUCCESS!!!! English text and the cart loads up perfectly. mind you I am using a Super Famicom with multi region CIC switchless mod installed. Now to seal her up.

I found I had to cut off a tiny bit of plastic on the inside middle of the case to fit everything in. It was a tight squeeze but I managed to screw the case all back together again.

 

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4116.jpg

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n532/jmicari/SuperMarioRPG/IMG_4118.jpg

 

All up I am very pleased with the result. Pretty straight forward. Just very fiddly at times and a bit time consuming stripping the 42 lengths of wire but in the end I have a playable version of a pretty rare SNES title.

 

One again big thanks to Womble for burning the rom off for me and also to KennYMcCormick from http://www.ultimate-console.fr for writing up the original tutorial.

 

Now what other cheap JAP carts can i sacrifice for a rare titles?? Maybe Starfox...

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Nice work, should be able to do that with most games that dont require any of the specialised chips such as Super FX or DSP, but if you have games containing them like Star Fox, Yoshi's Island 2, or Mario Kart to name a few then you should be fine. Wikipedia has a list of the chips and mentions some of the games which have them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips.
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That's totally cool! Would you be able to do this with Japanese Famicom games? So, if I had say Dragonquest in Japanese, could you use the same basic method to burn the English language version onto a ROM chip and make it English?

 

If so, that is awesome.

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That's totally cool! Would you be able to do this with Japanese Famicom games? So, if I had say Dragonquest in Japanese, could you use the same basic method to burn the English language version onto a ROM chip and make it English?

 

If so, that is awesome.

 

It was a super fami game, Super Mario RPG and he replaced the rom with the English version, not having done it I can only assume the only potential issue would be specialised chips and the lockout chip would have to match the console unless its modded.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Do yourself a favor and knock up a copy of Secret of Mana 2, killer game. Tops the first one I reckon, though if they first one gets a proper re-translation then that'll change things.

+1

If I brought you a JAP SoM2 cart could you convert it for a price? I also have the english patched rom file if needed.

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