Prism Land Story: Prism Land Story Memory Card support

Despite being released three times in the West by two different publishers, there has never been an official English version of Prism Land Story with Memory Card support. This patch makes it possible to play this rather long game in more than one sitting in situations where the use of savestates isn’t possible or desirable.

== PRISM LAND STORY TRANSLATION INJECTION PATCH ==
by rari_teh

INTRODUCTION
Prism Land Story is a game that, unbelievably, was
released five times over the course of six years:

• Prism Land Story, published by Dcruise, 1998, JP
• Prism Land Story, Midas, 2000, Europe
• Action Puzzle: Prism Land, Hect, 2000, JP
• Sorcerer’s Maze, XS Games, 2003, US
• Sorcerer’s Maze, XS Games, 2003, Europe

The Midas version was a lazy PAL conversion of the
original Dcruise release, with a utilitarian
translation tacked onto the game on badly anti-
aliased Comic Sans. This being Midas Interactive,
however, they had to cock up something major, and
in this case it was the removal of Memory Card
support, even though they went to the lengths of
translating virtually all the save menus.

The Hect version was just a budget label rerelease
under a new publisher, with the rather pretty menu
art swapped out for a bland background that ties
in with the Honkakuha de ¥1,300 Series visual
branding.

Sorcerer’s Maze is a completely different story.
Based on the Hect version for some reason, the
game underwent the then all-too-common process of
deanimeization, with blander, Western-style art
substituting part of the assets and producing a
rather jarring mixture of art styles, and the
entire storyline was literally blanked out. Like
Midas before them, XS also somehow found it a good
idea to remove Memory Card support, this time not
even bothering to translate the unused assets.

Even though the Midas version is a lazy PAL
conversion, it is the less-unideal official
English version, although very hampered by the
lack of ability of saving progress on a game that
was definitely not meant to be played in a single
sitting. This patch aims to remedy this problem by
injecting Midas’ translated assets back into the
game’s original release by Dcruise.

TECHNICAL PROCESS
Fortunately, Prism Land Story was made in a very
simple way, with every visual element – text and
art alike – being composed of bare, uncompressed
TIM images. It was just a matter of swapping files
out and editing the copyright line.

For some reason, when Midas translated the save/
load prompts, they inverted the order of all but
one of the images (maybe they axed the function
because they were too lazy to figure out why the
text didn’t make sense…?). Since they all have the
same properties, it was once again just a matter
of swapping files around. They also left
untranslated a data read error message, which I
translated myself.

Transplanting Midas’ translation like that left
behind one bug, however: even though everything
in this game is constructed out of images and
there’s plenty of space to spare, the Japanese
developers found it suitable to reuse the kana
long vowel mark from the word ワールド’s texture as
the dash that separates the world and level
numbers. When Midas translated the game, they had
to move the dash to an empty part of the TIM and
then move the pointer accordingly. Because of this
discrepancy, the level start screens now read
“WORLD 1OF1” instead of “WORLD 1–1” – the F being
actually a cut-down R from WORLD. With the help of
some very patient people at the RHDN Forums, I
managed to hunt down that variable and change it
so that the level indicator looks right again.

Shoutouts to Nezz for making v1.1 possible =)

CHECKSUMS
Database: Redump
Filename: Prism Land Story (Japan).bin
Original CRC32: 1683FC76
Original MD5: 66111e6cc2c482e78212e709b4fc98f9
Patched CRC32: C5761443
Patched MD5: 6dd571d4596755ad603002ba16372f30

Patch v1.1 | 2024-04-04

Filename: Prism Land Story (Japan).bin
Serial number: SLPS-01252
Database: Redump: Sony PlayStation
File/ROM SHA-1: 5DDF537AE8CDEFD7D6F255F1FBB511DA3EE719FE
File/ROM CRC32: 1683FC76