I have a Japanese import game (Tama) and I was surprised to find that it would work in my US Saturn with no adaptor. So I looked at the boot sector on the disk. Well instead of just one letter, starting at byte 64 was the sequence: JTUBKAEL
And starting at byte 3584 were eight corresponding messages:
For JAPAN.
For TAIWAN and PHILIPINES.
For USA and CANADA.
For BRAZIL.
For KOREA.
For ASIA PAL area.
For EUROPE.
For LATIN AMERICA.
So I decided to see if this would work on another import disk. First I added the other seven letters after the J at byte 64. Then I added the other seven strings after the "For JAPAN." (Yes, you have to do both.) Finally I noticed that there were a few bytes after the "For JAPAN." and I moved this to the end of the eight messages. (The game wouldn't boot without it.) And it worked perfectly. Yay.
It seems like this would make the perfect all-region hack. Except when I tried this on another game (Princess Crown) there wasn't room for the other seven messages. There was a bunch of code following the "For JAPAN." You can still replace "JAPAN" with something else, but is there any way to do a universal region hack that will work with all games?
And starting at byte 3584 were eight corresponding messages:
For JAPAN.
For TAIWAN and PHILIPINES.
For USA and CANADA.
For BRAZIL.
For KOREA.
For ASIA PAL area.
For EUROPE.
For LATIN AMERICA.
So I decided to see if this would work on another import disk. First I added the other seven letters after the J at byte 64. Then I added the other seven strings after the "For JAPAN." (Yes, you have to do both.) Finally I noticed that there were a few bytes after the "For JAPAN." and I moved this to the end of the eight messages. (The game wouldn't boot without it.) And it worked perfectly. Yay.
It seems like this would make the perfect all-region hack. Except when I tried this on another game (Princess Crown) there wasn't room for the other seven messages. There was a bunch of code following the "For JAPAN." You can still replace "JAPAN" with something else, but is there any way to do a universal region hack that will work with all games?