I got tired of waiting for others to translate the games I wanted to play, so guess what? I did it myself. I’m very interested in translating arcade games that are already available in English on other platforms, and KoF97 is one of my all-time favs, so the choice was obvious.
My knowledge in coding and ROM hacking is quite limited, but the advent of AI has come to help us improve.
The hacking was done with the help of Claude AI, but the inserted texts are the original ones from SNK.
The translation is a port of the official Neo Geo script, specifically from the Neo Geo CD, so nothing was grammatically corrected and the texts are in all their Engrish glory.
I also added subtitles for Yuki’s line at the end of the Sacred Treasures Team ending, which got Japanese voice acting on the consoles but had no subtitles.
Besides porting the translation, I made some QoL changes to fix things that have bothered me for years:
- The game’s texts originally run at the speed of light. The writing speed was reduced by 2x and the on-screen time was increased by 2x. Credits screen texts were not changed.
- The story texts for edited teams, which appear before the credits, also had their scrolling speed reduced by 2x.
- You can now skip the credits by pressing Start.
- All the secret characters are enabled by default, no codes needed.
- Demo Cut is enabled by default in Options, along with all endings, no need to finish the game to get them.
- Removed the timers from the character select and fighting order select screens.
- The voices on the Saturn port have a higher pitch, resulting in thinner voices than it's Arcade original. I fixed the pitch of all voices in the game, and they now match or come close to the Neo Geo CD ones.
- A programming error by SNK left the Monaco stage out of the Vs fights. This stage was added to the roulette and can now be fought on normally.
- The Japan stage had an algorithm that made it rarely appear in Vs. That was fixed, and it now has the same % as the other stages.
- Added the stages of the 4 bosses (variations of the Orochi New Faces Team and Orochi) to the Vs stage select roulette. These stages are no longer exclusive to the Single Player modes.
4MB Patch: I’ve made a 4MB-compatible version, and I highly recommend playing it. This is not the YZB hack; it’s a new one I made myself. It’s impossible to get rid of loading entirely, because the console’s RAM plus the cartridge’s RAM can’t hold all the data for the six characters plus the fixed elements. I prioritized shorter load times between character changes, so the cart preloads half of the fighters’ data before the match and loads the rest between rounds. If you use a Saroo, load times are even faster.
It includes everything above, plus:
-Much faster load times. The first load before the match will be a bit longer than usual because it’s caching half of the characters’ data. Subsequent rounds load significantly faster.
-No more long loading before the character select screen, so there’s no longer any reason to enable Demo Cut.
-CD files sorted for faster loading when using burned CDR.
-Since the game finishes loading before most of the loading bars fill up, I disabled some of them.
I used the .ips format for the patch. Use Lunar IPS to apply it to “King of Fighters ’97, The (Japan) (Track 01).bin” (redump).
I tested this extensively on real hardware using a CD-R, a Saroo, an original 4MB cart, and an Action Replay 4MB cart, as well as on the Ymir emulator. I found no issues, but let me know if you run into any.
My knowledge in coding and ROM hacking is quite limited, but the advent of AI has come to help us improve.
The hacking was done with the help of Claude AI, but the inserted texts are the original ones from SNK.
The translation is a port of the official Neo Geo script, specifically from the Neo Geo CD, so nothing was grammatically corrected and the texts are in all their Engrish glory.
I also added subtitles for Yuki’s line at the end of the Sacred Treasures Team ending, which got Japanese voice acting on the consoles but had no subtitles.
Besides porting the translation, I made some QoL changes to fix things that have bothered me for years:
- The game’s texts originally run at the speed of light. The writing speed was reduced by 2x and the on-screen time was increased by 2x. Credits screen texts were not changed.
- The story texts for edited teams, which appear before the credits, also had their scrolling speed reduced by 2x.
- You can now skip the credits by pressing Start.
- All the secret characters are enabled by default, no codes needed.
- Demo Cut is enabled by default in Options, along with all endings, no need to finish the game to get them.
- Removed the timers from the character select and fighting order select screens.
- The voices on the Saturn port have a higher pitch, resulting in thinner voices than it's Arcade original. I fixed the pitch of all voices in the game, and they now match or come close to the Neo Geo CD ones.
- A programming error by SNK left the Monaco stage out of the Vs fights. This stage was added to the roulette and can now be fought on normally.
- The Japan stage had an algorithm that made it rarely appear in Vs. That was fixed, and it now has the same % as the other stages.
- Added the stages of the 4 bosses (variations of the Orochi New Faces Team and Orochi) to the Vs stage select roulette. These stages are no longer exclusive to the Single Player modes.
4MB Patch: I’ve made a 4MB-compatible version, and I highly recommend playing it. This is not the YZB hack; it’s a new one I made myself. It’s impossible to get rid of loading entirely, because the console’s RAM plus the cartridge’s RAM can’t hold all the data for the six characters plus the fixed elements. I prioritized shorter load times between character changes, so the cart preloads half of the fighters’ data before the match and loads the rest between rounds. If you use a Saroo, load times are even faster.
It includes everything above, plus:
-Much faster load times. The first load before the match will be a bit longer than usual because it’s caching half of the characters’ data. Subsequent rounds load significantly faster.
-No more long loading before the character select screen, so there’s no longer any reason to enable Demo Cut.
-CD files sorted for faster loading when using burned CDR.
-Since the game finishes loading before most of the loading bars fill up, I disabled some of them.
I used the .ips format for the patch. Use Lunar IPS to apply it to “King of Fighters ’97, The (Japan) (Track 01).bin” (redump).
I tested this extensively on real hardware using a CD-R, a Saroo, an original 4MB cart, and an Action Replay 4MB cart, as well as on the Ymir emulator. I found no issues, but let me know if you run into any.
