I just did some research on this game for Segaretro and thought it sounded interesting, so decided to take a look at the CD-ROM image.
Virus is a cyberpunk adventure game for the Sega Saturn, developed as a joint venture between Hudson Soft, Sega, and the Japanese animation firm Avex. The game is described as a "hybrid adventure" since it incorporates both point-and-click and action elements. While the adventure segments are FMV like Enemy Zero and similar games, when the player enters cyberspace to battle the game switches to real time 3D.
It seemed they had lofty plans, since the animated segments are obviously high-budget, and an anime was made based on this Saturn-exclusive game. While the game got decent reviews it wasn't successful.
Text in the game appears to be simply encoded in Shift JIS, extended with some special control markers.
I was able to dump the Japanese script quite easily, using bin2iso and jstrings. I did my best to clean up false positives, but some small amount remains:
https://washbear.neocities.org/misc/virus-script.txt
The following files contain Shift JIS text:
It has 3 CD-ROMs. Each CD-ROM seems to have identical text, so the extra space is probably only used for FMVs and similar space-intensive content.
This is the first line of text that appears in the game:
It appears at 0x00019de0 in virus.bin. So this is the byte sequence:
The inserted ASCII came up blank so we need to convert our English text to fullwidth Shift JIS. I did this using online tools and the command line program iconv.
And it works!
There is a lot of text (over 20,000 lines), and a lot of voiced FMVs. Making this playable in English would be a huge project requiring freelance translators to be hired.
Virus is a cyberpunk adventure game for the Sega Saturn, developed as a joint venture between Hudson Soft, Sega, and the Japanese animation firm Avex. The game is described as a "hybrid adventure" since it incorporates both point-and-click and action elements. While the adventure segments are FMV like Enemy Zero and similar games, when the player enters cyberspace to battle the game switches to real time 3D.
It seemed they had lofty plans, since the animated segments are obviously high-budget, and an anime was made based on this Saturn-exclusive game. While the game got decent reviews it wasn't successful.
Text in the game appears to be simply encoded in Shift JIS, extended with some special control markers.
I was able to dump the Japanese script quite easily, using bin2iso and jstrings. I did my best to clean up false positives, but some small amount remains:
https://washbear.neocities.org/misc/virus-script.txt
The following files contain Shift JIS text:
- 1st_read.prg
- ais_prog.bin
- polmap.bin
- polmap2.bin
- s11prog.bin
- s12prog.bin
- s13prog.bin
- s16prog.bin
- s17prog.bin
- s18bprog.bin
- s24prog.bin
- s2prog.bin
- s3prog.bin
- s4prog.bin
- s5prog.bin
- s7prog.bin
- s8prog.bin
- s9prog.bin
- subxprog.bin
- teshmes.bin
- virus.bin
It has 3 CD-ROMs. Each CD-ROM seems to have identical text, so the extra space is probably only used for FMVs and similar space-intensive content.
This is the first line of text that appears in the game:
m0420c3（２日前、俺は戦功特待で}1傭兵部隊}2ブルーメタル}を除隊し、n その足で}1ＳＴＡＮＤ捜査官}2ネットエージェント}に志願したIt appears at 0x00019de0 in virus.bin. So this is the byte sequence:
6d 30 34 32 30 63 33 81 69 82 51 93 fa 91 4f 81The inserted ASCII came up blank so we need to convert our English text to fullwidth Shift JIS. I did this using online tools and the command line program iconv.
And it works!
There is a lot of text (over 20,000 lines), and a lot of voiced FMVs. Making this playable in English would be a huge project requiring freelance translators to be hired.
Last edited:
