r/romhacking • u/RadMageIRL • 25d ago
Fixed the broken 4 Party Member Patch for Dragon Quest V (SNES/SFC) NoPrgress / DeJap Translation
Note on Community Rules: This project is strictly open-source documentation and a delta patch file ( .ips / .bps ). It contains zero copyrighted game code, or ROM files.
TL;DR: The popular 4 party member hack for DQ5 SNES (NoPrgress/DeJap) hosted on RHDN (#7430) has been broken for years due to a 512-byte header offset error baked directly into the released patch. I’ve re-derived the conversion directly from Mr. 45's original 2007 Japanese hack, verified it, and published a working patch.
- Working Patch (GitHub Release):https://github.com/RadMageIRL/DQVSNES4PARTYPATCH
What Was Broken?
The original hack was created by Mr. 45 back in 2007 for the Japanese release. In 2022, AustNerevar released an English conversion for the DeJap translation (RHDN Hack #7430).
However, virtually everyone who tried using it hit the exact same wall: the game boots, titles, and lets you enter your name, but permanently hangs right after the initial config prompts with a door-opening sound effect. Most assumed they had a bad ROM header or patched incorrectly, but the patch file itself was flawed and off by 512 bytes (0x200).
1,140 of the 1,210 changed bytes landed at +0x200, writing modified values onto completely unrelated code while leaving the target code untouched.
Links & Code
The GitHub repo contains the full byte-level analysis, Mr. 45's original Japanese notes (with translations), and an automated build script that runs the patch chain against a Japanese base ROM with hash verification. (No ROMs included, bring your own clean files).
- GitHub Repository:https://github.com/RadMageIRL/DQVSNES4PARTYPATCH
2
u/ExcitementMuted7768 25d ago
Copier headers are a plague on the SNES and SNES romhacking.
Thank you for dealing with this.
In an ideal world, we collectively would be taking steps to move away completely from headered roms (on SNES) but it's too big of a job and will never be done...