The SGGG Translation Team proudly presents

Before we dive into the rest of the README, we must start with a word of thanks.

This effort simply would not have been possible without the members of the Dreamcast-Talk community that started tackling the various technical challenges in 2022. It was they who hacked the main binary, allowing it to leverage ASCII and use the Dreamcast BIOS font, built tools for extracting & re-compressing the textures, built tools for easy text reinsertion, and basically paved the way for a monkey like me to spend my days drawing, translating, and playtesting.

So, with utmost thanks:

DREAMCAST HACKING HEROES

megavolt85 (ASM hacking)
MadSheep (ASM hacking/custom script tooling)
VincentNL (ASM hacking/custom tooling)
Derek Pascarella (ateam) (ASM hacking/custom tooling)

Continuing on with the README...no, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. You’re about to play SEGAGAGA—the fun, quirky, RPG/game development simulator for Sega Dreamcast—in English. And you’re in for a truly unique and special experience.

SEGAGAGA was released in March 2001 in Japan. Let’s put this into perspective: just two months earlier, on January 31, 2001, SEGA announced that it was stopping production of Dreamcast consoles and would begin developing software for competitor hardware. It was a massive announcement that made waves across the gaming industry. One of the seminal hardware titans of the past 20 years was bowing out of the hardware race. For SEGA fans, it was a sad day, and the uncertainty about what the future would bring lingered for a long time afterward. (That is, until SEGA started pumping out some seriously awesome games across the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube—many of which are considered classics today.)

Thus, SEGAGAGA was released on a console that was no longer being produced. It would never make it overseas to the North American or European markets. Most SEGA fans would only read about it in gaming magazines of yesteryear (like I did), regaled with stories of a unique RPG with sim-like elements that was packed with SEGA references, inside jokes, and humor.

As you’ll see, the game is everything its myth proclaims. It’s an earnest love letter to all things SEGA, with the player taking the role of Taro Sega in a quest to vanquish the evil Dogma, its fiendish sub-bosses, and finally put SEGA at the top of the videogame industry after decades of underdog status. While that is the main story thread, the game also has much to say about the challenges of game development and the videogame industry—topics that are arguably as relevant in today’s tumultuous market as they were in 2001. The game leaves all involved in game development with a timeless message:

Dreaming is humanity's last remaining privilege!
It's not truth that paves the way—it's hope!
If you forget that, you can't make games.

Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. About the Game
3. Screenshots
4. Patching Instructions
5. Extras
6. Helpful Tips & Resources
7. Team Credits
8. Messages From the Team
9. AI Notice
10. Reporting Issues
11. Known Issues
12. Release Changelog

Overview

This patch fully translates SEGAGAGA into English. Our aim was to produce a faithful translation of both the source text and the original art. Care and attention have been paid to even the smallest details—for example, like matching the stroke width of the original lettering in various textures.

With this in mind, SGGG is a uniquely Japanese game, and we want the verisimilitude to make it feel like you're guiding Taro Sega through his daily life at SoJ and not SoA. Thus, certain small things remain in Japanese, like the background billboards of Akihabara. You'll encounter many things that are specific to Japanese culture, so rather than shoehorning those into Western concepts, we've translated them as-is. Use it as an opportunity to learn...after all, there's a whole wide internet out there (and hours and hours of video content) for you to learn about topics you may come across in the game.

Savor the experience!

With that said, the following changes have made been to bring the game to English speakers:

• All in-game dialogue translated
• All chapter dialogue translated
• All cutscenes subtitled in English
• Staff credits translated
• New English subtitles for the SHMUP portion (c/o ASM Wizard VincentNL)
• All 500+ in-game UI textures redrawn in English
• Title Screen/Options/Chapter Interstitial screens redrawn in English
• All VMU save and application metadata translated in Dreamcast's BIOS menu save manager
• 25th Anniversary celebration added to opening splash screen
• Commemorative 25th Anniversary VMU icon during gameplay
• Original instruction manual translated and redrawn in faithful style to the original

About the Game

Original Title	Segagaga (セガガガ)
Localized Title	SEGAGAGA
Developer	Hitmaker Co., Ltd. / Thunder Stone Japan, Inc.
Publisher	SEGA
Original Release Date	2001-03-29
Supported Peripherals	Controller, VMU, VGA Box
Average Time to Completion	15 hours-ish (Main Story)

Screenshots

Patching Instructions

Grab your original SGGG discs off the shelf! The patch is offered in three varients. Two GDI options (a Universal Dreamcast Patcher .dcp patch file or an .xdelta file) and a CDI option (provided as an .xdelta file).

--> Important! Read Before Patching! <--

• Tested with SGGG - Segagaga v1.022 (2001)(Sega)(JP)(!) and SGGG - Segagaga (Japan) (aka TOSEC and Redump releases)
• DO NOT USE "v2.000" or "Rev A". Due to minor cut content, the patch was designed around v1.022 and will NOT work with v2.000.
• It's highly recommended that you start the game with a NEW save file, not one carried over from a Japanese copy. Sorry to those who've played the Japanese original, but with all the changes to the main binary, it's better to start from scratch to avoid potential issues.

Option 1 (Easy Mode): Universal Dreamcast Patcher GDI Format (Users of ODEs or Emulators) - DCP Patch

1. Download Universal Dreamcast Patcher (if you don't already have it)
2. Click 'Select GDI or CUE' to open the source disc image.
3. Click 'Select Patch' to locate and open the SEGAGAGA_English_Translation_v1.0.2.dcp DCP patch file.
4. Click 'Apply Patch' to generate the patched GDI, which will be saved in the folder from which the application is launched.
5. Click 'Quit' to exit the application.

Option 2: GDI Format (Users of ODEs or Emulators) - XDelta Patch

The XDelta patch file shipped with this release can be used with any number of Delta utilities, such as Delta Patcher. It targets track03.bin of the original TOSEC GDI or Redump GDI (MD5 checksum cbd9c06606b889926aa496639a309531).

1. Click the settings icon (appears as a gear), enable 'Checksum validation', and disable 'Backup original file'.
2. Click the 'Original file' browse icon and select the original track03.bin file.
3. Click the 'XDelta patch' browse icon and select the SEGAGAGA_English_Translation_v1.0.2.xdelta XDelta patch.
4. Click 'Apply patch' to overwrite the original track03.bin file with the patched version.
5. Verify that the patched track03.bin file has an MD5 checksum of f4a730e75b2e95482fa2f8d57865e1f2.

Option 3: CDI Format (Users burning to CD-R for play in a Dreamcast console) - XDelta Patch

This XDelta patch is compatible with the existing CDI release that has a MD5 checksum of 2712f4ddce1a6b358bd7904d4435052a.

Note that the CDI release has reduced movie quality so that it can fit onto a CD-R. The GDI options above are the ideal way to play.

1. Click the settings icon (appears as a gear), enable 'Checksum validation', and disable 'Backup original file'.
2. Click the 'Original file' browse icon and select the original Sega Gaga (Japan).cdi file.
3. Click the 'XDelta patch' browse icon and select the SEGAGAGA_English_Translation_CDI_v1.0.2.xdelta XDelta patch.
4. Click 'Apply patch' to generate the new .cdi file (the resulting file size will be around 677 MB)

Extras

SEGAGAGA Instruction Manual	A complete recreation of the Japanese instruction manual that came with the game.
SEGAGAGA Soundtrack	SEGAGAGA has a vibetastic soundtrack composed by Tsuyoshi Kaneko. It will get stuck in your head. It is also available for purchase via Amazon JP.
SGGG Papercraft	Originally hosted on the JP SGGG website, the SGGG papercraft lets you build your own SEGA consoles from paper.

The following optional .DCP patches contain custom disc artwork that will display in the Dreamcast BIOS. Simply apply whatever .DCP patch you download to the patched game image using Universal Dreamcast Patcher.

BLACK		Classy and dressed for the occassion. [Patch default]
HEROES		Depicts the hero and heroine of Project Segagaga, Taro and Yayoi.
128-bit		The Dreamcast in all its 128-bit glory. Inspired by the SGGG papercraft which itself was inspired by the design of the Mega Drive.
SYSTEMS		Showcases the legacy of SEGA hardware. Inspired by the "SGGG Sound Truck Collection" originally found on the JP SGGG website.
SOUNDTRACK		Inspired by the covers of the SGGG Soundtrack Collection.
JP DEFAULT		The default 0GDTEX.PVR that comes with the Japanese version of SGGG.

Helpful Tips & Resources

Helpful Tips

• All currency in SEGAGAGA is denominated in yen (¥). Once your development budgets become sufficiently large, you'll start to encounter number formats that have no direct equivalent in English. For example, Japanese uses 万 to represent “10,000,” and 億 to represent “100,000,000.” The closest English analogues would be something like “K” for thousand or “MM” for million, but there’s no true one-to-one match. Since we don’t have access to the game’s source code, tracing and converting every internal calculation into an English-style numbering system wasn’t feasible. Instead, we created a simple letter-based notation to help you interpret yen amounts. For example, if you see a value such as 10T200¥, that corresponds to 100,200 yen. So, remember:

T	10,000 ¥
M	100,000,000 ¥

• SEGAGAGA has multiple endings and a lot of unlockable archive content that's impossible to acquire in a single playthrough. If you intend to see all of it, then expect to play through the game multiple times. If you're not a completionist but do want to see the true ending, then you'll need to acquire 100% market share.
• On your first playthrough, don't stress yourself too much when it comes to acquiring 100% market share. It is possible to achieve, but doing so requires a fair bit of knowledge of how the simulation works, which isn't likely to be quickly mastered by a first-time player. Just enjoy the story and experiment a bit in the game dev simulation to learn what you can, then apply what you learn on a subsequent playthrough if you want to try again for 100%.
• The most important thing to focus on for the first play is to simply keep the company afloat. Make sure that you don't completely run out of money and that your market share never drops all the way to 0%. If you can just survive the three-year SGGG project cycle, then it counts as a "clear," and successfully clearing the game will grant you extra money and other perks on your next playthrough, which will make achieving 100% share much easier.
• Wisely handling the company's finances is what requires the most strategy, as running out of money is what poses the biggest threat of a Game Over to a first-time player. In the very early phases, make sure that you're not spending superfluously and doing things like hiring staff at very high salaries or keeping far more staff on your research bench than what you need. Once you've released a game or two and have hopefully built up a little bit of a financial cushion, you can start spending on extras, such as equipment upgrades to develop your next games more quickly or advertising campaigns to make them sell better.

Resources

SGGG Perfect Guide	Contains a walkthrough of the game, enemy stats, developer interviews and insights, pre-production art, reference explanations, and more.
SEGAGAGA TCRF Entry	A collection of interesting content that was cut from the final game but discovered in the game files.
Debug Modes	SEGAGAGA has a couple interesting debug modes. Bo Bayles has detailed how to access them in this Rings of Saturn article.
HUGA Studio	If you love the vibe of SEGAGAGA, be sure to check out more of producer Tez Okano's work at his newest venture, HUGA Studio. His latest game, The Girl from GUNMA Kai, is a love letter to SHMUPS and the MSX!

Want to do your own translation of SEGAGAGA? All the tools are now available:

SGGG_BIN_Translation	Allows for the updating of game text found in the main binary (1_SGGG.BIN).
SGGG_MES	Allows for updating text found in SGGG's MES files (pre and post-chapter dialogue scenes).
SGGGE	Allows for extraction and reinsertion of SGGG's textures.
NinjaSubs	Allows for the insertion of custom subtitles into scenes that otherwise did not have subs.
Font Sheet Location	For translation teams that need custom characters for their languages, the game's font sheet can easily be viewed and edited in Crystal Tile 2 at the following address in 1_SGGG.BIN.

Team Credits

Project Lead

• Exxistance

Romhacking / Tooling

• megavolt85
• MadSheep
• VincentNL
• Derek Pascarella (ateam)

Translation / Review

• Exxistance
• LostinLoc
• TeDNeo
• Duralumin

Editors

• Exxistance

Texture Artists

• Exxistance
• mr.nobody
• CWM

Video Editing & Subtitling

• mr.nobody
• Exxistance

QA

• Exxistance
• Danthrax
• rasputin3000
• zeed64

Manual Recreation

• Exxistance

My Deepest Thanks

• My SGGG teammates (seriously, you all are amazing and it has been a joy to work with you!)
• Tez Okano and the original development team (for putting your heart, soul, and time into making a unique game that has entranced a fanbase for 25 years.)
• MoriyaMug (who doesn’t know me at all, but whose dedication to the Samurai Shodown RPG translation shows that passion and willpower can make all the difference in a project. Thank you for bringing SSRPG to English and fulfilling a 20+ year dream of mine to play it.)
• Those Who Came Before (A huge thank you to those who came before and paved the way with all the Segagaga artifacts that they left on the Internet. The 1 Ross and the SGGG Open Source Translation project, Prof_Rev and kinsukeJP of GameFAQs with their guides, whoever uploaded the SGGG Perfect Guide to IA).
• LewisJFC (For jumping aboard to provide minor proofreading discussion)

Messages From the Team

Exxistance

I’ve been a SEGA fan since I was a kid. Though my first video game console may have been an NES, I still vividly remember first experiencing Altered Beast on the Genesis at my friend’s house. The Genesis was such a step up from the NES, the games so cool, that it led me to buying my first SEGA console–the Game Gear (the only one I could afford, and which I bought via layaway at Kmart).

Many years later, when the Model 1 and 2 boards were wowing me at the arcades during my formative teenage years, the Saturn arrived with the enticing promise of bringing those arcade experiences to the home. I was exactly the kind of buyer SEGA wanted: someone not burned by their previous hardware flops, the 32X and Sega CD. The Saturn represented the beautiful 32-bit future in my eyes and “arcade perfect” Virtua Cop at home. I had a lot of love for Saturn–and still do. (Thanks to the vibrant translation community, I find myself enjoying it even more these days, thanks to previously Japanese-only games receiving English translations.)

With this historical context in mind, every few years I’d do some googling about the latest news of a Segagaga translation. Over a holiday break in December 2024, I found myself reading through a thread about Segagaga on Dreamcast-Talk. Somewhere between the hopeful posts and despairing ones, there were a few individuals talking about things like tools and data extraction. One of these individuals posted a texture extraction tool, and in my boredom, I decided to download it and take a quick look at Segagaga’s textures.

And that decision right there–just a small, random moment of boredom–is a key reason why you’re playing Segagaga in English right now.

You see, while my day job is not in graphic design, I studied it in high school and college, and so I like to spend my free time making game covers for SteamGridDB and such. When I started looking through SGGG’s textures, I realized that the game had an enormous amount of text baked into the textures, much of it as user interface elements. All the primary actions of the player, for example, are drawn into the UI rather than being simple text elements that can be updated in the game files. Merely translating the game text alone would not provide a player with the context they need to comfortably play the game in English.

I decided to do a test. I would edit one of the textures in Photoshop, and use Flycast’s texture replacement feature to insert it into the game. And lo and behold, it worked beautifully. I was looking at an English-readable texture in Segagaga! This, however, was only the first step in what would be a year-long journey.

I started extracting all the textures and figuring out which needed translation. My thought was, I’ve got my 25 year-old Photoshop skills, I like using them in my spare time, so this should be a therapeutic hobbyist project. And at the very least, I’ll remove at least one barrier for anyone else in the future that may want to tackle the rest of the game. I looked at the list of 500+ textures and started pulling a few of the core ones to get started.

While the prospect seemed daunting, I was enjoying the work. And a funny thing happened along the way. As I started posting regular updates in Dreamcast-Talk, people started reaching out to me. One of those people was mr.nobody, who immediately jumped in to help redrawing the textures. mr.nobody also spun up a Discord server and started connecting the key players together. Translators jumped in. Playtesters. This translation became a worldwide effort, with people across the globe working together to finally bring Segagaga to English-speaking audiences.

For all the bad the Internet has wrought, it’s projects like these that renew my faith in it. No one had to help out. For some Dreamcast hackers, RPGs aren’t even their favorite genre. But they helped nonetheless, perhaps because they love the Dreamcast, or they love the challenge, or they love gaming. Whatever the reason, they put their faith in me — some random stranger on an Internet forum — to help get this project to the finish line. And so, nearly every day since January, I’ve been working on SGGG. It’s a little bittersweet that the project is coming to an end, as it’s been a source of great joy for the past year. It’s given me a motivation I didn’t know I needed, helped push my design skills farther, and helped me crack ROM hacking concepts that I had always struggled to learn. Though it's coming to a close, I’m excited to see the fans who have clamored to play SGGG in English for so long finally get to enjoy it in the same way I have throughout the past year. The game is better than I had expected before starting this project; it’s so much deeper and more nuanced than the “SEGA references game” I anticipated, and I hope you discover the same.

Derek Pascarella (ateam)

Segagaga has something of a sordid history in the fan translation scene. At least two separate groups have made sincere (public) attempts to develop a full English localization patch over the years, though of course neither saw the project through to completion.

For a while now, there’s been a thread on the Dreamcast-Talk.com forums where several of us have shared technical bits and pieces about Segagaga in order to amass and preserve such knowledge should any group decide to tackle patching it. Collectively, we had native ASCII support (including a half-width font tile spacing hack), tools to extract/rebuild archives using custom compression, as well as a text extractor/rebuilder.

It might be worth noting that I myself considered endeavoring to lead this project myself once or twice, but I stopped myself for a number of reasons beyond the scope of this write-up.

Though at some point along the way, Exxistance saw what was available to him and decided he would do something about it. Once his project started gaining some momentum, Mr. Nobody reached out to see if I could potentially assist with things like hacking or tool writing. While many of you might know me for the many English translation patches I’ve developed for the Dreamcast (and other platforms) over the years, my free time as of writing this message is at an all-time low. As a result, not only was there zero chance of me leading this project, but I felt the odds of me being able to contribute anything meaningful to it were quite low too.

That assumption turned out to be untrue, however.

While I may have done a lot less for this project than I’d have liked, I’m happy that I was able to contribute a few key things that helped the patch finally see a release…

• Ability to edit font glyphs
  One of the biggest challenges this game presented to prospective patch developers has been its use of the BIOS font. See, rather than the game bundling in its own font sheet in some format that hackers can easily write tools to edit (e.g., insert their own Latin alphabet glyphs), Segagaga speaks directly to the Dreamcast’s BIOS when it comes time to render text on screen. After megavolt85 did all of the assembly hacking to force the game to interpret ASCII-encoded text and then pull from the ASCII section of the BIOS font (rather than Shift-JIS), I started poking around a bit to see how it all worked.

  What I discovered is that the game actually copies the entirety of the BIOS font into RAM pretty near the location where the game executable ends! So, I disabled the assembly code that performed this copy, then also disabled the code that null’d out that portion of RAM before doing the copy. I then appended the BIOS font to the end of the game executable, and just like that, the font data was precisely where the game expected it to be, and it could be modified! This came in handy a number of times as font glyphs needed tweaking for optimal appearance.

• Ability to expand available space for executable-embedded text strings
  After the modifications to the font system described above, I realized that we now had tons of free space in the game executable. Why, or how? Well, because only a fraction of all of that BIOS font data (i.e., ASCII) was actually being used, the rest of that space could be repurposed (i.e., where Shift-JIS once was).

  Because of this, I was able to give the team a giant, static place in memory where the game’s many, many executable-embedded text strings could now be safely written. If not for this hack, there’d be not nearly enough room to store the translated versions of those strings, resulting in a much poorer quality presentation.

All of that being said, the real credit belongs to Exxistance and the rest of the team who worked so tirelessly to see their vision through to completion. While this English translation patch release for Segagaga isn’t absolutely perfect, it’s very, very good, and there’s a saying: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. There are a few minor text alignment issues here and there, as well as a limitation for maximum number of characters printed per line in a dialogue box. I’d love to carve out a whole bunch of free time someday in the future to fix all of these, but honestly the prospect of doing such isn’t great. Until then, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank the Segagaga translation patch team, and I hope all of you, the players, enjoy experiencing it in English for the very first time.

AI Notice

Due to the importance of SEGAGAGA to the fan translation community, I think it’s important to disclose where AI was used in the development of this translation patch.

What I call the “playtesting translation” — a base translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get started early and understand what they were working on — was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review. I don't think that the end product feels “machine-translated,” but that’s ultimately for you, the player, to judge.

For the purists, we’re also offering the tools used to develop the translation, so if you are a translator who wants to do your very own translation of SEGAGAGA, you now have the means to do so! Check out the Resources section to get them.

The beauty of the fan translation community is that people are always refining and developing new translations and giving them back to the community. Go forth and prosper!

Reporting Issues

While the patch has been thoroughly tested for months and months, the universe loves a good joke, and stuff always gets through. Please report typos, mispellings, text overruns, and the like by submitting a new issue to this repo.

Known Issues

There are currently no known issues.

Release Changelog

• Version 1.0.2 (04/10/2026)

  • Technical Fixes:
    • PAL 60 Hz support
      • Courtesy of ateam, this release removes the 50 hz cap and black borders for users on PAL consoles when using cables other than the VGA cable
    • Fixed text overrun in SIMEVT when attempting to hire an outsourcing contractor that already has a project in-progress
  • Translation:
    • Corrected typo of “Cool” in NEWS11.SFD
    • Fixed R&D C “Safety” banner and accompanying battle background textures
    • Fixed several spelling errors in Archives game descriptions and MES files

• Version 1.0.1 (03/5/2026)

  • Fixed Bugs:
    • Fixed malformed pointer that caused the wrong text string to appear after the release score dialogue for games released in August and December
    • Fixed 14 spelling errors
    • Fixed untranslated texture in uhhh...without spoilers...one of the shops
  • Translation Improvements:
    • Fixed “Marry” SIMEVT event variable translations with updated and more readable “playful censorship” names
    • Updated item name and matching texture from “Polyvitamin E” to “Polivitan E” to match play on words of IRL brand.
    • Various other minor nips and tucks.

• Version 1.0 (02/27/2026)

  • Initial release.