Somebody in the Saturn scene is having themselves a month.
Hot on the heels of his English translation for Arcade Gears Vol. 1: Pu·Li·Ru·La, romhacker KoolFiller has done the same for Volume 2: Gun Frontier. According to SEGA SATURN, SHIRO!, the patch dropped on October 1 via SegaXtreme — and like its sibling release, it doesn’t just translate the words.
For the uninitiated: Gun Frontier started life as a Taito arcade shooter in 1991, then got an exclusive Sega Saturn port about six years later, produced by Xing Entertainment and developed by Goo!. It’s a vertical-scrolling shoot-’em-up with a western theme where you pilot — I kid you not — a gun-shaped airplane. The Saturn port even includes a tate mode for vertical monitors, as any self-respecting shmup port should.
KoolFiller’s patch uses the official English arcade translation, with two small spelling corrections, and brings the intro and both the good and bad endings into English. The song titles in the sound test that were still in Japanese get translated too. And then he kept going: he cleaned up graphical issues, fixed the HUD in horizontal mode so it actually fits the screen, and added a save feature for high scores and settings — so you can have the game boot straight into arcade display mode if that’s your thing.
But my favourite detail is the cheat-code archaeology. The Saturn version hid its CREDIT and STAGE options behind a sequence that involved shooting your screen with a lightgun plugged into the second player controller port (a trick discovered by Bo Bayles — as one does). KoolFiller has now permanently unlocked both, so your lightgun can stay holstered.
And then there’s the real headline for hardware nerds: the game supports the Saturn shuttle mouse, and KoolFiller confirmed it working on real hardware. Left click for regular fire, middle click for bombs, right click for rapid fire. The movement speed doesn’t change, so you’ll want to clear your desk. “I’m not saying this is the best way to play the game,” he said. “But I think it’s cool.” Hard to disagree — when’s the last time you played a 1991 arcade shooter with a mouse?
One note for transparency: this is a patch-only release applied to your own copy of the Saturn disc — no grey-area downloads involved. And neither KoolFiller’s notes nor the SHIRO! report mention any AI tooling in this release, so there’s no disclosure to make on that front. Just old-fashioned hex editing.
Check out the patch’s trailer below:
Gun Frontier’s Saturn port never left Japan, so this is the first time English speakers can play it properly without guessing their way through the menus. With Arcade Gears Vol. 1 and 2 both translated now, KoolFiller has quietly finished a little duology nobody asked for and everybody wanted. Vol. 3: Wonder 3, if you’re listening, buddy.
Are you digging out your Saturn for this one, or is this a Mednafen evening?
Sources: SEGA SATURN, SHIRO! — “Gun Frontier Now in English on Saturn” and SHIRO!’s Saturn translation projects listing. The patch itself is available on SegaXtreme via the SHIRO! article.