Nintama Rantarou 64 Game Gallery English Patch Rev. 1.0

Introduction:
  Arguably the worst Nintendo 64 title not produced by Titus, "Nintama Rantarou 64 Game Gallery" is a collection of three different types of simple puzzle games targeting a young audience.  Unreactive controls and incomplete features have reduced the game to obscurity.  Now you too can be frustrated at this license tie-in from the comfort of your native language.
  All instances of written Japanese have been rendered into English.  Voice has not been touched, nor any of the myriad of tile layout problems, improper priority levels, gameplay issues, or incomplete features.


Patching:
  The patch will only apply to a ROM in native byte order (big-endian).  Attempting to patch something else will result in a completely unhelpful checksum error.  Xdelta patches can be applied with the aptly-named xdelta patcher found, predictably, at xdelta.org.

Nintama Rantarou 64 Game Gallery (Japan).n64
Internal checksum:
CD3C3CDF 317793FA
MD5:
B04957D052EF850C5EDECE69DB7377B3
SHA-512:
208F386720D085CBE0437630E5D58F2BADA7E71FC40281DB78043A048D5FE0DA1E196E80E0A4D0F01870F60CFE34D7DF6C8BB9BC7E1CF5A4D522D9190868A4B4


Localization Notes:
  As your friendly neighbor weeaboo will be quick to point out, "Ninja Boy" is a localization of "Nintama" used by the English-language manga release.  "Nintama" is a contraction (or whatever) of "ninja" and "tamago", Japanese for egg.  Basically, their students are like eggs, then grow from hatchlings into proper ninja.
  Throughout "nintama" has been converted to "student"--how it's used.  In particular, difficulty settings have been converted from the literal "nintama" & "sensei" to "student" & "teacher".  Yes, sensei can be a loaded term but no, in this case it isn't.
  Remember PAL localizers to change "ninja" to "hero" ;*)

  "Exciting Jigsaw" was reduced to "Jigsaw Fun" to fit the display width.  Likewise, "Challenge! Quick Cube" was reduced to "Cube Challenge!".  One instance of "Stage" was converted to "Level".

  A number of suppressed or unused images were also translated (see below), which may or may not be accurate to their use; examples would be pluralization when necessary, or fitting a particular gameplay mode.  You won't see these normally, but they are present.

  The color balance is wrong on inserted parts of the updated game previews.  It's fixable-ish but a huge hassle.  Sorry to disappoint.  Blame colorspaces and monitor profiles.


Other Notes:
  *) Quick Cube runs slow on console--the in-game timer runs at half speed--and much, much slower under most emulation thanks to all the disk thrashing.  They aren't buffering animation frames, and Rantarou's animations make up over a quarter the total size of the ROM.
  *) There is no way to quit the Jigsaw Fun Challenge mode.  You will need to turn off the power or press reset.  Likewise, there is no way to abort a 2P Quick Cube game.

  This game was not completed before release.
  There's a huge pile of used but suppressed content.  Some of this rolls over from "Nintama Rantarou GB - Eawase Challenge Puzzle", released by Culture Brain for GameBoy in 1998.  In particular, there's a stack of additional Cube features that remain unused, such as displays for "Zone" & "Cubes", plus additional rulesets in 2P Cube.  Changing the flags on the tile instance will draw many of these to the screen, though it won't activate the scripting that should have updated them.
  Pause menus had a purple background and options to continue, quit, or retry.  The hand select pointer moved between the available options.
  The high score screen has suppressed "IQ=" labels, the value being a decimal number.
  All games had options screens attached to them, and most had additional options.  Quick Cube 2P had difficulty settings, and Quick Cube 1P had the option to continue a game or start from the beginning.  The Jigsaw mode also had the continue options.
  Drop & Plop's option menu contains buttons for 1P and 2P games.  2P can be activated by setting the byte at 801FF0EC nonzero.  After drawing the field, it will crash as soon as gameplay starts due to a break following division by zero.
  There is one additional unused menu, displaying a time & stage count plus (arguably) puzzles completed, all on a wood slat background.  It may be a results page for Jigsaw mode, presuming it could end in some way.
  The mempak management screen and Controller Pak messages from the Hiryuu no Ken series were included as well, likely by accident when the "no controller" message was inserted.  Page sizes are all given as 00.  The sprite sheet used was from a PSX version judging from the included buttons.  The mempak manager was excised from this translation.
  There are many other smaller elements that can't be tied to a known menu or a particular purpose.  Most prominent is an animated bomb (~14 frames) with a long multipart fuse and lit end graphic.  Two different shuriken backgrounds are unused.  There are different-sized image sets untied to any game mode.

-Zoinkity
