Hello and welcome to the Castlevania: Rondo of Blood English Translation Patch (PSP to TurboGrafx-CD). After many years of leaving this project abandoned I can happily say that this patch has reached it’s much needed 100% status! However the credits have not made it into this release of the patch (if ever) so in order to compensate for this inconvenience we have included the translation for the credits in the readme.
Rondo Duo -Yoake no Fortissimo- Punyu Puri ff / 輪舞曲Duo -夜明けのフォルテシモ- ぷにゅぷりff [English Patched, Version 1.06]. Re: Rondo Duo -fortissimo of dawn- punyupuri ff [RJ143025] Sorry for the month-long necro, but could anyone point me vaguely where to search for the english patch (not the 20GB patched game, just the english text) Thanks.
To make clear, this patch will translate the TurboGrafx-CD version of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood into English. Everything will be translated; even the voiced dialogue will be replaced with the official Konami English dub from Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (PSP). However miscellaneous grunts will retain their original Japanese.
It also replaces the old German narrator with the new narration that was in the PSP and VC release of the game. If you, for whatever reason, do not like this you can easily swap back the original narration (Track03) after it is done patching.
- 2019 Note*
The patch still has untranslated bits. The voice clips during the Death and Dracula fights are still in Japanese. The credits are also untranslated, but that part has already been mentioned by the author.
How to play Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (English Translation) using Retroarch with CRT Shaders
I was unable to find a good guide to playing this game. I finally got this working and had to share it somewhere on the internet. I haven't used CRT shaders before but this looks stunningly good using this setup. It is one of the best Castlevania games and should be played by any fans of the series! I’m sure most people in /r/emulation can figure it out but I wanted to post a guide for people like me anyway.
Note: you can also play the glorious remake on PSP and unlock the original to play on PSP. Also available untranslated on Wii Virtual Console.
I’ll refer to this guide from Lifehacker to get retroarch installed and running. Follow through Step 4.
Obtain the Rondo of Blood rom files in .bin / .cue or .iso / .cue format. There are pre-patched English iso’s out there (google rondo of blood english rom) and this is an easy solution. The pre-patched bin/cue ROM I found seemed to be an older patch version as the title screen and stage names were untranslated. Some English ROMs may be in the ISO/WAV/CUE format which requires .cue editing (see comment by GrieverV below for more info). The best way to play is using the final english patch from the romhacking.net link below.
If you can only find the Japanese rom (google rondo of blood rom) or want to try the final version of the English patch, the Japanese rom can be patched using the guide and files here: http://www.romhacking.net/translations/846/
The translation patch will have a folder named ‘for users with bin cue rips’ and inside that folder is a text file with instructions to patch the Japanese ROM.
Unfortunately, it will not produce a bin/cue file. What I had to do in this situation was to burn the .cue file produced by the translation utilities to a CD and then rip that CD to .bin/.cue format using IMGBurn. You could also try burning/mounting the .cue file to a virtual drive and then ripping to .bin / .cue format but I was unable to successfully do that.
(4). Google and download syscard3.pce and place it in the same folder as the Rondo of Blood ROM for PC Engine CD emulation. I’m not sure if it’s required but go ahead and copy syscard3.pce into the /system folder inside the Retroarch folder. I forgot where I got my file but the hashes generated by Hashtab are: MD5 FF1A674273FE3540CCEF576376407D1D and CRC32 64F78E3C
(5.) Open RetroArch (mine is 1.3.6) and go to Online Updater, Core Updater, and install a PC Engine core. I use Mednafen PCE Fast under the PC Engine category. Go to Load Content, Select File and Detect Core, Choose the Rondo of Blood .cue ROM file, Choose the Mednafen PCE Fast emulator core and it SHOULD launch the game!
(6.) Once in game take a look at some of the phenomenal CRT shaders that have been developed by the community. From the “Quick Menu” go to Shaders, Load Shader Preset, shaders_cg, crt. Some of my personal favorites are crt-easymode.cgp, crt-hyllian.cgp, and crt-royale.cgp.
I edited the crt-easymode.cgp file and turned brightness boost to 1.3.
(7.) Pics of 3 above shaders: http://imgur.com/a/2PgVD