for Game Boy Advance English fan translation (coming soon)
Update November 4, 2024: The editing tools are coming along well, I think they might be finished by the end of the year. Script polishing and testing will come after. Here's hoping the patch comes out in 2025!
Released in 2005, developed by Mistic Software and published by Atari SA, and based on the series of Franco-Belgian comics with an animated TV series adaptation. The game is about Kid, legendary(?) gamer, entering a contest at City Game to win the creatively-named Ultra 3000 VR console. To do this, you'll need to practice with the help of Big Bang in order to win the tournament at the arcade. These games are really difficult...
One day I (Onfy) was feeling nostalgic about the Kid Paddle cartoon, which I grew up watching on Teletoon here in Canada, dubbed in English. Nothing of the English dub was available online at the time, but it was still nice to see it again. (Since then some of the English dub has unofficially surfaced online!) I discovered the GBA game (only in French and Dutch) and the original comics (only in French and some other languages) and looking at the rom in a text editor, I realized the game's text is somewhat simple to edit. Well, that was maybe deceptive. But I was learning French and I always wanted to translate a game, and the GBA is one of my favourite consoles, so I thought this would be perfect. It went horribly!
Fast forward many years, I'm much better at hacking software, programming, and French. I meet a friend online who also grew up watching Kid Paddle in English and we end up both becoming interested in the series again. It's then that I remember this game and decide to see again if I can translate it. This time how the rom is assembled looks much more obvious to me. I extracted the game's text, banged out a quick preliminary translation, and started inserting text into the rom to see how it'd look in English, all without needing to worry about the length of the new text. Things were going great, so I uploaded a video to demonstrate the progress I made.
And then I realized how totally nuts I was for trying to edit the rom's codes by hand with a hex editor. Computer does math, not human brain!
After this I vowed to learn the skills needed to write a program to automatically replace the rom's text for me, feeling this would be needed to make the translation in a more professional manner. After this the project sat around with, sorry to say, almost no progress for over year. In September 2024 I finally felt a spark, that I should try learning C and use that to write the tool. As I was getting started I was talking to Vaporeon who it turns out is a very talented C programmer and ended up helping me out by writing most of the logic for converting the game's text. All from just a copy of it ripped from the rom and barely any description from me... you really should thank them for this!
As for the current status, I still need to draw the rest of the owl write the rest of the program. This could take quite a number of months, to learn the required skills. After that, I need to polish the translation, fixing mistakes and generally improving the English text to sound natural and faithful to the English dub of the TV series. Aside from that, there's a small extra amount of rom hacking that needs to be done, and finally testing everything to make sure it works as it should. I hope I don't keep you waiting too long! Thanks for reading this.
This is an unofficial fanmade website. It is not associated with Midam, Dupuis, Teletoon, Atari, Nintendo, or really anyone who has the slightest bit of relevance to Kid Paddle.