If you ever owned a Sega Dreamcast, you might be aware of Sonic Team's colourful rhythm game Samba De Amigo, about a maracas-shaking monkey who has a love of Latin music.
However, something you might not know is that Sega actually made another expanded version of the game, dubbed Samba De Amigo: Ver. 2000, which was also released on Dreamcast, but only in Japan. This version of the game featured extra songs, characters, and minigames, but unfortunately never reached Western players due to Sega stopping support for the struggling machine.
In 2008, the Nintendo Wii version of Samba De Amigo, released internationally, did eventually incorporate some of these new features. This gave those outside of Japan a taste of what they had missed. But now, it appears there is an even better option available for those who want to play something a little more akin to the original experience, with most of the barriers removed.
Earlier this month, the video game hacker dukeblooders released what they are calling an "English conversion" patch for the Dreamcast edition, giving English players a chance to play the title with English text available (as spotted by @CDRomance_Spike).
dukeblooders claims on GitHub that the patch is not necessarily a translation, with the hacker instead mostly using the existing US/PAL text from the Nintendo Wii version of the game to replace the original Japanese. As most of the text is presented via images in the game, this required them to try and reproduce the same color palette and font that Sega had used and adapt the assets they created to fit in the available space.
Some of the known issues with the patch that dukeblooders is already well aware of include the unconverted internet menu, the minigame Love Love's results still being in Japanese, and the voice for the volleyball minigame instructions being removed. It's also untested on original hardware, but dukeblooders expects that it should work, given it's just a sound and texture replacement.
Want to give it a try? You can download the .dcp file here from Romhacking.net. You'll need Universal Dreamcast Patcher in order to apply the patch. More information can be found on GitHub.