Tamagotchi Park's Saturn English patch v1.1 drops its save data lock

Romhacker patchyfluffy has released version 1.1 of the English fan translation for Sega Saturn de Hakken!! Tamagotchi Park on GitHub, removing a hardware check that forced players to keep pre-loaded save data on a backup memory cartridge before creating new files. The initial English patch originally launched on ROMhacking.net on October 3, 2026, making the 1998 Japan-exclusive virtual pet game fully playable in English for the first time in 28 years.

Delivered as free BPS and IPS files for Track 1 of the Sega Saturn disc image, the translation covers all of the user interface menus, care options, character stat sheets, evolutionary family trees, and minigame instructions. You can see the localized menus and contests running in Slow Coin's gameplay showcase below.

A single hex edit fixes a 28-year-old headache

When Bandai and Sega co-published Sega Saturn de Hakken!! Tamagotchi Park in Japan on January 29, 1998 for 6,800 yen, the retail box came bundled with a specialized Pink Sega Saturn Backup Memory cartridge. That cartridge wasn't just a bonus accessory. It shipped with pre-formatted TAMAGOTCHI_ data that the disc actively checked for before allowing anyone to save their progress.

That meant anyone playing the game nearly three decades later on an emulator, an optical drive emulator, or a standard backup cartridge had to manually inject a blank save file before booting the disc. Patchyfluffy's initial release even bundled a blank save file in the project repository just to get around the lock. It worked, though remembering to pre-stage a dummy save file before booting a virtual pet game is the kind of multi-step chore that makes you wonder if the pets are really worth saving.

On October 11, fellow contributor privateye posted a solution in a GitHub issue that bypasses the check entirely. By going to offset 0x20B92 inside the disc's 0EXEC.BIN executable and replacing the instruction value 2ED0 with a 0009 no-operation command, the game no longer requires the proprietary TAMAGOTCHI_ file to initialize a save.

Players still need an emulated or physical backup memory cartridge inserted, because the game doesn't save to the Saturn's tiny internal memory, and privateye suggested updating the in-game warning text to reflect how it behaves now:

MEMORY WARNING: IF YOU PLAY WITHOUT A MEMORY CARTRIDGE, YOU CANNOT CREATE ANY SAVE FILES.

Raising a tiny pixelated Sonic

Following the November 1996 launch of Aki Maita and Akihiro Yokoi's original LCD keychain toy, Bandai licensed Tamagotchi spin-offs across the Game Boy, Nintendo 64, and PlayStation. None of those consoles got the Sega Saturn's specific crossover roster.

Because Sega co-published this installment, the park includes exclusive Tamagotchi evolutions modeled after classic Sega arcade and console mascots. Depending on how you feed, clean up after, and discipline your creatures, they can evolve into Sonictchi (a Tamagotchi with Sonic the Hedgehog's spikes), Opa-Opa from Fantasy Zone, Alex Kidd, Flicky, or Pengo.

Once raised, you can enter your pets into beauty contests, five-lane footraces, and IQ tests like the tile-matching game "Panel Bang!". Getting through those menus and branching evolution charts used to require navigating walls of Japanese text, and the translation team went back to patch out the save-file lock so people can actually raise an Alex Kidd pet without fighting the Saturn's memory manager first.