Ace Attorney's GBA original is now fully playable in English, using Capcom's own DS script

A fan patch for the 2001 Gyakuten Saiban backports the official English text, graphics and voices of the DS release to the Game Boy Advance game. All four of its episodes play from start to finish.

AI-drafted from 4 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Gyakuten Saiban, the 2001 Game Boy Advance game that became Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, only ever came out in Japan on the GBA. The West got it in 2005, on the Nintendo DS. A fan patch released on 11 October now puts that DS release's English text into the original cartridge game, and version 0.7.54 says all four episodes are playable from beginning to end.

The official script, on the GBA's own engine

The project, led by Acer_man, does not write a new translation. It carries over the script and text graphics of Capcom's English DS release, so The First Turnabout, Turnabout Sisters, Turnabout Samurai and Turnabout Goodbyes read as they did on DS, while the game runs on the GBA engine with its own timing. The README lists English versions of the title screen, the Court Record, the Testimony and Cross-Examination banners, the Objection!, Hold it! and Take that! bubbles, map markers and signs in the backgrounds. It adds a variable-width font made from the DS one and the DS release's English voice clips. Other sound effects stay as on the GBA.

One change goes beyond the DS version: the patch swaps in the courtroom from Gyakuten Saiban 3, which the README describes as replacing the first game's very bright courtroom. The fifth episode, Rise from the Ashes, is not included, because it was made for the DS and was never part of the GBA game.

Built on a decompilation, with AI help

The patch is built from source on top of pwaa1, atasro2's decompilation of the Japanese game, which the credits say the project would not exist without. The credits also say Anthropic's Claude did much of the reverse engineering and code, with Acer_man handling design decisions and testing.

The patch comes as BPS files for each version of the Japanese ROM: the first release, Rev 1, and a second known variant of the first release. No ROMs are provided. The README recommends mGBA, and flash cart users should set the save type to SRAM. In-game saves carry over between patch versions, but emulator save states do not.

It is not the only Ace Attorney patch on Acer-2006's GitHub. An English patch for Gyakuten Saiban 2, built the same way from the official localisation, reached version 1.0 on 5 October in two editions with big and small speech bubbles, and a Gyakuten Saiban 3 project using the English DS script was started on 7 October.

Sources

Image: Acer_man

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