A tiny new PCB from Delta Island is about to make that wall of untranslated Super Famicom carts way more tempting. The DELTA PCB SNES Translator drops into a legit cartridge and lets you flip between the original Japanese and a fan-style English or French translation with a simple hardware switch.
Right now, it’s Chrono Trigger-only, but it’s a clever setup. The replacement board slots into your cart with just a handful of wired connections, bringing 64 Mb of flash memory to hold the patched ROM alongside the original data. A small toggle lets you swap from stock Japanese to the translated script on the fly, and there’s even a PROG mode so you can update or refine the patch later without sacrificing the cart. The whole design is fully reversible, so if you get cold feet, you can restore the game to factory settings without leaving a scar.
Delta Island stresses that backups are fully compatible and that the mod doesn’t permanently alter or damage the shell or original board. At the moment, only Chrono Trigger’s PCB is up for sale, but a Mother 2: EarthBound setup is already in the works, which feels like the most obvious use case imaginable. If they keep going, you can easily imagine a small library of “translator boards” for RPGs and text-heavy curios that never left Japan.
For anyone who likes running original hardware through a scaler into a handheld capture rig, this stuff is catnip. Instead of juggling ROM sets, translation patches, and ever-multiplying flash carts, you’re just slotting in the same Chrono Trigger cart you’ve had on the shelf for years, only now it finally speaks your language. It’s not the cheapest way to play, but as a preservation-friendly, reversible tweak that respects the physical cart, it’s a pretty elegant middle finger to region-locked text boxes.
Source: Retro Dodo
