Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu for WonderSwan

What’s translated

• The whole script, about 4,900 lines: the story, every rival trucker’s challenge and taunts, the six women’s stories and the endings, jobs and cargo, shops, parts, and the CB radio chatter.
• Menus, the name entry (an English letter grid), race HUD labels and song captions, results, the report and save screens, and the ending credits.
• Graphics: the title buttons (ALL JAPAN / VS LINK); the hub, garage, shop and report buttons and headings (208 labels); SHOW / DOWN for rival showdowns; YOU WIN! / YOU LOSE banners.
• Left as in the original: the title logo, the side banners, and three kanji on the two-player course map.

Names: the women are Yukie, Kumi (the operator), Aki, Miki, Nami, Megumi and Maki. The expressway bosses run from Tanaka in Kyushu through Kojiro, Ueno, Ishii, Keiko, Shizuka and more, up to Bunjiro in Hokkaido. Pops runs the parts shop, and Roamer is the trucker who first shows you the ropes.

Content note: it’s a 1999 trucker melodrama and the script shows it: a kidnapping and trafficking threat, smugglers with drugs and guns, a drunk passenger, butt-pat jokes, toilet humour, and characters with sexist attitudes that the women racers push back on. None of it was softened or added to.

The special edition: Event Select (may be buggy)

The developers left a hidden event selector in the game that nothing in the original can reach. The special edition (dekotora-en-special-1.0.bps) puts it on the start menu:

• Opening it: Title screen → ALL JAPAN → the third entry, which reads Event Select in the special edition. It needs a saved game. (That entry was View Parts List; the parts list is still in the garage under List.)
• Using it: EVENT NO= appears over a truck-stop picture. UP/DOWN change the number by 1, LEFT/RIGHT by 10 (0-199), and A plays that event: job offers, each region’s arrival and rest scenes, rival challenges and races, the endings’ openings, and event 199, the staff credits.
• Limits: there’s no way back out. B and START do nothing in the original code, so you leave by choosing an event or switching off. Events start out of story order, so it’s for viewing scenes, not for playing the story through. About 40 numbers show nothing, event 99 never finishes, and event 148 shows garbage on the original Japanese cartridge too.
• It may be buggy. It’s the developers’ leftover tool, not a finished feature. Keep a copy of your save and play the standard edition for the actual game.

How it was made: AI translation, independent checks, human decisions

• Claude translated the script directly from the Japanese in the ROM, and did all the hacking: a variable-width dialogue engine, a lowercase menu font, a wider speaker-name field, the English name grid, rebuilt credits and the 208 redrawn labels.
• A second, independent Claude reviewer checked every line against the Japanese (282 corrections). A polish pass followed, with each change checked by a separate verifier, and then a naturalness pass over the whole script. A final separate review read the whole patch again, and a mechanics check counted each inserted part name at its widest.
• Every one of the 4,252 printed lines was rendered in an emulator with every glyph logged: no overflow and no leftover Japanese. All 200 story events were run through the game’s own hidden event selector.
• The judgement calls were listed with the Japanese, a literal reading and the options, and I decided each one by hand. That includes the rougher content, which is kept as written.

Changelog

• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan ROM itself.
• Fonts: pixel fonts drawn for this project.

How to patch

Apply one of the BPS files to the Japanese ROM “Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu for WonderSwan (Japan)” (CRC32 392DD813) with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS:

• Standard: dekotora-en-1.0.bps, the result should be CRC32 E7B6B96E.
• Special edition (Event Select, may be buggy): dekotora-en-special-1.0.bps, the result should be CRC32 37431865.

The English ROM is 4 MB (the original is 2 MB) because the translation needed more room: use an emulator or a flash cart that takes 32 Mbit WonderSwan ROMs. It’s a WonderSwan (mono) game, so keep the .ws extension.

You must provide your own copy of the original Japanese game to apply it.

Download: dekotora-en-1.0.bps, dekotora-en-special-1.0.bps on the release page.

Known issues

• It hasn’t been played start to finish by a person. If you find leftover Japanese, cut text or a crash, please tell me where it happened.
• In the Parts Taken list, a very long part name can run under the border art. It’s rare.
• The two-player VS LINK screens are translated but untested (they need two consoles).

Technical notes (for the curious)

• The dialogue now uses a variable-width font, so English fits the original boxes. The ROM was expanded to 4 MB to hold the longer text.
• The hub, garage, shop and report screens were buttons and headings drawn as pictures; all 208 were redrawn.
• The event selector is unused developer code at F000:E005. The special edition swaps the start menu’s View Parts List call for the scene setup and the selector.