Fire Pro Wrestling for WonderSwan

What’s translated

• Every menu, prompt and message of every mode: Master of Ring (with its Free mode), One Night Match, One Night Tournament, Open League, Elimination Match, Edit, Network Battle and Options.
• All 132 wrestler names, their profiles and about 860 move names.
• Match results, rankings, records, the ending and the staff credits.
• All the words drawn as pictures: screen headings, buttons, plates, rank marks, the attendance stamps (DEEP IN THE RED, FULL HOUSE, SUPER FULL HOUSE and the SOLD OUT tag, hand-drawn), the title logo and the intro tagline.
• Name entry has an English keyboard (lower case, capitals, digits and symbols); letters go straight into the name.
• Kept as they are: the ring-mat logos (the Yukiguni promotion’s mat keeps its Japanese logo, which is art on the mat), and the music titles, which were already in English in the original.

Names and terms

As in every Fire Pro game, the wrestlers are parodies with deliberately altered names, and they stay altered. Their spellings follow the English names the Fire Pro community uses for this roster and the official English spellings of the series’ own legends (Victory Musashi, Great Shiba, Mask de Panther…). Japanese names are in Western order, given name first. Moves use their names in English-language wrestling and in Fire Pro Wrestling World; Japanese names that English fans use as they are stay romanized (Enzuigiri, Shiranui, Koppo, Nodowa Otoshi). The promotions keep their acronyms (VIEW JAPAN, FWN, WWC, WFW, GONGS).

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

• Claude translated everything directly from the Japanese in the ROM and did all the hacking: a variable-width font, a larger 8 MB ROM, the English keyboard and about 490 redrawn pictures.
• A separate, independent Claude reviewer checked the whole game against the Japanese; its findings were verified and fixed.
• On screen: every scene of the game booted in turn and pressed through, a full Master of Ring show played, tournaments, the editor and name entry used, the ending and the credits seen to the last line, with every character the game drew logged (no Japanese left). Every screen was also compared with the Japanese, enlarged, for centring and spacing.
• The judgement calls (names, terms, abbreviations, the stamps, the logo, the codes below) were listed with the Japanese, a literal reading and the options, and I decided each one by hand over seven rounds.

Secret codes

In Master of Ring, choose Free and rename the show (Rename Show). Type one of these as the name, in capitals on the ABC page (the space is the Spc key on the abc page):

• GOLDEN REVIVAL (ゴールデン復活 in the original): the original’s unlock code. It sets the game’s unlock flag; we could not tell what it changes (the menus and rosters looked the same in our testing).
• DEBUG1 (デバッグ１): shows a “Show Rating Detail” screen after each Master of Ring match.
• DEBUG2, DEBUG3 (デバッグ２, ３): the developers’ “Game Monitor” screens.

The Japanese codes cannot be typed on the English keyboard, so the patch accepts the English ones instead.

Notes on the original

• Rack Bottom: the move list calls one move ラックボトム, “Rack Bottom”. The patch keeps the game’s own name; it may be a play on, or a misspelling of, Rock Bottom.
• Music titles: the sound test titles were already in English in the original and are shown as the game spells them, including its typos “orvercrowded” and “geish”.

Changelog

• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan ROM itself.
• Move names: Fire Pro Wrestling World’s English move list; wrestler names: the English-speaking Fire Pro community’s names for this roster.
• Font: the public-domain Shinonome 12-dot font (proportional widths) for text, a bold style of it for picture labels.

How to patch

Apply fire-pro-en-1.0.bps to the Japanese ROM “Fire Pro Wrestling for WonderSwan (Japan)” (CRC32 F246A68E) in your browser with the Swan Revival patcher, or with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS. The result should be CRC32 7E701D9E.

The patched ROM is 8 MB (the original is 4 MB): the English needs more room, so the patch doubles the ROM. 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: fire-pro-en-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.
• The link-cable screens (trading wrestlers, Title Match Mode) are translated but could not be tested with a second unit.
• “Kakracon” fills its plate edge to edge on the Team Select screen (the name is exactly as wide as the plate).

Technical notes (for the curious)

• The game prints every character into its own 8x16 cell. The patch adds a variable-width renderer that packs English letters by their pixel width into the same cells, and corrects the game’s centring (which rounds to whole cells) so centred English stays centred.
• The ROM is expanded from 4 MB to 8 MB: the game moves to the upper half and the new graphics, text and pictures go in the lower half.
• About 490 words drawn as pictures are redrawn in their tile sets. Some list plates (the editor’s categories and the data prompts) need more tiles than their sets have; the game now draws those at run time, copying each plate’s English picture into a few spare tiles whenever the plate appears on screen.
• The name entry’s kana grid became an English keyboard; letters skip the kana-to-kanji conversion step and go straight into the name, and the box around the name now follows the English text.